jezreel

By: Janet Howe Gaines

For more than two thousand years, Jezebel has been saddled with a reputation as the bad girl of the Bible, the wickedest of women. But just how depraved was she?

By: Robin M. Jensen

The story of the offering of Isaac is one of the most powerful narratives in the Hebrew Bible. But each tradition has understood and used the story differently and for varying purposes.

By: Walter Zanger

What are zodiac mosaics doing in ancient synagogues in Israel?

By: Ellen White

The open-air altar shrine, called a bamah (plural bamot), is known through several books of the Biblical canon. Often referred to as “high places” in translations of the Bible, bamot were worship sites that usually contained an altar.

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.?

By: John Drummond

“The Woman at the Window” is an intriguing artistic motif that was popular among the elite of the ancient Near East during the Iron Age […]

By: Hershel Shanks

In BAR, Hershel Shanks examines a recent article published by archaeologist Amihai Mazar. Mazar contends that while the Biblical narratives were written hundreds of years after the reigns of Saul, David and Solomon, they “retain memories of reality.”

By: Nathan Steinmeyer

During excavations at the site of Tel Shimron in northern Israel, archaeologists were shocked to discover the earliest example of a corbelled vault ever discovered […]

By: Noah Wiener

Megiddo’s Great Temple is a structure that, according to its excavators, “has proven to be the most monumental single edifice so far uncovered in the EB I Levant and ranks among the largest structures of its time in the Near East.”

By: Robin Ngo

IAA archaeologists have discovered a 3,300-year-old anthropoid coffin with Egyptianizing features belonging to a wealthy Canaanite near Tel Shadud in the Jezreel Valley.