Biblical Archaeology Review

See Adam Zertal, “Has Joshua’s Altar Been Found on Mt. Ebal?” BAR 11:01).

See Amihai Mazar, “Bronze Bull Found in Israelite ‘High Place’ from the Time of the Judges,” BAR 09:05).

A scholarly version of this paper was published in Pharaonic Egypt, ed. Sarah Israelit-Groll (Jerusalem, 1985), pp. 129–137.

Egyptian kings had five names, the last called a nomen and the fourth called a prenomen. (Alan H. Gardiner, Egyptian Grammar, 3rd edition, [London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1964], p. 71.) Normally, Egyptians referred to their kings by only these last two names.

We know Y‘qb-HR scarabs were those of a Hyksos king because the name is Semitic, not Egyptian; it dates from the Hyksos period and the name is almost always enclosed in an oval known as a cartouche, the indication that the name is a royal one.

This figure is preserved in quotations from Manetho in an Armenian version of Eusebius’s history and by a Greek priest, Georgius Syncellus (792 A.D.), rather than in Josephus.

“Tophet” is the Biblical word for the place in Jerusalem’s Valley of Ben Hinnom where ancient Israelites transgressed the rigid monotheism of their faith by sacrificing their children to pagan gods. Modern scholars use the word to name Phoenician cemeteries of sacrificed children that have been discovered in Sicily, Sardinia and Tunisia.

The Mishnah is a collection of Jewish legal traditions. It is the basic part of the Talmud.

For a discussion of the Amarna archive, see endnote 1.

A theophoric is that element of a personal name in which the god is mentioned, as Jeho or -jah (for YHWH) in Jehoshaphat or Elijah. Israelites compounded their names with theophorics of YHWH, or of epithets of YHWH (El, Baal, Amm, Zur, etc.). Each of the Transjordanian peoples shows a similar pattern with its national god (e.g., Moabite Kemosh).