Biblical Archaeology Review

For all of these matters, see Kitchen, Third Intermediate Period, and “Egyptian Interventions in the Levant in Iron Age II,” in William G. Dever, ed., Symbiosis, Symbolism and the Power of the Past: Canaan, Ancient Israel and their Neighbors (American Schools of Oriental Research), in press.

William L. Moran, The Amarna Letters (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1992), pp. 8–9, letter 4:4–22.

Ricardo A. Caminos, “Gebel Es-Silsilah No. 100, ” Journal of Egyptian Archaeology 38 (1952), pp. 46–61, plates 10–13; recent translation by Kitchen in Lowell K. Handy, ed., The Age of Solomon, Scholarship at the Turn of the Millennium (Leiden: Brill, 1997), pp. 124–125.

We need to allow a brief co-regency of Jehoshaphat with his sick and aged father, King Asa, when the new Israelite king, Ahab, may have posed a threat to Judah. It is significant that the two most competent scholars on Hebrew monarchy chronology, E.R. Thiele and Gershon Galil, both come to this same basic date of 931/930 B.C., from two quite independent approaches. See Thiele, The Mysterious Numbers of the Hebrew Kings, 3rd ed. (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1986); and Galil, The Chronology of the Kings of Israel and Judah (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1996).

See for example, A. Leo Oppenheim, trans., “Babylonian and Assyrian Historical Texts,” in James B. Pritchard, ed., Ancient Near Eastern Texts (ANET) (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press, 1950), p. 279.

This has opened Josephus up to criticism. Several historians over the years have suggested that Josephus’s description of the battle of Masada may have been deliberately slanted to make Flavius Silva, the commander of the 10th Roman Legion, look good and that Josephus inflated the Roman accomplishment to please his patrons. Feldman, Josephus and Modern Scholarship, pp. 772–777.

Tessa Rajak, Josephus: The historian and his society (London: Duckworth, 1983), p. 34.