Queries & Comments

Thank you for sharing your thoughts and comments about our Winter 2022 issue. We appreciate your feedback. Here are a few of the letters and responses we received. Find more online at biblicalarchaeology.org/letters.

Is BAR Losing Its Way?

Most people who care about biblical archaeology do not care about the archaeology of places not mentioned in the Bible or secondhand rehashes of archaeological work done years or decades before. We want to hear about new, spade-in-the-ground archaeology in biblical places by the people doing it. Hershel Shanks figured out how to find that stuff, and if he couldn’t get the archaeologists themselves to write, he told us about it in his “First Person” column. If you cannot recover Hershel’s focus, you will lose us.

Continuing BAR’s Quality Tradition

I heartily approve the outstanding article “Mesha’s Stele and the House of David,” by André Lemaire and Jean-Philippe Delorme, even though I am clueless about Hebrew and the technical details shown in the photographs. I treasure the full disclosure by the authors, who put their argument out there for critique. That gives me comfort, since over the decades BAR has been a place where experts can discuss and debate. Excellent work continuing the quality tradition started by Hershel Shanks.