A Look Back

In 1987, BAR editor Hershel Shanks interviewed Avraham Biran, then director of the Nelson Glueck School of Biblical Archaeology at Hebrew Union College, in Jerusalem, on his 20 years of digging at Tel Dan.

HS: I suppose the greatest criticism I hear about you is that in 18 or 19 years of digging at Dan, you haven’t published a real preliminary report. How do you respond to that?

AB: That is partially true. And I know that famous saying, “Publish or perish.” But I don’t think it’s entirely true. We have brought to the attention of the scholarly world—and not only the scholarly world—everything that we have found. Some of it has appeared in BAR. Now it is true that we have not provided all the details that substantiate what we have found. But there are problems here, too. You know in most textbooks I now find a drawing of the Israelite city gate of Dan, which was published in 1970 or thereabouts. I’m sorry now that I published that plan—because it’s wrong. When we published it, that’s what we had, but subsequently we discovered a major outer gate. There’s always that danger if you publish too soon.