Apr 20
By: BAS Staff
A newly published inscription from Tel Lachish in southern Israel is the earliest alphabetic writing discovered in the southern Levant. The fragmentary inscription features a mere handful of letters inscribed on a tiny pottery sherd, measuring just 4 by 3.5 cm. The sherd is dated by radiocarbon to the 15th century B.C.E., or the first part of the Late Bronze Age.
Apr 19
By: Jennifer Drummond
Vestis Virum Facit—clothes make the man. While this quote has been (wrongly) attributed to Roman educator Marcus Fabius Quintilianus, its dubious authenticity doesn’t make it […]
Apr 12
By: BAS Staff
New excavations near Luxor have revealed an extremely well-preserved urban settlement from Egypt’s 18th Dynasty. It was a time when Egypt’s powerful pharaohs ruled over an expansive empire that stretched to the land of Canaan and beyond. Known in antiquity as Aten, the settlement dates to the reign of Amenhotep III (1391–1353 B.C.E.) and his successors. The “lost golden city” may have been established to support and help administer the pharaoh’s royal residence, located nearby at the site of Malqata.
Apr 5
By: Thomas E. Levy
Review: My Nine Lives—Sixty Years in Israeli and Biblical Archaeology By William G. Dever (Atlanta: SBL Press, 2020), pp. 233, 57 figures Reviewed by Thomas […]
Mar 29
By: Jonathan Laden
On April 3rd, 22 royal mummies are being transferred with great fanfare from Cairo's Egyptian Museum to Fustat's National Museum of Egyptian Civilization It is The Pharaohs' Golden Parade where the main celebrities are all long dead. Egypt is holding the procession to transfer the mummies of 18 pharaohs and 4 queens to their new permanent home at the National Museum of Egyptian Civilization in Fustat.
Mar 22
By: Marc Zvi Brettler and Amy-Jill Levine
The title of this blogpost is also the title of the book we recently coauthored. The Bible With and Without Jesus (HarperOne 2020) asks how […]
Mar 18
By: Jonathan Klawans
Followers of this blog may have heard that the 19th-century Shapira Affair[1] has resurfaced again. In just the past week, a biblical scholar at the […]
Mar 17
By: Glenn Corbett
The Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA) announced this week that recent explorations in the Judean desert south of Jerusalem have revealed scores of new scroll fragments […]
Mar 14
By: Marvin A. Sweeney
James Alvin Sanders, Professor Emeritus of Intertestamental and Biblical Literature at the Claremont School of Theology, passed away in his home on October 1, 2020. […]
Mar 10
By: Jonathan Laden
An 11-year-old found a rare pottery figurine in the Negev from biblical times.