NOTES

INTRODUCTION

* The greatest challenge Molly Dewsnap Meinhardt, ed., Mysteries of the Bible: From the Garden of Eden to the Shroud of Turin (Washington, D.C.: Biblical Archaeology Society, 2004), vii.

* the work of such enthusiasts frequently meets the criteria Elizabeth H. Gierlowski-Kordesch, review of Discovered: Sodom and Gomorrah! A Video, by Ron Wyatt, Biblical Archaeology Review 24, no. 5 (1998): 60-62; Ron W. Pritchett, “Recognizing Junk Science,” Professional Geologist 34, no. 13 (1997): 5-7.

* former Vice President Spiro Agnew and William Safire in a new context Former Vice President Spiro Agnew used the phrases “nattering nabobs of negativism” and “an effete corps of impudent snobs who characterize themselves as intellectuals” to describe members of the media; http://www.bartleby.com/​59/12/agnewspiro.html, http://www.bartleby.com/​73/1876.html, and http://www.bartleby.com/​63/8/408.html, accessed on February 5, 2007. For more information, see http://www.bartleby.com/​73/1553.html, accessed on February 5, 2007, which states with further references that Agnew first used the phrase “nattering nabobs of negativism” in his address to the California Republican State Convention in San Diego, California, on September 11, 1970, and that William Safire, then a speech-writer for President Nixon, was the author of the phrase. It seems particularly relevant in this context to redirect the phrases toward the scholars who appear as “talking heads” on these shows and who are frequently forced to assume the roles of naysayers.

* their ostensible ancestors the invading Israelites? Eric H. Cline, Jerusalem Besieged: From Ancient Canaan to Modern Israel (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004), 33-35.

* more like a sibling rivalry or a family reunion gone bad I would like to thank Alan Mairson at the National Geographic Society for suggesting this and other cogent points.

* the standard “historical method” followed by most historians See for instance, Jacques Barzun and Henry F. Graff, The Modern Researcher (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1992); Martha C. Howell and Walter Prevenier, From Reliable Sources: An Introduction to Historical Methods (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2001); John Lewis Gaddis, The Landscape of History: How Historians Map the Past (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002). I should note that asking for three independent sources is sometimes wishful thinking in a field where scholars are often lucky just to find two sources—or even a single source—in their efforts to reconstruct the periods in the ancient Near East before the first millennium B.C.

CHAPTER 1

* the Lord God This and all other additional citations from the Bible follow the New Revised Standard Version. See Bruce M. Metzger and Roland E. Murphy, eds., New Oxford Annotated Bible, with the Apocryphal/Deuterocanonical Books (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991).

* two of the four rivers See commentary by the editors of the New Oxford Annotated Bible, page 4OT. See also Ephraim A. Speiser, Genesis: Introduction, Translation, and Notes, the Anchor Bible (New York: Doubleday and Company, 1964), 16-17, 19-20; Ephraim A. Speiser, “The Rivers of Paradise,” Festschrift Johannes Friedrich zum 65. Geburtstag am 27. August 1958, ed. R. von Kienle, A. Moortgat, H. Otten, E. von Schuler, and W. Zaumseil (Heidelberg: Carl Winter, 1959), 475-478; Alessandro Scafi, Mapping Paradise: A History of Heaven on Earth (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 35.

* the Bible seems to connect it with Mesopotamia On Cush in Mesopotamia, see Speiser, “The Rivers of Paradise,” 475-476. For the quote from Scafi, see Scafi, Mapping Paradise, 13; see also pages 32-43 for a discussion of the biblical account of the Garden of Eden and some of the problems of interpretation that have been addressed over the centuries.

* according to Joseph Smith, Jr. See Joseph Fielding Smith, Jr., Doctrines of Salvation, vol. 3 (Salt Lake City, UT: Bookcraft, 1954-1956), 74-75; Bruce R. McConkie, Mormon Doctrine, 2nd ed. (Salt Lake City, UT: Bookcraft, 1966). McConkie says, “The early brethren of this dispensation taught that the Garden of Eden was located in what is known to us as the land of Zion, an area for which Jackson County, Missouri, is the center place” (p. 20). For a discussion of other suggested locations, see Scafi, Mapping Paradise, 342-364.

* can provide us with an exact parallel For a discussion of the word “Eden” and its origins and suggested translation, see Richard S. Hess, “Eden: A Well-watered Place,” Bible Review 7, no. 6 (1991): 28-33; Speiser, Genesis: Introduction, Translation, and Notes, 16; Dora Jane Hamblin, “Sleuthing the Garden of Eden,” Smithsonian 18, no. 2 (1987): 127-135; Scafi, Mapping Paradise, 34-36. See also the discussions that suggest that the biblical description of Eden essentially reflects the nature of the Temple in Jerusalem, by Lawrence E. Stager, “Jerusalem as Eden,” Biblical Archaeology Review 26, no. 3 (2000): 36-37, 66; Lawrence E. Stager, “Jerusalem and the Garden of Eden,” Eretz-Israel 26 [Frank M. Cross Festschrift] (1999): 183*-194*.

* The land Dilmun is pure Translation follows James B. Pritchard, ed., Ancient Near Eastern Texts Relating to the Old Testament, 3rd ed. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969), 38-39.

* There are also Creation stories from this area See David Toshio Tsumura, “Genesis and Ancient Near Eastern Stories of Creation and Flood: An Introduction,” I Studied Inscriptions from Before the Flood: Ancient Near Eastern, Literary and Linguistic Approaches to Genesis 1-11, eds. Richard S. Hess and David Toshio Tsumura (Winona Lake, IL: Eisenbrauns, 1994), 27-57.

* When on high Translation follows Pritchard, Ancient Near Eastern Texts, 60-61.

* the “Babylonian Genesis” See the famous book on Enuma Elish by Alexander Heidel, The Babylonian Genesis, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963). See also the brief discussion by Peter Enns, Inspiration and Incarnation: Evangelicals and the Problem of the Old Testament (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker Academic, 2005), 25-27.

* Scholars generally agree On the date for the writing of the Hebrew Bible, see various discussions in Richard E. Friedman, Who Wrote the Bible? (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1987); William G. Dever, What Did the Biblical Writers Know and When Did They Know It? (Grand Rapids, Mich.: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2001); William M. Schniedewind, How the Bible Became a Book: The Textualization of Ancient Israel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004); Israel Finkelstein and Neil Asher Silberman, The Bible Unearthed: Archaeology’s New Vision of Ancient Israel and the Origin of its Sacred Texts (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2001).

* domesticated some 10,000 to 12,000 years ago See Graeme Barker, The Agricultural Revolution in Prehistory: Why Did Foragers Become Farmers? (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006); Daniel C. Snell, Life in the Ancient Near East, 3100-332 B.C.E. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998). For a general overview, further references, and bibliography on both the origins of agriculture and the invention of irrigation in this region, see Susan Pollock, Ancient Mesopotamia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).

* based on a variety of environmental, geological, and archaeological data, Juris Zarins On Zarins’s suggestion for the location of the Garden of Eden (he has not published his own theory), see Hamblin, “Sleuthing the Garden of Eden,” 127-135; T. Krausz, “Paradise Found,” Jerusalem Report, February 1, 1999. Much of Zarins’s related scholarly research may be found in his review article entitled “The Early Settlement of Southern Mesopotamia: A Review of Recent Historical, Geological and Archaeological Research,” Journal of the American Oriental Society 112, no. 1 (1992): 55-77.

* In a brief article entitled “The Rivers of Paradise” See Speiser, “The Rivers of Paradise,” 473-485.

* A second possibility See James Sauer, “A Lost River of Eden: Rediscovering the Pishon,” in Mysteries of the Bible: From the Garden of Eden to the Shroud of Turin, Molly Dewsnap Meinhardt, ed. (Washington, D.C.: Biblical Archaeology Society, 2004), 3-11.

* More recently, British archaeologist David Rohl See David Rohl, Legend: The Genesis of Civilisation (London: Century, 1998), 46-68. For articles written about his hypothesis, see Peter Martin, “The Secret Garden,” Sunday Times, October 11, 1998; Krausz, “Paradise Found,” 38-43. See also now the discussion of Rohl’s hypothesis in Scafi, Mapping Paradise, 12-14, 369-370, and figures 0.4-0.5. Rohl’s earlier work regarding his “New Chronology” for redating the ancient world is probably best known through his Pharaohs and Kings: A Biblical Quest (New York: Crown, 1996), which was made into a three-part television documentary program. As a whole, Rohl’s “New Chronology” has not been particularly well received by the academic community; it is seen as falling into the same general category as Immanuel Velikovsky’s Ages in Chaos: A Reconstruction of Ancient History from the Exodus to King Akhnaton (New York: Doubleday, 1952) and Peter James’s Centuries of Darkness: A Challenge to the Chronology of Old World Archaeology (London: Jonathan Cape, 1991), each of which also suggest alternate chronologies to those generally accepted by the scholarly world.

* Two years after Rohl’s hypothesis was first published, Gary Greenberg See Gary Greenberg, 101 Myths of the Bible: How Ancient Scribes Invented Biblical History (Naperville, IL: Sourcebooks, 2000), 59-61. See also http://ggreenberg.tripod.com (accessed on January 5, 2007).

* originated in Africa and migrated outward from there See the most recent, interesting books on ancestry and genetics by Spencer Wells, Deep Ancestry: Inside the Genographic Project (Washington, D.C.: National Geographic, 2006); Spencer Wells, The Journey of Man: A Genetic Odyssey (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002). See also Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza, Genes, Peoples, and Languages, trans. Mark Seielstad (New York: North Point Press, 2000); Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza and Francesco Cavalli-Sforza, The Great Human Diasporas: The History of Diversity and Evolution, trans. Sarah Thorne (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley Publishing Company, Inc., 1995).

* In 2001, Michael S. Sanders On Sanders’s claim to have located the Garden of Eden, see Peter Goodspeed, “Garden of Eden in Turkey, Says Bible Scholar,” Canadian National Post, January 11, 2001; Peter Goodspeed, “Garden of Eden Said to Be in Turkey,” Chicago Sun-Times, January 12, 2001; Matthew Kalman, “Has a Satellite Spotted the Original Garden of Eden in Eastern Turkey?” Daily Mail, January 17, 2001. See also Carol McGraw, “Thou Shalt Search Archaeology: Irvine Scholar Says He May Know Where the Tablets of the Ten Commandments Lie,” Orange County Register, March 3, 2001; Sanders’s own Web site: http://www.biblemysteries.com, with his mission/message statement and numerous linked pages (accessed on January 5, 2007).

* the Primeval History See Robert Alter, The Five Books of Moses: A Translation with Commentary (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 2004), 12-14; Speiser, Genesis: Introduction, Translation, and Notes, 20. See also Pope John Paul II, Man and Woman He Created Them: A Theology of the Body, trans. Michael Waldstein (Boston: Pauline Books and Media, 2006), 137-138, 157. The pope refers to this portion of Genesis as “manifesting … [an] early mythical character” and elaborates, “The term ‘myth’ does not refer to fictitious-fabulous content, but simply to an archaic way of expressing a deeper content.”

* the Garden of Eden was obviously a geographic reality See Speiser, “The Rivers of Paradise,” 473.

* a battered sign standing at the site of Querna in Iraq See Scafi, Mapping Paradise, 370-371 and figure 12.1.

* As Victor Hurowitz As quoted by Krausz, “Paradise Found,” 38-43.

CHAPTER 2

* consists of two different stories that have been woven together For a concise and readable explanation of the two sources woven together in Genesis, called J and P by biblical scholars, and explicit comparisons of the details from the two stories about Noah and his ark, see Richard E. Friedman, Who Wrote the Bible? (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1997), 54-60; Ephraim A. Speiser, Genesis: Introduction, Translation, and Notes, the Anchor Bible (New York: Doubleday and Company, 1964), xx-xliii, 54-56; Robert Alter, Genesis: Translation and Commentary (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1996), 30; Robert Alter, The Five Books of Moses: A Translation with Commentary (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 2004), 10-12, 42. See also William H. Stiebing, Jr., Ancient Astronauts, Cosmic Collisions, and Other Popular Theories about Man’s Past (Buffalo, N.Y.: Prometheus Books, 1984), 9-16; William H. Stiebing, Jr., “A Futile Quest: The Search for Noah’s Ark” in Mysteries of the Bible: From the Garden of Eden to the Shroud of Turin, ed. Molly Dewsnap Meinhardt (Washington, D.C.: Biblical Archaeology Society, 2004), 25-26.

