Biblical Archaeology Review, May/June 2010
Features
Godfearers in the City of Love
In Roman times, Aphrodisias in the southwest of Asia Minor (modern Turkey) was the city of Aphrodite, goddess of love. It was also a city of marble, abundantly available in excellent quality from nearby quarries. The monumental marble gate of the sanctuary of Aphrodite (the tetrapylon) has...Read more ›
Escape Clause
Where Jews fled from Roman destruction beneath the streets of Jerusalem
Josephus tells of the Jews who fled to the “mines” (underground passages) when the Romans conquered Jerusalem and burned the Temple in 70 C.E. The victorious Romans then “instituted a search for those in the mines, and, tearing up the ground slew all whom they met.”1 Some...Read more ›
The Devil Is Not So Black as He Is Painted
BAR interviews Israel Finkelstein
Israel Finkelstein is professor of archaeology at Tel Aviv University and has codirected the excavations at Megiddo since 1994. Recently, he was the recipient of an award that provides a fund in excess of $4 million for a scientific study of the history of ancient Israel. Editor...Read more ›
The Dig-for-a-Day Experience
The underground chambers were filled with the sounds of the crunching of small picks against the dirt floors and the thud of earth dumped into buckets. Voices of a dozen children and their parents accompanied warnings not to swing picks at each other and to use the...Read more ›
Volunteers Find Missing Pieces to Looted Inscription
In the November/December 2008 issue of BAR, we reported on an inscribed limestone stela that had been purchased on the antiquities market by Judy and Michael Steinhardt and is on permanent loan to the Israel Museum.a The incomplete stela, broken off at the bottom, was studied and...Read more ›