Digging In: Find Your Summer Fun with BAR

BAR’s Summer 2023 issue is the perfect read for your summer adventures, whether you’re relaxing on the beach, experiencing the great outdoors, or maybe even getting your hands dirty in an excavation trench in the Holy Land. We’ve packed this issue with stories, profiles, news, quizzes, and contests that are sure to entertain, inform, and enlighten.

Our cover story, “The Rise of the Maccabees” by archaeologist Andrea Berlin, explores the historical and archaeological evidence for the power politics that lay behind the dramatic rise of the Hasmonean state in the late second century BCE. Then, in “David and Solomon’s Invisible Kingdom,” authors Zachary Thomas and Erez Ben-Yosef present a bold new theory that the legendary biblical kings did, in fact, rule over a powerful kingdom, but that it was made up largely of archaeologically invisible tent-dwelling nomads in addition to city dwellers and townspeople who would have left behind buildings and monuments.

In “Jerusalem’s Temple Treasures: Where Did They Go?” biblical scholar Elena Dugan uncovers a little-known Hebrew text that preserves the intriguing tradition that some of the First Temple treasures were hidden in Mesopotamia following the Babylonian destruction of Jerusalem in 586 BCE. And in “The Amorites and the Bible,” archaeologist Aaron Burke examines the Amorites, one of several groups encountered by the Israelites after their arrival in Canaan, and the massive Bronze Age monuments that the biblical writers attributed to this legendary people of gigantic origin.