Bible History Daily

Bible History Daily

ancient toilet

Jun 2

Did Biblical Kings Have Dysentery?

By: Nathan Steinmeyer

It is not shocking to learn that ancient hygiene did not live up to modern standards. But new archaeological evidence from Jerusalem suggests that personal […]

Aaron

Jun 1

Aaron in the Bible

By: Elie Wiesel

I have a problem with Aaron, number two in the great and glorious epic that recounts the liberation of the Jewish people from slavery in Egypt. He is a man of peace. He succeeds at everything. Everyone admires, even loves him. Whether great or small, they need him, his understanding and his mediation. Whatever he does, he is well regarded.

Pieter Bruegel Bethlehem Painting

Jun 1

How December 25 Became Christmas

By: Andrew McGowan

Theological scholar Andrew McGowan examines how December 25 came to be associated with the birthday of Jesus and became Christmas, a holiday celebrated by Christians around the world.

May 31

Shifting Borders?

By: Robert A. Mullins

Five faded letters inscribed on a storage jar is all the textual evidence we have from ninth-century BCE Abel Beth Maacah in the far north […]

May 30

King David’s Judah Found?

By: Nathan Steinmeyer

Despite King David’s prominence in the Hebrew Bible, little archaeological evidence has been directly linked to the early years of the Kingdom of Judah. As a result, some scholars have argued that Judah only became a developed polity in the ninth or even eighth century B.C.E. A 2021 study, however, seeks to refute this idea based on the findings of an extensive regional archaeological project in the Judean foothills, the very region where the Bible says David’s kingdom was born.

May 29

The Palace of the Kings of Israel—in the Bible and Archaeology

By: Megan Sauter

King Omri of Israel selected Samaria as his capital and built an elaborate palace there in the ninth century B.C.E. What did this palace look like, and was it destroyed when the Assyrians conquered the kingdom of Israel in 721 B.C.E.?

City of David inscription

May 29

Second Temple Period Receipt Found in the City of David

By: Nathan Steinmeyer

During a salvage excavation of a 19th-century excavation tunnel underneath the City of David, archaeologists from the Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA) discovered a fragmentary inscription […]

May 28

Jethro in the Bible

By: Elie Wiesel

Read the article by Nobel Prize recipient Elie Wiesel as it appeared in Bible Review.

May 28

Misogyny in the Bible

By: Biblical Archaeology Society Staff

Is God gendered as a male in the Bible? How could Scripture, the Word of God to so many Christians, be the product of patriarchy and its over-sexed values that are grounded in the perpetuation of male domination and the degradation of the female? How could Jesus be portrayed as someone who valued God as a male spiritual being? With these challenging questions, April DeConick begins her Biblical Views column in the September/October 2012 issue of Biblical Archaeology Review, exploring the possibility of misogyny in the Bible.

May 26

Defending the “House of David”

By: André Lemaire and Jean-Philippe Delorme

In our article “Mesha’s Stele and the House of David” (Biblical Archaeology Review, Winter 2022), we showed that new photographs of the stone and the […]