* In 1872, George Smith See William H. Stiebing, Jr., Ancient Astronauts, Cosmic Collisions, and Other Popular Theories about Man’s Past (Buffalo, N.Y.: Prometheus Books, 1984), 9-11; William H. Stiebing, Jr., Uncovering the Past (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 110-111; Stiebing, “A Futile Quest,” 17-18. See also the interesting and useful article by Tikva Frymer-Kensky, “What the Babylonian Flood Stories Can and Cannot Teach Us about the Genesis Flood,” Biblical Archaeology Review 4, no. 4 (1978): 32-41.

* All the destructive winds Translation originally published in Joan Aruz, ed., Art of the First Cities: The Third Millennium B.C. from the Mediterranean to the Indus (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2003), 478.

* I will reveal to you a mystery Translation following Nancy K. Sandars, The Epic of Gilgamesh (Harmondsworth, England: Penguin Books, 1972), 107. For the date of the historical Gilgamesh and the evolution of the Epic of Gilgamesh, see Jeffrey H. Tigay, The Evolution of the Gilgamesh Epic (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1982). See also the discussion by Peter Enns, Inspiration and Incarnation: Evangelicals and the Problem of the Old Testament (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker Academic, 2005), 27-29, 39-41, 49-51.

* These are the measurements Translation following Sandars, The Epic of Gilgamesh, 108-109. See also the discussion in Ralph K. Pederson’s “Was Noah’s Ark a Sewn Boat?” Biblical Archaeology Review 31, no. 3 (2005): 18-23, 55-56.

* You know the city Shurrupak Translation following Sandars, The Epic of Gilgamesh, 108.

* the Flood is sent for a moral reason For a deeper discussion of the reasons why the Flood was sent in the Genesis story, see Frymer-Kensky, “What the Babylonian Flood Stories,” 32-41.

* Ea … warned me in a dream Translation following Sandars, The Epic of Gilgamesh, 108.

* some sort of Flood legend See the brief discussion in Stiebing, Ancient Astronauts, 17-22.

* made the front page of newspapers around the world that year See Molly Dewsnap, “The Ur-Flood? Uncovering the Deluge,” Biblical Archaeology Review 22, no. 4 (1996): 56; Susan Pollock, “Ur,” in The Oxford Encyclopedia of Archaeology in the Near East, vol. 5, ed. Eric M. Meyers (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 288-291; P. R. S. Moorey, Ur of the Chaldees: A Revised and Updated Edition of Sir Leonard Woolley’s Excavations at Ur (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1982). See also Stiebing, Ancient Astronauts, 19; Stiebing, “A Futile Quest,” 19-20. See the discussion by Max Mallowan (longtime assistant to Sir Leonard Woolley and an important archaeologist in his own right, as well as the husband of Agatha Christie), “Noah’s Flood Reconsidered,” Iraq 26 (1964): 62-82.

* A much more relevant discovery See William B. Ryan and Walter C. Pitman, Noah’s Flood: The New Scientific Discoveries about the Event That Changed History (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1998). See also Ian Wilson, Before the Flood: The Biblical Flood as a Real Event and How It Changed the Course of Civilization (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2002).

* that a freshwater lake was inundated by the Black Sea some 7,500 years ago See some of the results and a discussion of Ballard’s expedition posted on the National Geographic Web site: http://www.nationalgeographic.com/​blacksea/ax/frame.html (accessed on January 25, 2007).

* Most expeditions going in search For a brief discussion of the ancient sources, see Stiebing, Ancient Astronauts, 22-23 and figure 1; Stiebing, “A Futile Quest,” 20-21.

* William Stiebing For the list of modern expeditions that have gone in search of the ark, see Stiebing, Ancient Astronauts, 22-27; see also the update in Stiebing, “A Futile Quest,” 21-24 (also see footnote 5 on page 20 for a list of books published by “Arkeologists,” as such people are frequently called).

* Another infamous set of claims came from Fernand Navarra, who in 1955 See Stiebing, “A Futile Quest,” 23-24; Stiebing, Ancient Astronauts, 25-27.

* Perhaps the most infamous set of claims For these claims about Noah’s ark and for more about Ron Wyatt himself, see the official Web site of Wyatt Archaeological Research, especially https://safeco3.net/wyattmuseum/donations2.htm and http://wyattmuseum.com/noahs-ark.htm (and linked pages). An informal position statement for Wyatt Archaeological Research can be found at http://wyattmuseum.com/meetings.htm (all pages accessed on January 5, 2007). On his being held hostage by Kurdish separatist rebels, see the brief mention on the above Web site and, among other articles, Maria Puente, “Ark Hunters Abducted: 3 from USA among 5 Seized in Turkey,” USA Today, September 3, 1991.

* a former police investigator and SWAT team member Bob Cornuke is the founder and president of the BASE Institute; see http://www.baseinstitute.org and especially http://www.baseinstitute.org/​bob.html. For the BASE Institute’s mission statement, see http://www.baseinstitute.org/​explore.html (all pages accessed on January 5, 2007). See also Mark I. Pinsky, “A Bible-based Indiana Jones,” Orlando Sentinel, January 13, 2007, for Cornuke’s recent statement, “The word of God is never wrong. Archaeology can only reveal truths that are already existing in the Bible.”

* Media reports announced that Cornuke’s 2006 expedition For the details, claims, and reactions to Cornuke’s recent expedition, see Kate Ravilious, “Noah’s Ark Discovered in Iran?” National Geographic News, July 5, 2006, http://news.nationalgeographic.com​/news/2006/07/060705-​noahs-ark.html. See also Robert Cornuke and David Halbrook, In Search of the Lost Mountains of Noah: The Discovery of the Real Mts. of Ararat (Nashville, Tenn.: Broadman and Holman Publishers, 2001), and Robert Cornuke, Ark Fever (Wheaton, IL: Tyndale House Publishers, 2005).

* could be reflected in the actual archaeological record See Speiser, Genesis, 75-76.

* The original story See commentary by Bruce M. Metzger and Roland E. Murphy, eds., New Oxford Annotated Bible, with the Apocryphal/Deuterocanonical Books (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 14-15OT.

* Hanging Gardens of Babylon Irving L. Finkel, “The Hanging Gardens of Babylon,” in The Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, eds. Peter A. Clayton and Martin J. Price (London: Routledge, 1998), 38-58.

* linking the Tower of Babel Placing the Tower of Babel in the city of Babylon is entirely more plausible, from an archaeological and historical point of view, than the recent suggestion by Michael S. Sanders, the self-taught “Biblical Scholar of Archaeology, Egyptology and Assyriology,” who announced in 1999 that he had located the Tower of Babel “in the Pontus region of the Black Sea coast of Turkey” by using “satellite photographs from NASA, the American space agency.” On Sanders’s theory for the location of the Tower of Babel, see Jack Grimston, “Tower of Babel Is ‘Found’ Near the Black Sea,” Sunday Times, April 4, 1999.

* Deucalian and the Flood On the transmission of the Flood stories around the world, see Stiebing, Ancient Astronauts, 3-4, 17-19. On the influence of the Near East on Greek mythology and literature, see Walter Burkert, The Orientalizing Revolution: Near Eastern Influence on Greek Culture in the Early Archaic Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998).

CHAPTER 3

* the land of Shinar See J. Maxwell Miller and John H. Hayes, A History of Ancient Israel and Judah, 2nd ed. (Louisville, Ky.: Westminster John Knox Press, 2006), 62.

* Most archaeologists and biblical scholars think See the discussion in David M. Howard, Jr., “Sodom and Gomorrah Revisited,” Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society 27 (1984): 387-388. See also J. Penrose Harland, “Sodom and Gomorrah. Part I. The Location of the Cities of the Plain,” Biblical Archaeologist 5, no. 2 (1942): 17-32; J. Penrose Harland, “Sodom and Gomorrah. Part II. The Destruction of the Cities of the Plain,” Biblical Archaeologist 6, no. 3 (1943): 41-54.

* The text In fact, the editors of the New Oxford Annotated Bible simply say “the Dead Sea” rather than the “Salt Sea.” See Bruce M. Metzger and Roland E. Murphy, eds., New Oxford Annotated Bible, with the Apocryphal/Deuterocanonical Books (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 17OT.

* the Valley of Shaveh See commentary by the editors of the New Oxford Annotated Bible, 18OT.

* The only other tidbit of biblical information See Howard, “Sodom and Gomorrah Revisited,” 392.

* The other texts See Harland, “Sodom and Gomorrah. Part I,” 22-23, and “Sodom and Gomorrah. Part II,” 44-47.

* a flurry of excitement took place See Paolo Matthiae, Ebla: An Empire Rediscovered (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1977); Giovanni Pettinato, The Archives of Ebla: An Empire Inscribed in Clay (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1981).

* were soon shown to be faulty See Alan Millard, “Ebla and the Bible: What’s Left (if Anything)?” Bible Review 8, no. 2 (1992): 18-31, 60, 62; Hershel Shanks, “Ebla Evidence Evaporates,” Biblical Archaeology Review 5, no. 6 (1979): 52-53; Alfonso Archi, “Are ‘The Cities of the Plain’ Mentioned in the Ebla Tablets?” Biblical Archaeology Review 7, no. 6 (1981): 54-55. See also Hershel Shanks, “BAR Interviews Giovanni Pettinato,” Biblical Archaeology Review 6, no. 5 (1980): 46-52, in which Pettinato stands by his original identifications.

* as Rast and Schaub have noted, Bab edh-Dhra For the data concerning the excavations at Bab edh-Dhra and Numeira, see the report by Walter Rast and Thomas Schaub, “Expedition to the Southeastern Dead Sea Plain, Jordan, 1979,” ASOR Newsletter, June 1980, 12-17, especially the subsection entitled “Are These Sites Sodom and Gomorrah?” 16-17. See also the discussions by Hershel Shanks, “Have Sodom and Gomorrah Been Found?” Biblical Archaeology Review 6, no. 5 (1980): 26-36; Willem C. van Hattem, “Once Again: Sodom and Gomorrah,” Biblical Archaeologist 44 (1981): 87-92; Bryant G. Wood, “The Discovery of the Sin Cities of Sodom and Gomorrah,” Bible and Spade 12, no. 3 (1999): 67-80. See also Walter E. Rast, “Bab edh-Dhr’a and the Origin of the Sodom Saga,” in Archaeology and Biblical Interpretation: Essays in Memory of D. Glenn Rose, eds. Leo D. Perdue, Lawrence E. Toombs, and Gary L. Johnson (Atlanta: John Knox Press, 1987), 185-201, with further bibliography; Walter E. Rast, “Bronze Age Cities along the Dead Sea,” Archaeology 40, no. 1 (1987): 42-49; Michael D. Coogan, “Numeira 1981,” Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research 255 (1984): 75-81; Walter E. Rast and R. Thomas Schaub, The Southeastern Dead Sea Plain Expedition: An Interim Report of the 1977 Season (Annual of the American Schools of Oriental Research), vol. 46 (Cambridge, MA: ASOR, 1981); R. Thomas Schaub, “Bab edh-Dhra,” The Oxford Encyclopedia of Archaeology in the Near East, vol. 1, ed. Eric N. Meyers (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 248-251; R. Thomas Schaub, “Southeast Dead Sea Plain,” The Oxford Encyclopedia of Archaeology in the Near East, vol. 5, ed. Eric N. Meyers (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 62-64; R. Thomas Schaub, “Bab edh-Dhra,” The New Encyclopedia of Archaeological Excavations in the Holy Land, vol. 1, ed. Ephraim Stern, Ayelet Lewinson-Gilboa, and Joseph Aviram (Jerusalem: Carta, 1993), 130-136.

* One of the excavators Coogan, “Numeira 1981,” 76; Rast, “Bronze Age Cities,” 47-48.

* In June 1980 See Rast and Schaub, “Expedition to the Southeastern Dead Sea,” 16-17.

* As Rast pointed out See Rast, “Bab edh-Dhr’a and the Origin,” 193.

* Rast also mentioned See Rast, “Bab edh-Dhr’a and the Origin,” 186.

* Ron Wyatt, the nurse anesthetist For these claims about Sodom and Gomorrah, see the official Wyatt Archaeological Research Web site: http://www.wyattmuseum.com/​cities-of-the-plain.htm and linked pages, especially http://www.wyattmuseum.com/​cities-of-the-plain-02.htm (accessed on January 5, 2007).

