Strata: In Their Own Words

Recently we received a letter from Ralph Hawkins, a visiting professor of Bible at Bethel College in Indiana (in photo with Adam Zertal), telling us how BAR changed his life. Here is what he said:

In 1987 I went to a small Bible college in Tennessee, where I began to study to become a pastor. One of my professors had earned his Ph.D. in ancient Near Eastern studies at Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati, and he would regularly give us handouts that he had photocopied from BAR. I had never been exposed to archaeology before, and my plans lay solely in the pastorate. However, I soon became fascinated by the ancient Biblical world to which I was being exposed through BAR, so I switched my major to Biblical languages. In the early 1990s, again through the influence of BAR, I wrote a Master’s thesis on the Moabite Stone and the Dan stele.

In the summer of 1995, I took a post in a small mission church in the mountains of east Tennessee and began a doctorate in ministry (which I completed in 1999). Earlier that same year, however, I had read BAR’s January dig issue, in which I found Adam Zertal’s call for volunteers to work at el-Ahwat. I remembered the article that the professor I mentioned before had given me—almost ten years