BARlines

Benjamin Mazar (1906–1995)

Professor Benjamin Mazar died on September 8th, at the age of 89. The world has lost its greatest living Biblical archaeologist and historian, Israel has lost a preeminent educator and citizen, and I have lost a friend and mentor.

From his childhood in Russia to his last days in Jerusalem, Mazar pursued his quest for the ancient cultural and historical roots of the Jews in the land of Israel. For these roots he knew he had to dig deep, back into the Biblical period, and to search wide, across the diverse contexts of neighboring Near Eastern cultures.

At the age of 22, when most of us are completing our undergraduate degrees, Mazar received his Ph.D. degree from the University of Giessen in Germany, under the tutelage of the famous cuneiform scholar Julius Levy. That same year, 1928, he published his first article, on Amarna, in the German edition of the Encyclopedia Judaica. Once, not knowing that Mazar began his studies of Akkadian as a teenager, I asked him if he had read the 14th-century B.C.E. Amarna Letters in cuneiform before he wrote the article. He looked at me incredulously and replied: “Would it be possible to do it any other way?”