* Wyatt’s claims are baseless See Elizabeth H. Gierlowski-Kordesch, review of Ron Wyatt’s “Discovered: Sodom and Gomorrah! A Video,” Biblical Archaeology Review 24, no. 5 (1998): 60-62; Ron W. Pritchett, “Recognizing Junk Science,” Professional Geologist, December 1997.

* Similarly, Michael S. Sanders For more on Sanders’s Dead Sea diving expedition, see Christopher Goodwin, “Satellite Sleuth Finds Sodom and Gomorrah,” Sunday Times, October 18, 1998; Jonathan Leake, “Dead Sea Sub Dives for Lost City of Sodom,” Sunday Times, November 21, 1999; Jonathan Petre, “Sodom and Gomorrah are ‘Found at Bottom of Dead Sea,’ ” London Telegraph, March 26, 2000; Peter Sheridan, “Finder of the Lost Ark … and the Garden of Eden, Sodom and Gomorrah, the Tower of Babel and the 10 Commandments,” Daily Express, March 15, 2001. See also Sanders’s own Web site, http://www.biblemysteries.com (accessed on January 5, 2007).

* For instance, as early as 1936 See Frederick G. Clapp, “The Site of Sodom and Gomorrah,” American Journal of Archaeology 40 (1936): 323-344; Frederick G. Clapp, “Geology and Bitumens of the Dead Sea Area, Palestine and Transjordan,” Bulletin of the American Association of Petroleum 20 (1936): 881-909. See also various suggestions provided by Harland, “Sodom and Gomorrah. Part I,” 17-32; Harland, “Sodom and Gomorrah. Part II,” 41-54; as well as the summaries presented by David Howard, Jr., “Sodom and Gomorrah Revisited,” especially 394-399.

* More recently, in 1995 See David Neev and K. O. Emery, The Destruction of Sodom, Gomorrah, and Jericho (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995). For the brief—and harsh—reviews, see Amos Nur’s review in Earth Sciences History 16, vol. 1 (1997): 57-58 and Ronald Hendel’s review in Biblical Archaeology Review 23, no. 4 (1997): 70.

* As they and others have pointed out See Graham M. Harris and Anthony P. Beardow, “The Destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah: A Geotechnical Perspective,” Quarterly Journal of Engineering Geology 28 (1995): 349-362.

* Harris and Beardow also suggested See Harris and Beardow, “The Destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah,” 349. For a discussion of “liquefaction failure” in layman’s terms, see Jeanne B. Perkins, et al., “The REAL Dirt on Liquefaction: A Guide to the Liquefaction Hazard in Future Earthquakes Affecting the San Francisco Bay Area,” February 2001, http://www.abag.ca.gov/​bayarea/eqmaps/liquefac/Lq_rept.pdf (accessed January 5, 2007).

* Most recently, in 2001 See BBC News, “Scientists Uncover Sodom’s Fiery End,” August 18, 2001, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/1497476.stm (accessed January 5, 2007). See also the longer discussion by Jessica Cecil, “The Destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah,” http://www.bbc.co.uk/​history/ancient/cultures/sodom_gomorrah_01.shtml (accessed January 5, 2007).

* Maxwell Miller and John Hayes For a succinct discussion that includes the now-discounted “Amorite Hypothesis” proposed by William F. Albright and others, see J. Maxwell Miller and John H. Hayes, A History of Ancient Israel and Judah, 2nd ed. (Louisville, Ky.: Westminster John Knox Press, 2006), 51-53. See also Iaian Provan, V. Philips Long, and Tremper Longman III, A Biblical History of Israel (Louisville, Ky.: Westminster John Knox Press, 2003), 108-121. On the suggested dates for Abraham, see Jack Finegan, Handbook of Biblical Chronology: Principles of Time Reckoning in the Ancient World and Problems of Chronology in the Bible, rev. ed. (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson Publishers, 1998), 196-206.

* The debates concerning Abraham For a summary of the various suggestions, see Israel Finkelstein and Neil Asher Silberman, The Bible Unearthed: Archaeology’s New Vision and the Origin of Its Sacred Texts (New York: Free Press, 2001), 319-325.

* there is no proof, however, that these two sites are one and the same For further discussion, see Finkelstein and Silberman, The Bible Unearthed, 312-313; Molly Dewsnap Meinhardt, “Abraham’s Ur: Did Woolley Excavate the Wrong Place?” Biblical Archaeology Review 26, no. 1 (2000): 20-25, 60; Alan R. Millard, “Where Was Abraham’s Ur? The Case for the Babylonian City,” Biblical Archaeology Review 27, no. 3 (2001): 52-53, 57.

* In addressing the first question See Rast, “Bab edh-Dhr’a and the Origin,” 186.

* Other scholars have suggested For a brief discussion of scholars who have suggested a possible Canaanite origin for the story of Sodom and Gomorrah, see Rast, “Bab edh-Dhr’a and the Origin,” 188-190 (also see page 189 for a possible Iron Age date for the story).

* short-lived carbon-14 dates R. Thomas Schaub, personal communication, February 17, 2007.

* In The Oxford Companion to the Bible Joseph A. Greene, “Sodom and Gomorrah,” in The Oxford Companion to the Bible, eds. Bruce M. Metzger and Michael D. Coogan (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 707.

* Steven Collins See Tall el Hammam Excavation Project (TeHEP), “Digging the Past,” April 2006, http://www.trinitysouthwest.com/​uploads/hammam_hi.pdf (accessed January 5, 2007). The article mentions an additional monograph published by Collins, The Search for Sodom and Gomorrah (Albuquerque, NM: TSU Press, 2003-2006).

* Frankly, though Originally quoted by Andrew L. Slayman in “Sodom and Gomorrah Update,” Archaeology 49, no. 4 (July/August 1996), and reprinted in Secrets of the Bible (New York: Hatherleigh Press, 2004), 56.

CHAPTER 4

* the parting of the Red (Reed) Sea See Bruce M. Metzger and Roland E. Murphy, eds., New Oxford Annotated Bible, with the Apocryphal/Deuterocanonical Books (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 86-87OT.

* Let us begin by considering precisely when On the date of Joseph in Egypt, see James K. Hoffmeier, Israel in Egypt: The Evidence for the Authenticity of the Exodus Tradition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 77-98, with further bibliography; see also Jack Finegan, Handbook of Biblical Chronology: Principles of Time Reckoning in the Ancient World and Problems of Chronology in the Bible, rev. ed. (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson Publishers, 1998), 206-213, 220-221, 223-224; Iaian Provan, V. Philips Long, and Tremper Longman III, A Biblical History of Israel (Louisville, Ky.: Westminster John Knox Press, 2003), 121-125.

* well-known wall paintings at Beni Hasan See Eric H. Cline, “Trade and Exchange in the Levant,” in Near Eastern Archaeology: A Reader: 360-366, ed. Suzanne Richard (Winona Lake, Ind.: Eisenbrauns, 2003), 362 and figure 94. On both the wall paintings and the larger question of Semites in Egypt, see Hoffmeier, Israel in Egypt, 52-68, with further bibliography. On connecting the Joshua story to the Hyksos period, see Baruch Halpern, “The Exodus from Egypt: Myth or Reality?” in The Rise of Ancient Israel, ed. Hershel Shanks (Washington, D.C.: Biblical Archaeology Society, 1992), 99-101. On the Hyksos in Egypt, see Donald B. Redford, Egypt, Canaan, and Israel in Ancient Times (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), 98-122.

* it is not unique among the annals of ancient stories On parallels for the story of the birth and childhood of Moses, see Hoffmeier, Israel in Egypt, 136-143, with further bibliography; Provan, Long, and Longman, III, A Biblical History, 125-126.

* the myth of Romulus and Remus See Livy, The Early History of Rome, 1.3-1.5.

* the great Persian ruler and conqueror, Cyrus the Great See Herodotus, The Histories, 1.107-122.

* I am Sargon, the mighty king—king of Akkad Translation follows Mark W. Chavalas, The Ancient Near East: Historical Sources in Translation (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2006), 22-24. See also James B. Pritchard, ed., Ancient Near Eastern Texts Relating to the Old Testament, 3rd ed. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969), 119.

* Maxwell Miller and John Hayes For a brief discussion on the numbers given and the problems that they cause in trying to interpret the story of the Exodus, see J. Maxwell Miller and John H. Hayes, A History of Ancient Israel and Judah, 2nd ed. (Louisville, Ky.: Westminster John Knox Press, 2006), 72.

* 600 families or clans See discussion by Nahum M. Sarna, “Israel in Egypt: The Egyptian Sojourn and the Exodus” (revised by Hershel Shanks), in Ancient Israel: From Abraham to the Roman Destruction of the Temple, rev. and exp. ed., (New York: Prentice Hall, 1999), 45, 306, and footnote 40.

* Not all scholars are prepared to accept these dates For arguments about the date of the Exodus, see John J. Bimson and David Livingston, “Redating the Exodus,” Biblical Archaeology Review 13, no. 5 (1987): 40-53, 66-68; Baruch Halpern, “Radical Exodus Redating Fatally Flawed,” Biblical Archaeology Review 13, no. 6 (1987): 56-61; John J. Bimson, “Redating the Exodus: A Reply to Baruch Halpern,” Biblical Archaeology Review 14, no. 4 (1988): 52-55; Alan Millard, “How Reliable Is Exodus?” Biblical Archaeology Review 26, no. 4 (2000): 50-57; see also John J. Bimson, Redating the Exodus and Conquest, 2nd ed. (Sheffield: Almond Press, 1981), passim; Jack Finegan, Handbook of Biblical Chronology: Principles of Time Reckoning in the Ancient World and Problems of Chronology in the Bible, rev. ed. (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson Publishers, 1998), 202-203, 225-245; Sarna, “Israel in Egypt,” 33-54; Provan, Long, and Longman, A Biblical History, 131-132.

* On the stele Translation following Pritchard, Ancient Near Eastern Texts, 378. See also Miller and Hayes, A History of Ancient Israel, 39-41. There have been many discussion of this inscription over the years. Some of the most recent include Itamar Singer, “Merneptah’s Campaign to Canaan and the Egyptian Occupation of the Southern Coastal Plain of Palestine in the Ramesside Period,” Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research 269 (1988): 1-10; Michael G. Hasel, “Israel in the Merneptah Stela,” Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research 296 (1994): 45-61; Frank J. Yurco, “Merneptah’s Canaanite Campaign,” Journal of the American Research Center in Egypt 23 (1986): 189-215; Frank J. Yurco, “Merneptah’s Wars, the Sea Peoples’ and Israel’s Origins,” in Ancient Egypt, the Aegean and the Near East: Studies in Honour of Martha Rhoads Bell, vol. 2, ed. Jacke Phillips, Lanny Bell, Bruce B. Williams, James Hoch, and Ronald J. Leprohon (San Antonio, TX: Van Siclen Books, 1997), 497-506.

* There is, however, also a third possibility See Halpern, “The Exodus from Egypt,” 105. See also Avraham Malamat, “Let My People Go and Go and Go and Go,” Biblical Archaeology Review 24, no. 1 (1998): 62-66, 85.

* textual mention of the Israelites’ existence On the “Habiru” (or “ ’Apiru”) who are mentioned in Canaanite texts from the 14th and 13th centuries B.C., and their possible relationship to the biblical Hebrews, see most recently Miller and Hayes, A History of Ancient Israel, 37, 113, 115, 117; see also Nadav Na’aman, “The ‘Conquest of Canaan’ in the Book of Joshua and in History,” reproduced in Nadav Na’aman, Canaan in the Second Millennium B.C.E. Collected Essays, vol. 2 (Winona Lake, Ind.: Eisenbrauns, 2005), 317-392.

* what route would (or could) Moses and the Hebrews have followed On the possible geographical routes taken by the Hebrews during the Exodus, see the very detailed and useful discussions by Hoffmeier, Israel in Egypt, 176-222, with full bibliography, maps, and photographs; see also Hoffmeier, Ancient Israel in Sinai: The Evidence for the Authenticity of the Wilderness Tradition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 35-109, with full bibliography, maps, and photographs. Similarly, see the discussion by Kenneth A. Kitchen, On the Reliability of the Old Testament (Grand Rapids, Mich.: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2003), 254-274, and contrast the views presented by Israel Finkelstein and Neil A. Silberman, The Bible Unearthed: Archaeology’s New Vision of Ancient Israel and the Origin of Its Sacred Texts (New York: Free Press, 2001), 58-64.

