Queries & Comments

No Bull; It’s a Calf—At Least in Part

Regarding the “silver calf” featured on the cover of your BAR 17:02 issue and in the article on Ashkelon:

I am not an archaeologist. I am a farmer with 50 years of experience raising cattle. That is not a calf. That is a bull.

The depth of the fore- in relation to the hind-quarters, the thick neck with a definite hump, the length of the horn all show a fully mature animal. In fact, using 20th-century standards, a horn that curved to below the eye would argue for at least a six-year-old animal, but since we do not know the breed, I won’t insist on that age.

Paula Wapnish and Brian Hesse reply:

Mr. Neitzel knows his beef! He is correct on every point. But we want to present the reasons why, on balance, the identification of the statuette as a calf is also supportable.

We are the staff archaeozoologists at Ashkelon and can tell you that from the day the figure was recovered Larry Stager has been most concerned to get a fix on the age because of the Biblical significance of the term ‘egel. Having been raised on a farm he was familiar with cattle of all ages and felt that while the figure was proportionately calflike, some features just didn’t fit.