A Tribute to Yadin Resurfaces

In the accompanying interview, Israel Finkelstein pays tribute to Israel’s most illustrious archaeologist, Yigael Yadin, who died in 1984 at what now seems to me like a very young age, 69.^a

Sometimes life’s coincidences are inexplicable: While cleaning a desk that looked like a looted dig, I came upon an old note that then-Managing Editor Suzanne Singer wrote to me shortly after Yadin’s death, paying tribute to the great man. (Don’t ask me how the note got there.) At the time Yadin died, Singer was working with him on the final edits of an article on the Temple Scroll that appeared posthumously in the September/October 1984 BAR.^b I reprint her note here as a memorial to a friend and mentor:

Hershel,