* the question of the location of Mount Sinai On the various locations which have been suggested for Mount Sinai, and the arguments for and against each, see James K. Hoffmeier, Ancient Israel in Sinai, 111-148, with full bibliography; Kitchen, On the Reliability, 269-272 and table 20. See also Finkelstein and Silberman, The Bible Unearthed, 326-328.

* the so-called Negative Confession Translation following W. K. Simpson, ed., The Literature of Ancient Egypt, 3rd ed. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), 267-277.

* The Ten Commandments were not the only laws For a recent discussion of the laws received by Moses at Mount Sinai, with full bibliography, see Hoffmeier, Ancient Israel in Sinai, 177-192.

* the Sumerian and other law codes of Ur-Nammu, Eshnunna, and Lipit-Ishtar For an early Sumerian law code and for the translations from Hammurabi’s Law Code, which are followed here, see Pritchard, Ancient Near Eastern Texts, 163-180, 525-526. See Jacob J. Finkelstein, The Ox That Gored (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1981), for a fascinating comparison of biblical laws that are also found in earlier law codes in the ancient Near East.

* the same punishments into the Hebrew Bible See the brief discussion by Peter Enns, Inspiration and Incarnation: Evangelicals and the Problem of the Old Testament (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker Academic, 2005), 31-34.

* As the late Samuel Noah Kramer See Samuel Noah Kramer, History Begins at Sumer: Thirty-Nine “Firsts” in Recorded History (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1981).

* when turning to archaeological evidence On Hoffmeier’s excavations at Tell el Borg, see especially Hoffmeier, Ancient Israel in Sinai; Hoffmeier, “The North Sinai Archaeological Project’s Excavations at Tell el-Borg (Sinai): An Example of the ‘New Biblical Archaeology,’ ” in The Future of Biblical Archaeology: Reassessing Methodologies and Assumptions, ed. James K. Hoffmeier and Alan Millard (Grand Rapids, Mich.: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2004), 53-55; see also the official Web site at www.tellelborg.org (accessed on January 18, 2007).

* no such evidence at the supposed time of the Exodus See Finkelstein and Silberman, The Bible Unearthed, 62-63.

* to identify the famous ten plagues See Robert R. Stieglitz, “Ancient Records and the Exodus Plagues,” Biblical Archaeology Review 13, no. 6 (1987): 46-49; Siro I. Trevisanato, The Plagues of Egypt: Archaeology, History, and Science Look at the Bible (Piscataway, N.J.: Gorgias Press, 2005). See also the detailed discussions by Hoffmeier, Israel in Egypt, 144-155, with further bibliography; Kitchen, On the Reliability, 249-254.

* One of the favorite suggestions See Christos G. Doumas, “High Art from the Time of Abraham: Was this the Lost Continent of Atlantis? Did a Volcano Part the Red Sea?” Biblical Archaeology Review 17, no. 1 (1991): 40-51; Hershel Shanks, “The Exodus and the Crossing of the Red Sea, According to Hans Goedicke,” Biblical Archaeology Review 7, no. 5 (1981): 42-50; Charles R. Krahmalkov, “A Critique of Professor Goedicke’s Exodus Theories,” Biblical Archaeology Review 7, no. 5 (1981): 51-54; Eliezer D. Oren, “How Not to Create a History of the Exodus—A Critique of Professor Goedicke’s Theories,” Biblical Archaeology Review 7, no. 6 (1981): 46-53; Trevisanato, The Plagues of Egypt. On the revised date of the Santorini eruption, see the full discussion in Sturt W. Manning, A Test of Time: The Volcano of Thera and the Chronology and History of the Aegean and East Mediterranean in the Mid Second Millennium BC (Oxford: Oxbow Books, 1999); see also Sturt W. Manning, et al., “Chronology for the Aegean Late Bronze Age 1700-1400 B.C.,” Science 312, no. 5773 (2006): 565-569; Michael Balter, “New Carbon Dates Support Revised History of Ancient Mediterranean,” Science 312, no. 5773 (2006): 508-509; Walter L. Friedrich, et. al, “Santorini Eruption Radiocarbon Dated to 1627-1600 B.C.,” Science 312, no. 5773 (2006): 548. On Jacobovici’s television extravaganza on the Exodus, which aired in August 2006, see the subsequent debate between Jacobovici and Hershel Shanks, editor and publisher of Biblical Archaeology Review, posted at http://www.bib-arch.org/​bswbOOexodus.html, and an additional debate between Jacobovici and Professor Ron Hendel of UC Berkeley, following Hendel’s review of the film, posted at http://www.bib-arch.org/​bswbOOexodusbeware.html; see also the review by Dr. Bryant G. Wood, director of the Associates for Biblical Research, posted at http://abr.christiananswers.net/​articles/article58.html; and the official “Exodus Decoded” Web site, maintained by Jacobovici’s company Associated Producers: http://www.theexodusdecoded.com (all sites accessed on January 5, 2007).

* the Egyptian expulsion of the Hyksos See the brief discussion by Finkelstein and Silberman, The Bible Unearthed, 56-57; see also Halpern, “The Exodus from Egypt,” 87-113.

* the story was fabricated See Thomas L. Thompson, The Mythic Past: Biblical Archaeology and the Myth of Israel (New York: Basic Books, 2000) and Keith Whitelam, The Invention of Ancient Israel (Boston: Routledge, 1997), as compared to Redford, Egypt, Canaan, and Israel and Finkelstein and Silberman, The Bible Unearthed, 65-71.

* Finkelstein refers to himself as a “centrist” See the interview by Hershel Shanks, “A ‘Centrist’ at the Center of Controversy: BAR Interviews Israel Finkelstein,” Biblical Archaeology Review 28, no. 6 (2002): 38-49, 64-68.

* Finkelstein and Silberman point out Finkelstein and Silberman, The Bible Unearthed, 65.

* an interview with the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz Aviva Lori, “Grounds for Disbelief,” Ha’aretz, http://www.haaretz.com/​hasen/pages/ShArt.jhtml?item​No=291264andcontrassID=2andsubContrassID=​14andsbSubContrassID=0andlistSrc=Y (accessed on January 5, 2007).

CHAPTER 5

* Legend of Keret Translation following James B. Pritchard, ed., Ancient Near Eastern Texts Relating to the Old Testament, 3rd ed. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969), 142-149.

* Numerous scholars have already commented See Theodor Gaster, Myth, Legend and Custom in the Old Testament (New York: Harper and Row, 1969), 412; Steven E. Loewenstamm, “The Seven Day Unit in Ugaritic Epic Literature,” Israel Exploration Journal 15, no. 3 (1965): 121-133; Foster R. McCurley, Jr., “ ‘And After Six Days’ (Mark 9:2): A Semitic Literary Device,” Journal of Biblical Literature 93, no. 1 (1974): 67-81; Daniel E. Fleming, “The Seven-Day Siege of Jericho in Holy War,” in Ki Baruch Hu: Ancient Near Eastern, Biblical, and Judaic Studies in Honor of Baruch A. Levine, eds. Robert Chazan, William W. Hallo, and Lawrence H. Schiffman (Winona Lake, Ind.: Eisenbrauns, 1999), 211-228, with extensive bibliography. Fleming also gives additional examples of military campaigns involving seven days which are found in the Hebrew Bible, including 1 Samuel 11:3, 13:8; and 2 Kings 3:9.

* accounts of armies marching around cities See Yigael Yadin, The Art of Warfare in Biblical Lands (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1963), 99-100; Theodor Gaster, Myth, Legend and Custom in the Old Testament (New York: Harper and Row, 1969), 412-413; Daniel E. Fleming, “The Seven-Day Siege of Jericho in Holy War,” in Ki Baruch Hu: Ancient Near Eastern, Biblical, and Judaic Studies in Honor of Baruch A. Levine, eds. Robert Chazan, William W Hallo, and Lawrence H Schiffman (Winona Lake, Ind.: Eisenbrauns, 1999), 219 and footnote 26; Avraham Malamat, “Israelite Conduct of War in the Conquest of Canaan,” in Symposia Celebrating the Seventy-Fifth Anniversary of the Founding of the American Schools of Oriental Research (1900-1975), ed. Frank M. Cross (Cambridge, MA: ASOR, 1979), 47-48.

* a lot more archaeological data available For full bibliographic references and an excellent summary of the earlier excavations and the problems involved with the archaeological evidence, see Bryant G. Wood, “Did the Israelites Conquer Jericho? A New Look at the Archaeological Evidence,” Biblical Archaeology Review 16, no. 2 (1990): 44-58. See earlier research as well: Ernst Sellin and Carl Watzinger, Jericho: Die Ergebnisse der Ausgrabungen (Jericho) (Leipzig: J. C. Hinrichs, 1913); Carl Watzinger, “Zur Chronologie der Schichten von Jericho,” Zeitschrift der Deutschen Morgenländischen Gessellschaft 80 (1926): 131-136; John Garstang and J. B. E. Garstang, The Story of Jericho, rev. ed. (London: Marshall, Morgan and Scott, 1948); Kathleen M. Kenyon, “Some Notes on the History of Jericho in the Second Millennium B.C.,” Palestine Exploration Quarterly (1951): 101-138; Kathleen M. Kenyon, Digging Up Jericho (London: Ernest Benn, 1957); Thomas A. Holland, ed., Excavations at Jericho Volume 3: The Architecture and Stratigraphy of the Tell (London: British School of Archaeology in Jerusalem, 1981); Kathleen M. Kenyon and Thomas A. Holland, Excavations at Jericho Volume 4: The Pottery Type Series and Other Finds (London: British School of Archaeology in Jerusalem, 1982); Kathleen M. Kenyon and Thomas A. Holland, Excavations at Jericho Volume 5: The Pottery Phases of the Tell and Other Finds (London: British School of Archaeology in Jerusalem, 1983). See also John R. Bartlett, Jericho (Grand Rapids, Mich.: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1982); Piotr Bienkowski, Jericho in the Late Bronze Age (Warminster: Aris and Phillips, 1986); Kathleen M. Kenyon, “Jericho,” in The New Encyclopedia of Archaeological Excavations in the Holy Land, vol. 2, eds. Ephraim Stern, Ayelet Lewinson-Gilboa, and Joseph Aviram (Jerusalem: Carta, 1993), 674-681; Thomas A. Holland, “Jericho,” in The Oxford Encyclopedia of Archaeology in the Near East, vol. 3, ed. Eric M. Meyers (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 220-224.

* The city was essentially uninhabited after that date See the brief discussion and description in Bryant G. Wood, “Dating Jericho’s Destruction: Bienkowski Is Wrong on All Counts,” Biblical Archaeology Review 16, no. 5 (1990): 45-49, 68-69.

* Bryant G. Wood, director of the Associates for Biblical Research The Web site for the Associates for Biblical Research can be found at http://abr.christiananswers.net/home.html. Their mission statement and philosophy of ministry can be found at http://abr.christiananswers.net/abr-ministry.html (both accessed on January 5, 2007).

* Piotr Bienkowski, former curator of Near Eastern and Egyptian antiquities Piotr Bienkowski is currently head of collections and academic development at the Manchester Museum at the University of Manchester, England. He is also an honorary research fellow at the School of Archaeology, Classics, and Egyptology at the University of Liverpool.

* Wood argued See Wood, “Did the Israelites Conquer Jericho?” 44-58; Wood, “Dating Jericho’s Destruction,” 45-49, 68-69.

* Bienkowski, however, stood firm with Kenyon See Piotr Bienkowski, “Jericho Was Destroyed in the Middle Bronze Age, Not the Late Bronze Age,” Biblical Archaeology Review 16, no. 5 (1990): 45-46; see also Piotr Bienkowski, Jericho in the Late Bronze Age (Warminster: Aris and Phillips, 1986).

* The scholarly arguments between Bryant Wood and Piotr Bienkowski Randall Price’s book The Stones Cry Out: What Archaeology Reveals about the Truth of the Bible (Eugene, Ore.: Harvest House Publishers, 1997), 152-153, presents Wood’s arguments and conclusions about Jericho, stating, “Wood has shown that once the destruction is correctly dated, the archaeological evidence harmonizes perfectly with the biblical record” (p. 152). However, Price never mentions Bienkowski in his chapter, nor does he present to his readers Bienkowski’s very valid objections, nor does he cite—in either his footnotes or bibliography—the article in which Bienkowski presented his objections, even though he cites (in footnote 12 on page 413) both Wood’s original article and Wood’s subsequent response to Bienkowski’s criticisms.

* An earthquake at Jericho that occurred less than a century ago See Amos Nur, “And the Walls Came Tumbling Down: Old Testament Writings of Doom and Destruction Are Now Providing Researchers with a Record of Earthquakes Spanning 4,000 Years,” New Scientist, July 6, 1991, 45-48; Amos Nur, “The End of the Bronze Age by Large Earthquakes?” in Natural Catastrophes During Bronze Age Civilisations: Archaeological, Geological, Astronomical and Cultural Perspectives, eds. Benny J. Peiser, Trevor Palmer, and Mark E. Bailey (Oxford: Archaeopress, 1998), 142-143, 146, and figure 6. See also Amos Nur and Christopher MacAskill, The Walls Came Tumbling Down—Earthquakes in the Holy Land, a Video Documentary (Stanford, Calif.: ESI Productions, 1991); Amos Nur and Hagai Ron, “Earthquake! Inspiration for Armageddon,” Biblical Archaeology Review 23, no. 4 (1997): 48-55; Bryant G. Wood, “Did the Israelites Conquer Jericho? A New Look at the Archaeological Evidence,” Biblical Archaeology Review 16, no. 2 (1990): 44-58.

* However, in 1993, a team of earthquake specialists See now A. Shapira, R. Avni, and A. Nur, “Note: A New Estimate for the Epicenter of the Jericho Earthquake of 11 July, 1927,” Israel Journal of Earth Sciences 42, no. 2 (1993): 93-96; R. Avni, D. Bowman, A. Shapira, and A. Nur, “Erroneous Interpretation of Historical Documents Related to the Epicenter of the 1927 Jericho Earthquake in the Holy Land,” Journal of Seismology 6 (2002): 469-476. See previously John Garstang, Joshua-Judges (London: Constable and Co., 1931), 136-139.

* The book also gives us a summary of Joshua’s southern campaign See Kenneth A. Kitchen, On the Reliability of the Old Testament (Grand Rapids, Mich.: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2003), 173-174.

* Obviously, there are two tales within the biblical account That there is more than one tale contained within this biblical account is by no means a new observation; biblical scholars using textual criticism have long proposed that there are a number of different stories concerned with the conquests of Joshua intertwined within the books of Joshua and Judges. It is likely that these stories were written at different times and by different groups (that is, the various tribes of Israelites may each have had their own version), but that they were eventually redacted by later editors to form the single account that we possess today. See, for instance (each with extensive bibliography), J. Alberto Soggin, Joshua: A Commentary (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1972); Robert G. Boling, Joshua: A New Translation with Notes and Commentary (New York: Doubleday and Company, 1982); E. John Hamlin, Inheriting the Land: A Commentary on the Book of Joshua (Grand Rapids, Mich.: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1983); Yehezkel Kaufmann, The Biblical Account of the Conquest of Canaan (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1985); Carolyn Pressler, Joshua, Judges, and Ruth (Louisville, Ky.: Westminster John Knox Press, 2002). See also Kitchen, On the Reliability, 159-190.

* the site of et-Tell See Joseph Callaway, “Ai,” in The Anchor Bible Dictionary, vol. 1, ed. David Noel Freedman (New York: Doubleday, 1992), 125-130; Joseph Callaway, “Ai,” in The New Encyclopedia of Archaeological Excavations in the Holy Land, vol. 1, eds. Ephraim Stern, Ayelet Lewinson-Gilboa, and Joseph Aviram (Jerusalem: Carta, 1993), 39-45; William G. Dever, Who Were the Early Israelites and Where Did They Come From? (Grand Rapids, Mich.: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2003), 47-48; Kitchen, On the Reliability, 188-189.

* the nearby site of Khirbet el Maqatir Several of the preliminary reports written by Bryant Wood are available on the Internet; see http://bibleplaces.com/bolen/ai2000.htm (2000 season), http://bibleplaces.com/bolen/maqatir.htm (1999 season), and http://bibleplaces.com/bolen/maqatirdetailed.html (1998 season) (all accessed on January 5, 2007).

* As for the other cities For a brief and up-to-date summation of some of these (and other) sites, see Dever, Who Were the Early Israelites, 49-50, 54-64, 68-71; see also Kitchen, On the Reliability, 182-190; John J. Bimson, Redating the Exodus and Conquest, 2nd ed. (Sheffield: Almond Press, 1981), 106-214; Provan, Long, and Longman, A Biblical History, 174-189.

* Excavations were first conducted at Lachish Quotation and specific details taken from the very useful article by David Ussishkin, “Lachish—Key to the Israelite Conquest of Canaan?” Biblical Archaeology Review 13, no. 1 (1987): 18-39. See also, in much greater detail, the five-volume publication on his excavations at Lachish: The Renewed Archaeological Excavations at Lachish (1973-1994), vol. 1-5 (Tel Aviv: Institute of Archaeology, Tel Aviv University, 2005). See also his earlier articles, “Lachish,” in The New Encyclopedia of Archaeological Excavations in the Holy Land, vol. 3, ed. Ephraim Stern, Ayelet Lewinson-Gilboa, and Joseph Aviram (Jerusalem: Carta, 1993), 897-911, and “Lachish,” in The Oxford Encyclopedia of Archaeology in the Near East, vol. 3, ed. Eric M. Meyers (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 317-323.

* characteristics of an Israelite settlement This brings up the interesting question of how to tell a Canaanite city from an Israelite city, from an archaeological point of view. On this topic, see William G. Dever, “How to Tell an Israelite from a Canaanite,” in The Rise of Ancient Israel, ed. Hershel Shanks (Washington, D.C.: Biblical Archaeology Society, 1992) 27-56; Israel Finkelstein, The Archaeology of the Israelite Settlement (Jerusalem: Israel Exploration Society, 1988).

* Yigael Yadin, professor of archaeology See Amnon Ben-Tor and Maria T. Rubiato, “Excavating Hazor, Part Two: Did the Israelites Destroy the Canaanite City?” Biblical Archaeology Review 25, no. 3 (1999): 22-39; Amnon Ben-Tor, “The Fall of Canaanite Hazor—The ‘Who’ and ‘When’ Questions,” in Mediterranean Peoples in Transition: Thirteenth to Early Tenth Centuries BCE, eds. Sy Gitin, Amihai Mazar, and Ephraim Stern (Jerusalem: Israel Exploration Society, 1998), 456-468. See also the earlier Yigael Yadin, Hazor: The Rediscovery of a Great Citadel of the Bible (New York: Random House, 1975); Yigael Yadin, Hazor: The Schweich Lecture Series of the British Academy 1970 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972); Yigael Yadin and Amnon Ben-Tor, “Hazor,” in The New Encyclopedia of Archaeological Excavations in the Holy Land, vol. 2, eds. Ephraim Stern, Ayelet Lewinson-Gilboa, and Joseph Aviram (Jerusalem: Carta, 1993), 594-606; Amnon Ben-Tor, “Hazor,” in The Oxford Encyclopedia of Archaeology in the Near East, vol. 3, ed. Eric M. Meyers (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 1-5.

* the German journalist Werner Keller See Werner Keller, The Bible as History: A Confirmation of the Book of Books (New York: William Morrow, 1956). While it is fun to read, with good descriptions of some archaeologists and their discoveries, it is certainly a stretch—and overly optimistic—for Keller to say that the discoveries had proven the Bible, or that they even showed that it is historically accurate. See the more recent books from the nonspecialists discussing such topics, including Jeffery L. Sheler, Is the Bible True? How Modern Debates and Discoveries Affirm the Essence of the Scriptures (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1999); Amy D. Marcus, The View from Nebo: How Archaeology Is Rewriting the Bible and Reshaping the Middle East (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 2000).

* several alternate hypotheses were put forward For these various theories, including Albright’s, see previous discussions summarized in Israel Finkelstein and Neil Asher Silberman, The Bible Unearthed: Archaeology’s New Vision of Ancient Israel and the Origin of Its Sacred Texts (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2001), 72-122, 329-339; Dever, Who Were the Early Israelites, 37-74; Neil Asher Silberman, “Who Were the Israelites?” Archaeology 45, no. 2 (1992): 22-30; Provan, Long, and Longman, A Biblical History, 138-148; David Merling, Sr., The Book of Joshua: Its Theme and Role in Archaeological Discussions (Berrien Springs, Mich.: Andrews University Press, 1996), with full references and bibliography. On the “Conquest” model, see William F. Albright, “The Israelite Conquest of Canaan in the Light of Archaeology,” Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research 74 (1939): 11-23; Paul W. Lapp, “The Conquest of Palestine in the Light of Archaeology,” Concordia Theological Monthly 38 (1967): 495-548; Yigael Yadin, “Is the Biblical Conquest of Canaan Historically Reliable?” Biblical Archaeology Review 8 (1982): 16-23; Israel Finkelstein, The Archaeology of the Israelite Settlement (Jerusalem: Israel Exploration Society, 1988), 295-302. On the “Peaceful Infiltration” model, see Albrecht Alt, Essays on Old Testament History and Religion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1966), 135-139; Martin Noth, The Deuteronomistic History (Sheffield: JSOT Press, 1981). On the “Revolting Peasants” model, see George E. Mendenhall, “The Hebrew Conquest of Palestine,” Biblical Archaeologist 25 (1962): 66-87; George E. Mendenhall, The Tenth Generation: The Origins of the Biblical Tradition (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973); Norman K. Gottwald, The Tribes of Yahweh: A Sociology of the Religion of Liberated Israel 1230-1050 B.C.E. (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis, 1979). On the “Invisible Israelites” model, see Finkelstein and Silberman, The Bible Unearthed, 105-118, with references.

* was an outcome of the collapse of the Canaanite culture, not its cause See Finkelstein and Silberman, The Bible Unearthed, 118.

* Of the major suggestions that have been made See also Dever, Who Were the Early Israelites, for discussions on why these various suggestions do not work particularly well.

* These Sea Peoples On the Sea Peoples, see most recently Eric H. Cline and David O’Connor, “The Mystery of the ‘Sea Peoples,’ ” in Mysterious Lands, eds. David O’Connor and Stephen Quirke (London: UCL Press, 2003), 107-138, with further references. See also the earlier Lawrence E. Stager, “The Impact of the Sea Peoples in Canaan (1185-1050 BCE),” in The Archaeology of Society in the Holy Land, ed. Thomas E. Levy (New York: Facts on File, 1995), 332-348; and the full discussions in Eliezer D. Oren, ed., The Sea Peoples and Their World: A Reassessment, University Museum Monograph 108, University Museum Symposium Series 11 (Philadelphia: University Museum, University of Pennsylvania, 2000). See also Eric H. Cline, “The Sea Peoples’ Possible Role in the Israelite Conquest of Canaan,” in Festschrift for Spyros E. Iakovidis, ed. Vassiliki Pliatsika (Athens: publisher and date forthcoming).

* the Book of Judges may give a slightly more accurate historical account See the discussion in Joseph A. Callaway, “The Settlement in Canaan: The Period of the Judges” (revised by J. Maxwell Miller), in Ancient Israel: From Abraham to the Roman Destruction of the Temple, rev. and exp. ed., ed. Hershel Shanks (New York: Prentice Hall, 1999), 56-58; Provan, Long, and Longman, A Biblical History, 148-168.

* I agree completely with William G. Dever See Dever, Who Were the Early Israelites, 227-228.

* Esteemed scholar Nadav Na’aman See Nadav Na’aman, “The ‘Conquest of Canaan’ in the Book of Joshua and in History,” reproduced in Nadav Na’aman, Canaan in the Second Millennium B.C.E. Collected Essays, Volume 2 (Winona Lake, Ind.: Eisenbrauns, 2005), 347, with many additional references and extensive bibliography.

CHAPTER 6

* The ark is mentioned numerous times in the Hebrew Bible The ark is mentioned in the following passages in the Hebrew Bible: Exodus 25-26, 30-31, 35, 37, 39-40; Leviticus 16; Numbers 3-4, 7, 10, 14; Deuteronomy 10, 31; Joshua 3, 4, 6-8; Judges 20; I Samuel 3-7, 14; II Samuel 6-7, 15; I Kings 2, 3, 6, 8; I Chronicles 6, 13, 15-17, 22, 28; 2 Chronicles 1, 5, 6, 8, 35; Psalm 132; Jeremiah 3. It is also mentioned in II Maccabees 2:4-5 and 2 Esdras 10 in the Apocrypha, and in Revelation 11 in the New Testament.

* the craftsmen Bezalel and Oholiab Bezalel and his qualifications, as well as his helper Oholiab, are described in Exodus 31:1-5.

* The subsequent history of the ark See also the discussion in Ephraim Isaac, “From Israel to Ethiopia: The Journey of the Ark,” in Mysteries of the Bible: From the Garden of Eden to the Shroud of Turin, ed. Molly Dewsnap Meinhardt (Washington, D.C.: Biblical Archaeology Society, 2004), 113-121. For scholarly disputes regarding the biblical account, see the book by eminent scholars J. Maxwell Miller and John Hayes, A History of Ancient Israel and Judah, 2nd ed. (Louisville, Ky.: Westminster John Knox Press, 2006), 127-128 and 130-134, with additional references and bibliography. The book points out some of the conflicts and contradictions concerning the travels and history of the ark as found in the account in the Book of Joshua and the Book of Judges. These include the role of Shiloh itself as a religious center as well as additional problems with the so-called Ark Narrative found in I Samuel 4:1-7:2 and II Samuel 6. These conflicts and contradictions may well render some or all of the biblical account’s early history of the ark moot, but I present it here in brief anyway, since it is the account most usually followed both by scholars and the general populace. Technically, it matters little to us if the biblical account of the early history and travels of the ark is factually accurate, since we are more concerned with what happened to it after the time of Solomon—but we should also keep in mind the problematic nature of this biblical material when considering the ark’s later history.

* The ark remained at Shiloh for an unspecified period How long this length of time lasted depends upon when we believe Joshua and Samuel, respectively, lived. Many biblical scholars, ancient historians, and archaeologists suggest that Joshua was active in the very late 13th and early 12th centuries B.C. (from 1210 B.C. onward) and that Samuel was a child in the mid-11th century B.C. (circa 1050 B.C.). This would place the ark at Shiloh for just over a century at the most. Note, however, that in his book Searching for the Ark of the Covenant: Latest Discoveries and Research (Eugene, Ore.: Harvest House Publishers, 2005), evangelical biblical maximalist Randall Price states that the ark was at Shiloh for more than 300 years. In his table on page 72, Price has an entry which says: “c. 1385-1050 B.C.: The Ark is housed with the Tabernacle at Shiloh,” in between entries which state “c. 1446 B.C.: Bezalel constructs the Ark” and “c. 1050 B.C.: The Ark is captured by the Philistines.” Also note that on page 62 he minimizes this length of time by saying only: “For over 100 years it remained at Shiloh and at other sites until King David restored its central status by installing it at Jerusalem.” Placing the ark at Shiloh for more than 300 years, instead of only 100 years, is one of the few ways that biblical maximalists link a hypothesized 1450 B.C. date for the Exodus with the more definite 1050 B.C. date for the battle against the Philistines during which the ark was taken, and Eli’s two sons were killed.

* the Ark of the Covenant had possibly been removed during the rule of King Manasseh See Menahem Haran, “The Disappearance of the Ark,” Israel Exploration Journal 13 (1963): 46-58. See also the further discussions based on Haran’s suggestions by Leen Ritmeyer, The Quest: Revealing the Temple Mount in Jerusalem (Jerusalem: Carta, 2006), 309-310; Jacob M. Myers, II Chronicles: Translation and Notes, the Anchor Bible (New York: Doubleday and Company, 1965), 196-197; Stuart Munro-Hay and Roderick Grierson, The Ark of the Covenant: The True Story of the Greatest Relic of Antiquity (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1999), 112-114; Price, Searching for the Ark, 81-84.

* the Book of Jeremiah also mentions the ark See the brief discussion of this passage in John Bright, Jeremiah: Introduction, Translation, and Notes, the Anchor Bible (New York: Doubleday and Company, 1965), 26-27; Price, Searching for the Ark, 70-71, 122.

* took from Jerusalem during their attacks on the city While it is unlikely that Nebuchadnezzar also attacked the city in 605 B.C., as suggested in the Book of Daniel, we may note that even here there is no mention of the Ark of the Covenant being taken back to Babylon. The biblical account simply says: “The Lord let King Jehoiakim of Judah fall into his [Nebuchadnezzar’s] power, as well as some of the vessels of the house of God. These he brought to the land of Shinar [Babylon], and placed the vessels in the treasury of his gods” (Daniel 1:2). On Nebuchadnezzar’s attacks on Jerusalem in 598, 597, and 587/586 B.C., see the full discussion in Eric H. Cline, Jerusalem Besieged: From Ancient Canaan to Modern Israel (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004), 50-65, 320-321, footnote 39.

* As Bezalel Porten, professor of Jewish history See Bezalel Porten, “From Jerusalem to Egypt: Did the Ark Stop at Elephantine?” in Mysteries of the Bible: From the Garden of Eden to the Shroud of Turin, ed. Molly Dewsnap Meinhardt (Washington, D.C.: Biblical Archaeology Society, 2004), 128.

* In the Book of II Maccabees See the brief discussion of this passage in Jonathan A. Goldstein, II Maccabees: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary, the Anchor Bible (New York: Doubleday and Company, 1983), 182-183; Price, Searching for the Ark, 123- 124.

* the treasures kept in Solomon’s Temple were plundered See my original publication of this list and my discussion in Jerusalem Besieged, 129, 331, and especially footnote 97. See also Price, Searching for the Ark, 78-81, 168-169.

* the ark is only mentioned in a few extra-biblical sources In addition to those discussed in the main text, there are a few more extra-biblical sources that are late and of dubious quality and therefore will not be considered here; these include the Life of Jeremiah, the Paralipomena of Jeremiah, and the Apocalypse of Baruch. For discussions of these, see Munro-Hay and Grierson, The Ark of the Covenant, 117-120; Price, Searching for the Ark, 124-126.

* The first reference The translation follows Michael L. Rodkinson, trans., The Babylonian Talmud, book 2, vols. 3 and 4 (1918), available at http://www.sacred-texts.com/​jud/t02/shk10.htm (accessed on January 8, 2007). See also the discussion in Price, Searching for the Ark, 142-148.

* The second reference For a translation of the entire debate, see Rodkinson, The Babylonian Talmud, at http://www.sacred-texts.com/​jud/t03/yom10.htm. See also the discussion in Price, Searching for the Ark, 142-148.

* we are told Quotation following http://www.chabad.org/​holidays/3weeks/insights/article.asp?AID=144580 (accessed January 8, 2007), which cites the Mishneh Torah, Laws of the Holy Temple 4:1.

* the Ethiopian Kebra Nagast For a partial translation, see Gerald Hausman, ed., The Kebra Nagast: The Lost Bible of Rastafarian Wisdom and Faith from Ethiopia and Jamaica (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997), 103-119, 144-149. See also the earlier translation by E. A. Wallis Budge, The Queen of Sheba and Her Only Son Menyelek (I) (London: Kegan Paul, 2001); David A. Hubbard, The Literary Sources of the Kebra Nagast, Ph.D. thesis (St. Andrews: University of St. Andrews, 1957); Don Stewart, In Search of the Lost Ark: The Quest for the Ark of the Covenant (Murrieta, Calif.: AusAmerica Publishers, 1992), 136-139, also available online at www.cvc.tv/resources/2_InSearchOfTheLostArk.pdf (accessed on January 12, 2007); Munro-Hay and Grierson, The Ark of the Covenant, 195-291; Price, Searching for the Ark, 42-43, 101-103, 106; Stuart Munro-Hay, The Quest for the Ark of the Covenant: The True History of the Tablets of Moses (London: I. B. Tauris, 2005), passim.

* the house of Abinadab in the city of Kiriath-jearim See Price, Searching for the Ark, 192-194, for a discussion of the “Our Lady Ark of the Covenant Church,” which is built “on top of the hill where tradition locates the house of Abinadab, the priest who tended the Ark.”

* The closest that we get to such excavations On the various explorations and excavations of and near the Temple Mount, see Ritmeyer, The Quest, passim.

* From the early amateur explorations On the early explorers and the underground cisterns and reservoirs, including the famous and ill-fated Parker expedition, led by British Lt. Montague Parker and the Swedish (or Danish) mystic Walter Juvelius in 1911, see Leen Ritmeyer, The Quest, chapters 1 and 4; Neil Asher Silberman, “In Search of Solomon’s Lost Treasures,” Biblical Archaeology Review 6, no. 4 (1980): 30-41; Price, Searching for the Ark, 92-95.

* they do provide circumstantial evidence that Solomon’s Temple was located there Note the finds from the First (and Second) Temple Period that have been discovered by the team led by Gabriel Barkai and Tzachi Zweig in sifting through the debris dumped by the Islamic Waqf after its illegal digging on the Temple Mount. See Nadav Shragai, “First Temple Artifacts Found in Dirt Removed from Temple Mount,” Ha’aretz, October 19, 2006, available at http://www.haaretz.com/​hasen/spages/776922.html (accessed on January 9, 2007).

* claims that can be dismissed outright See Cline, Jerusalem Besieged, chapter 5, with full references and bibliography.

* Leen Ritmeyer, an architect See the discussion in Ritmeyer, The Quest, 241-277, especially 268-277. See also the earlier Ritmeyer, “The Ark of the Covenant: Where It Stood in Solomon’s Temple,” Biblical Archaeology Review 22, no. 1 (1996): 46-55, 70-72, and the debates between Ritmeyer, Asher Kaufman, and David Jacobson over the precise location of the Temple itself upon the Temple Mount in Biblical Archaeology Review 9, no. 2 (1983): 40-59; 18, no. 2 (1992): 24-45, 64-65; 25, no. 4 (1999): 41-53, 62-64; 25, no. 5 (1999): 54-63; 26, no. 2 (2000): 52-59.

* resembles other such containers found in the ancient Near East On the chest found in King Tut’s tomb, see Munro-Hay and Grierson, The Ark of the Covenant, 294-297; Randall Price, The Stones Cry Out: What Archaeology Reveals about the Truth of the Bible (Eugene, Ore.: Harvest House Publishers, 1997), 206, figure 46; Graham Hancock, The Sign and the Seal: A Quest for the Lost Ark of the Covenant (New York: Crown Publishers, 1993), 288-289, figure 56; Price, Searching for the Ark, 48-49.

* the ark was a transmitter See Erich von Däniken, Chariots of the Gods (New York: Bantam Books, 1969), 40-41; Stewart, In Search of the Lost Ark, 36-38, 42; Price, Searching for the Ark, 25-26, 35, 38-43.

* the ark is presently in a secret chamber deep within the Temple Mount See full arguments and discussion in Price, Searching for the Ark, 138-151. Just before this book went to press, Professor Eilat Mazar, who is currently excavating a structure that she identifies as David’s palace, was asked by a reader of the Jerusalem Post, “Is it true that the Ark of the Covenant is buried under the mount?” Mazar replied: “There is a very high probability that the most important ancient remains are inside the compound in the massive underground halls. This includes the Ark of the Covenant.” See “Q and A on the Temple Mount with Dr. Eilat Mazar,” Jerusalem Post, January 14, 2007, also available online at http://www.jpost.com/​servlet/Satellite?cid=1170359857094​andpagename=JPost/JPArticle​/ShowFull (accessed January 14, 2007).

* the Temple Institute, an ultra-Orthodox Jewish group See the Temple Institute’s Web site, www.templeinstitute.org, specifically the statements quoted from www.templeinstitute.org/ark_of_the_covenant.htm (both accessed on January 12, 2007). See also Stewart, In Search of the Lost Ark, 11-12, 147-148.

* digs have been conducted under the Temple Mount in search of the ark See Ritmeyer, The Quest, 311. See also the Web page of the Temple Institute, www.templeinstitute.org/ark_of_the_covenant.htm, which notes, “An attempt was made some few years ago to excavate towards the direction of this chamber. This resulted in widespread Moslem unrest and rioting” (accessed on January 12, 2007). For a more complete version of the stories, see Stewart, In Search of the Lost Ark, 11-12, 147-148, available at www.cvc.tv/resources/2_InSearchOfTheLostArk.pdf (accessed on January 12, 2007); see also Price, Searching for the Ark, 151-163 and 184-188, who reiterates the stories in detail and includes quotations from personal interviews conducted with several rabbis in Jerusalem, some of whom were reportedly involved in the secret excavations.

* According to the Wyatt Archaeological Research Web site See www.wyattmuseum.com/ark-of-the-covenant-02.htm and linked pages (all page accessed on January 12, 2007). See also the lengthy discussion and critique in Price, Searching for the Ark, 178-184.

* Menahem Haran, a respected biblical scholar See again Haran, “The Disappearance of the Ark,” 46-58, and the further discussions by Ritmeyer, The Quest, 309-310; Myers, II Chronicles, 196-197; Munro-Hay and Grierson, The Ark of the Covenant, 112-114; Price, Searching for the Ark, 81-84.

* Graham Hancock, a former journalist who used to write for the London Economist See Hancock, The Sign and the Seal; Isaac, “From Israel to Ethiopia,” 113-121; Porten, “From Jerusalem to Egypt,” 123-147; Stewart, In Search of the Lost Ark; Price, Searching for the Ark, 101-115, 167-177. See also the effective rebuttal to Hancock by Munro-Hay in his book The Quest for the Ark.

* One proponent, however, was Bob Cornuke See Robert Cornuke and David Halbrook, In Search of the Lost Ark of the Covenant (Nashville, Tenn.: Broadman and Holman Publishers, 2002); see also http://www.baseinstitute.org/​covenant.html and linked pages (accessed on January 17, 2007). See also Price, Searching for the Ark, 101-115, 167-177, where he critiques both Hancock and Cornuke.

* an article in the Los Angeles Times See Michael A. Hiltzik, “Does Trail to Ark of Covenant End Behind Axum Curtain?” Los Angeles Times, June 9, 1992; see also Stewart, In Search of the Lost Ark, 140-141; Price, Searching for the Ark, 176-177. See Edward Ullendorff’s books on Ethiopia, including The Ethiopians: An Introduction to Country and People (London: Oxford University Press, 1965); Ethiopia and the Bible (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968); The Two Zions: Reminiscences of Jerusalem and Ethiopia (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988).

* Tom Crotser, founder of the Institute for Restoring Ancient History See Hershel Shanks, “Tom Crotser Has Found the Ark of the Covenant—Or Has He?” Biblical Archaeology Review 9, no. 3 (1983), 66-69; Anis A. Shorrosh, The Exciting Discovery of the Ark of the Covenant (Spanish Fort, Ala.: Anis Shorrosh Evangelsitic Association, 1984), 19-32. See also the earlier publications Antonia F. Futterer, Palestine Speaks (Los Angeles: A. F. Futterer, 1931), 536-556; Stewart, In Search of the Lost Ark, 127-133. Finally, see discussion in Vendyl Jones, A Door of Hope: My Search for the Treasures of the Copper Scroll (Springdale, Ark.: Lightcatcher Books, 2005), 159-163.

* Vendyl Jones, a longtime enthusiast of biblical archaeology from Texas See Jones, A Door of Hope, 74-75, 171-181, 187-207; see also the Web site and linked pages of the Vendyl Jones Research Institute: http://www.vendyljones.org.il/ (accessed on January 11, 2007); Stewart, In Search of the Lost Ark, 177-178. On the quotation for when he was to find the ark, see “Kabbalist Blesses Jones: Now’s the Time to Find Holy Lost Ark,” Arutz Sheva, May 20, 2005, available at http://www.israelnationalnews.com/​news.php3?id=82226 (accessed on January 11, 2007); for the correction on the home Web page of the Vendyl Jones Research Institute, see http://www.vendyljones.org.il/ (accessed on January 11, 2007). On the Copper Scroll, see P. Kyle McCarter, “The Mysterious Copper Scroll: Clues to Hidden Temple Treasure?” Bible Review 8 (1992): 34-41, 63-64.

* Andis Kaulins, a German lawyer with a law degree from Stanford University See the links from Kaulins’s Web site http://www.lexiline.com/​lexiline/civilization.htm and specifically the pages found at http://www.lexiline.com/​lexiline/lexi000.htm (accessed on January 11, 2007). On the chest in King Tut’s tomb, see again the discussions in Price, The Stones Cry Out, 206, figure 46; Hancock, The Sign and the Seal, 288-289, figure 56; Munro-Hay and Grierson, The Ark of the Covenant, 294-297; Price, Searching for the Ark, 48-49.

* let alone captured it See discussion in Eric H. Cline, Jerusalem Besieged, 39-41, with full references and bibliography.

* Nevertheless, Michael S. Sanders See Jon Ungoed-Thomas, “Is Lost Ark Buried in Terrorist Camp?” Sunday Times, September 6, 1998. See also McGraw, “Thou Shalt Search,” March 3, 2001; Peter Sheridan, “Finder of the Lost Ark … and the Garden of Eden, Sodom and Gomorrah, the Tower of Babel and the 10 Commandments,” Daily Express, March 15, 2001. Note, however, that Sanders apparently does not equate Shishak with Shoshenq, as most mainstream biblical archaeologists and Egyptologists do; see his Web site, http://www.biblemysteries.com, with relevant linked pages (accessed on January 12, 2007). For a lengthy discussion about Shishak and the possibility that he took the Ark of the Covenant, see Price, Searching for the Ark, 78-81; see also 95-98 for a discussion, critique, and ultimately a debunking of Sanders’s theory.

* Herbert G. May, professor of Old Testament language and literature See Herbert G. May, “The Ark—A Miniature Temple,” American Journal of Semitic Languages and Literatures 52, no. 4 (1936): 220; see also Price, Searching for the Ark, 81, who cites and quotes May’s statement. Note that May’s earliest suggested date of 621 B.C. for the possible disappearance of the ark has been followed by enthusiasts such as Ron Wyatt, who (apparently) claims to have found this date himself: http://www.wyattmuseum.com/​ark-mary-nell-special-04.htm (accessed January 14, 2007).

* Nebuchadnezzar and the Neo-Babylonians See Price, Searching for the Ark, 84-90, for an account by someone who disagrees with this possibility.

* The biblical minimalists For a quick entrée into the world of the biblical minimalists, see Hershel Shanks, “The Biblical Minimalists: Expunging Ancient Israel’s Past,” Bible Review 13, no. 3 (1997): 32-39, 50-52; Hershel Shanks, “Face to Face: Biblical Minimalists Meet Their Challengers,” Biblical Archaeology Review 23, no. 4 (1997): 26-42, 66. On the Tel Dan inscription, see William M. Schniedewind, “Tel Dan Stela: New Light on Aramaic and Jehu’s Revolt,” Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research 302 (1996): 75-90, with full references. On David and Solomon, see Baruch Halpern, David’s Secret Demons: Messiah, Murderer, Traitor, King (Grand Rapids, Mich.: William B. Eerdmans Publishing, 2001); Jonathan Kirsch, King David: The Real Life of the Man Who Ruled Israel (New York: Ballantine Books, 2001); Steven L. McKenzie, King David: A Biography (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000); Israel Finkelstein and Neil A. Silberman, David and Solomon: In Search of the Bible’s Sacred Kings and the Roots of the Western Tradition (New York: Free Press, 2006).

CHAPTER 7

* The first time the fighting occurred was during the reign of Menahem See discussion, with additional references, in J. Maxwell Miller and John Hayes, A History of Ancient Israel and Judah, 2nd ed. (Louisville, Ky.: Westminster John Knox Press, 2006), 361, 376-377; K. Lawson Younger, Jr., “The Deportations of the Israelites,” Journal of Biblical Literature 117, no. 2 (1998): 201-202; Bob Becking, The Fall of Samaria: A Historical and Archaeological Study (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1992), 1-6.

* Tiglath-pileser III attacked Israel during the reign of Pekah See discussion, with additional references, in Miller and Hayes, A History of Ancient Israel, 365, 370, 378-383; Younger, “The Deportations of the Israelites,” 202; Becking, The Fall of Samaria, 6-13.

* The account in I Chronicles provides more information See Younger, “The Deportations of the Israelites,” 207 and footnotes 29-31. See also Jacob M. Myers, I Chronicles: Introduction, Translation and Notes, the Anchor Bible (New York: Doubleday and Company, 1965), 34, 38-39.

* He apparently attacked the northern kingdom of Israel twice See discussion, with additional references, in Miller and Hayes, A History of Ancient Israel, 385-387.

* To replace the deportees For a brief series of archaeological and historical clues for the presence of the Israelites in Samaria after the Neo-Assyrian resettlement, see Israel Finkelstein and Neil A. Silberman, The Bible Unearthed: Archaeology’s New Vision of Ancient Israel and the Origin of Its Sacred Texts (New York: Free Press, 2001), 220-221; Nadav Na’aman, “Population Changes in Palestine Following Assyrian Deportation,” reproduced in Nadav Na’aman, Ancient Israel and Its Neighbors: Interaction and Counteraction, Collected Essays, Volume 1 (Winona Lake, Ind.: Eisenbrauns, 2005), 204-208, with further references and bibliography. For the origins of these resettled peoples, see these references and K. Lawson Younger, Jr., “Recent Study on Sargon II, King of Assyria: Implications for Biblical Study,” in Mesopotamia and the Bible: Comparative Explorations, eds. Mark W. Chavalas and K. Lawson Younger, Jr. (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 2002), 301-312; K. Lawson Younger, Jr., “The Repopulation of Samaria (2 Kings 17:24, 27-31) in Light of Recent Study,” in The Future of Biblical Archaeology: Reassessing Methodologies and Assumptions, eds. James K. Hoffmeier and Alan Millard (Grand Rapids, Mich.: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2004), 254-280; Becking, The Fall of Samaria, 95-104.

* Tiglath-pileser III’s own inscriptions Translations following James B. Pritchard, ed., Ancient Near Eastern Texts Relating to the Old Testament, 3rd ed. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969), 283-284. See also Hayim Tadmor, The Inscriptions of Tiglath-pileser III King of Assyria: Critical Edition, with Introductions, Translations and Commentary (Jerusalem: Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities, 1994), 68-69, 106-107, 141; Younger, “The Deportations of the Israelites,” 202-203, 206-207; Miller and Hayes, A History of Ancient Israel, 370, 382-383.

* Tiglath-pileser claimed that he spared only the city of Samaria See Finkelstein and Silberman, The Bible Unearthed, 215-216; Younger, “The Deportations of the Israelites,” 202-203, 206-207, 210-211, with additional references; Hayim Tadmor, The Inscriptions of Tiglathpileser III King of Assyria, 81-83, 188-189, 280-281; Na’aman, “Population Changes in Palestine,” 201-202, with full references; Nadav Na’aman, “Tiglath-pileser III’s Campaigns Against Tyre and Israel (734-732 BCE),” reproduced in Nadav Na’aman, Ancient Israel and Its Neighbors: Interaction and Counteraction. Collected Essays, Volume 1 (Winona Lake, Ind.: Eisenbrauns, 2005), 60-63, with full references; Younger, “Recent Study on Sargon II,” 294-295; Becking, The Fall of Samaria, 1-20.

* biblical scholars consider it more likely See Younger, “The Deportations of the Israelites,” 207 and footnote 31; Mordechai Cogan and Hayim Tadmor, II Kings: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary, the Anchor Bible (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1988), 197.

* we have been left with no inscriptions of Shalmaneser V See Miller and Hayes, A History of Ancient Israel, 384, with discussion; Younger, “The Deportations of the Israelites,” 211, 214-215.

* Fortunately, we do have the Babylonian Chronicles Translations following Miller and Hayes, A History of Ancient Israel, 384, with discussion; see also Younger, “The Deportations of the Israelites,” 211, 214-215; Nadav Na’aman, “The Historical Background to the Conquest of Samaria (720 BCE),” reproduced in Nadav Na’aman, Ancient Israel and Its Neighbors: Interaction and Counteraction. Collected Essays, Volume 1 (Winona Lake, Ind.: Eisenbrauns, 2005), 79; K. Lawson Younger, Jr., “The Fall of Samaria in Light of Recent Research,” Catholic Biblical Quarterly 61, no. 3 (1999): 464-467; Becking, The Fall of Samaria, 22-25; Cogan and Tadmor, II Kings: A New Translation, 199.

* At Sargon’s palace in Khorsabad Translation following Miller and Hayes, A History of Ancient Israel, 386, text 10 and discussion, with further references and bibliography, on pages 387-388; see also Na’aman, “Population Changes in Palestine,” 203; Younger, “The Deportations of the Israelites,” 215-219. On where the “distant Arabs” came from, see discussion in Nadav Na’aman and Ran Zadok, “Sargon II’s Deportations to Israel and Philistia (716-708 BCE),” Journal of Cuneiform Studies 40 (1988) 36-46; Younger, “The Deportations of the Israelites,” 226-227. On the possible depictions of the Samarians, see Norma Franklin, “The Room V Reliefs at Dur-Sharrukin and Sargon II’s Western Campaign,” Tel Aviv 21 (1994): 255-275; Younger, “The Fall of Samaria,” 475-476.

* In eight separate inscriptions See discussion in Miller and Hayes, A History of Ancient Israel, 388-389; Younger, “The Deportations of the Israelites,” 215-219; see also Younger, “Recent Study on Sargon II,” 290-295; Younger, “The Fall of Samaria,” 468-473; Bob Becking, The Fall of Samaria: An Historical and Archaeological Study (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1992), 25-33.

* many possible suggestions have been put forward For a good summary and discussion of all the suggestions, see Younger, “The Fall of Samaria,” 461-482; Becking, The Fall of Samaria, 21.

* The first suggests that while the biblical account On this first possibility, see Miller and Hayes, A History of Ancient Israel, 384-388. See also the discussion in Finkelstein and Silberman, The Bible Unearthed, 217-220; Younger, “The Deportations of the Israelites,” 214-215; Younger, “Recent Study on Sargon II,” 289-290; Younger, “The Fall of Samaria,” 482; Becking, The Fall of Samaria, 34-45.

* Eminent scholars Mordechai Cogan and Hayim Tadmor See Cogan and Tadmor, II Kings: A New Translation, 197, 199-210.

* It posits See the suggestion by Gershon Galil, “The Last Years of the Kingdom of Israel and the Fall of Samaria,” Catholic Biblical Quarterly 57, no. 1 (1995): 52-65; countered by Younger, “The Fall of Samaria,” 479.

* The third hypothesis gives the Bible the most credit See Na’aman, “The Historical Background,” 76-93. Na’aman also explains away the brief mention in the Babylonian Chronicle that Shalmaneser besieged Samaria and argues (on page 88) that the passage in II Kings 18:9-11 (which says that “King Shalmaneser of Assyria came up against Samaria, besieged it, and at the end of three years took it”) is a mistake made by a later redactor of the biblical text trying to make sense of the earlier passage in II Kings 17:1-6. This is a suggestion that has been made previously by other scholars as well.

* an elegant solution to a complex problem Alert readers will note that in my 2004 book, Jerusalem Besieged: From Ancient Canaan to Modern Israel (Ann Arbor, Mich.: University of Michigan Press, 2004), 44-45, I followed the standard line that Shalmaneser V laid siege to Samaria, conquered it after three years, and then deported the conquered population. I would now consider revising my earlier statement to conform with Na’aman’s suggestion, despite Galil’s and Younger’s arguments against it; see Galil, “The Last Years of the Kingdom,” 52-65; Younger, “The Fall of Samaria,” 464-467.

* the deported members of the Ten Tribes were sent off into exile On the location of these specific places, see discussions in Miller and Hayes, A History of Ancient Israel, 389; Finkelstein and Silberman, The Bible Unearthed, 220; Na’aman, “Population Changes in Palestine,” 203, with further references and bibliography; Younger, “The Deportations of the Israelites,” 221-224; Younger, “Recent Study on Sargon II,” 294-296; K. Lawson Younger, Jr., “ ‘Give Us Our Daily Bread’: Everyday Life for the Israelite Deportees,” in Life and Culture in the Ancient Near East, eds. Richard E. Averbeck, Mark W. Chavalas, David B. Weisberg (Bethesda, Md.: CDL Press, 2003), 269-288; K. Lawson Younger, Jr., “Israelites in Exile: Their Names Appear at All Levels of Assyrian Society,” Biblical Archaeology Review 29, no. 6 (2003): 36-45, 65-66; Becking, The Fall of Samaria, 61-93; Rivka Gonen, To the Ends of the Earth: The Quest For the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel (North Bergen, N.J.: Book-Mart Press, 2002), 20-23; Cogan and Tadmor, II Kings: A New Translation, 197.

* The Prophet Isaiah was active On the dates, see the discussion in Bruce M. Metzger and Roland E. Murphy, eds., New Oxford Annotated Bible, with the Apocryphal/Deuterocanonical Books (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 866OT, 960OT, 1057OT.

* One of these is found in the Book of Tobit On the dates, see the discussion in the New Oxford Annotated Bible, pages 1AP and 3AP.

* they may have identified some of the deported Samarians in Neo-Assyrian records See Younger, “The Deportations of the Israelites,” 219-220, with full references and additional bibliography; Younger, “Recent Study on Sargon II,” 296-301; Younger, “ ‘Give Us Our Daily Bread,’ ” 269-288. For earlier editions, see Stephanie Dalley, “Foreign Chariotry and Cavalry in the Armies of Tiglath-pileser III and Sargon II,” Iraq 47 (1985): 31-48; I. Eph’al, “The Samarian(s) in the Assyrian Sources,” in Ah, Assyria …: Studies in Assyrian History and Ancient Near Eastern Historiography Presented to Hayim Tadmor, ed. Mordechai Cogan and Israel Eph’al (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1991), 36-45.

* The other passage within the Apocrypha See discussion in the New Oxford Annotated Bible, page 300AP.

* the excavations at the site of Samaria itself See discussion in Miller and Hayes, A History of Ancient Israel, 302-303; see also earlier books including G. A. Reisner, C. S. Fisher, and D. G. Lyon, Harvard Excavations At Samaria, 1908-1910 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1924); J. W. Crowfoot, K. M. Kenyon, and E. L. Sukenik, The Buildings at Samaria (Samaria-Sebaste 1) (London: Palestine Exploration Fund, 1942). See also Ron E. Tappy, The Archaeology of Israelite Samaria, I: Early Iron Age through the Ninth Century BCE (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1992); Ron E. Tappy, The Archaeology of Israelite Samaria, II: The Eighth Century BCE (Winona Lake, Ind.: Eisenbrauns, 2001); Norma Franklin, “Samaria: From the Bedrock to the Omride Palace,” Levant 36 (2004): 189-202; Na’aman, “The Historical Background,” 78; Nahman Avigad, “Samaria,” in The New Encyclopedia of Archaeological Excavations in the Holy Land, vol. 4, eds. Ephraim Stern, Ayelet Lewinson-Gilboa, and Joseph Aviram (Jerusalem: Carta, 1993), 1300-1310; Ron E. Tappy, “Samaria,” in The Oxford Encyclopedia of Archaeology in the Near East, vol. 4, ed. Eric M. Meyers (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 463-467; Younger, “The Fall of Samaria,” 473-475.

* Even though there is clear evidence of Neo-Assyrian occupation at the site See Tappy, “Samaria,” 465; Tappy, The Archaeology of Israelite Samaria, II; Daniel Master, review of Ron E. Tappy, The Archaeology of Israelite Samaria, in Journal of Near Eastern Studies 63, no. 2 (2004): 136-138.

* Megiddo and other major sites that were occupied by the Neo-Assyrians See Magen Broshi and Israel Finkelstein, “The Populations of Palestine in Iron Age II,” Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research 287 (1992): 55; Younger, “The Deportations of the Israelites,” 212-214.

* the city of Megiddo IVA See most recently and completely Jennifer Peersman, “Assyrian Magiddu: The Town Planning of Stratum III,” in Megiddo III: The 1992-96 Seasons, eds. Israel Finkelstein, David Ussishkin, and Baruch Halpern (Tel Aviv: Tel Aviv University, 2000), 524-534; also Eric H. Cline, The Battles of Armageddon: Megiddo and the Jezreel Valley from the Bronze Age to the Nuclear Age (Ann Arbor, Mich.: University of Michigan Press, 2000), 89, with further references and bibliography; Younger, “The Deportations of the Israelites,” 213 and note 43, with further bibliography and references.

* Israel was not decimated by the Neo-Assyrians See Broshi and Finkelstein, “The Populations of Palestine,” 47-60; Finkelstein and Silberman, The Bible Unearthed, 221-222; see also Na’aman, “Population Changes in Palestine,” 200-219; Younger, “The Deportations of the Israelites,” 211, 213-214.

* the excavations that have been carried out in the city of Jerusalem itself See Magen Broshi, “The Expansion of Jerusalem in the Reigns of Hezekiah and Manasseh,” Israel Exploration Journal 24 (1974): 21-26; Broshi and Finkelstein, “The Populations of Palestine,” 47-60; Dan Bahat, “Was Jerusalem Really That Large?” in Biblical Archaeology Today, 1990: Proceedings of the Second International Congress on Biblical Archaeology, Jerusalem, June-July 1990, eds. Avraham Biran and Joseph Aviram (Jerusalem: Israel Exploration Society, 1993), 581-584; Jane M. Cahill, “Jerusalem at the Time of the United Monarchy: The Archaeological Evidence,” in Jerusalem in Bible and Archaeology: The First Temple Period, eds. Andrew G. Vaughn and Ann E. Killebrew (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2003), 70-71; Hillel Geva, “Western Jerusalem at the End of the First Temple Period in Light of the Excavations in the Jewish Quarter,” in Jerusalem in Bible and Archaeology: The First Temple Period, eds. Andrew G. Vaughn and Ann E. Killebrew (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2003), 183-208; Ann E. Killebrew, “Biblical Jerusalem: An Archaeological Assessment,” in Jerusalem in Bible and Archaeology: The First Temple Period, eds. Andrew G. Vaughn and Ann E. Killebrew (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2003), 336-337; Roni Reich and Eli Shukron, “The Urban Development of Jerusalem in the Late Eighth Century B.C.E.,” in Jerusalem in Bible and Archaeology: The First Temple Period, eds. Andrew G. Vaughn and Ann E. Killebrew (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2003), 209-218; Israel Finkelstein, “The Rise of Jerusalem and Judah: The Missing Link,” in Jerusalem in Bible and Archaeology: The First Temple Period, eds. Andrew G. Vaughn and Ann E. Killebrew (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2003), 81-101. Quotations are from Finkelstein and Silberman, The Bible Unearthed, 243-245.

* with the welcome exception of Rivka Gonen See Gonen, To the Ends of the Earth; see also Tudor Parfitt, The Lost Tribes of Israel: The History of a Myth (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2002). For an article in which archaeologists and biblical scholars respond as reviewers, see Hershel Shanks, Rivka Gonen, Ronald S. Hendel, and Hillel Halkin, “The Tribe of Manasseh: Found in India?” in Mysteries of the Bible: From the Garden of Eden to the Shroud of Turin, ed. Molly Dewsnap Meinhardt (Washington, D.C.: Biblical Archaeology Society, 2004), 101-109.

* Josephus is also one of the first authors Translation following William Whiston, The New Complete Works of Josephus, rev. ed. (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Kregel Publications, 1999), 368.

* The tradition continued thereafter See Gonen, To the Ends of the Earth, 31-37; see also Parfitt, The Lost Tribes, 4-6.

* the descendants of the Ten Tribes can be found A sample of books that have been published in the fairly recent past include David A. Law, From Samaria to Samarkand: The Ten Lost Tribes of Israel (Lanham: University Press of America, 1992); R. Clayton Brough, The Lost Tribes: History, Doctrine, Prophecies and Theories about Israel’s Lost Ten Tribes (Bountiful, Utah: Horizon Publishers, 1999); Hillel Halkin, Across the Sabbath River: In Search of a Lost Tribe of Israel (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2002); Magdel le Roux, The Lemba: A Lost Tribe of Israel in Southern Africa? (Unisa, South Africa: Unisa Press, 2003); Joshua M. Benjamin, The Mystery of Israel’s Ten Lost Tribes and the Legend of Jesus in India (New Delhi: Mosaic Books, 2001); Simcha Shtull-Trauring, ed., Letters From Beyond the Sambatyon: The Myth of the Ten Lost Tribes (New York: Maxima New Media, 1997); Charles Even, The Lost Tribes of Israel or the First of the Red Men (New York: Arno Press, 1977); Tudor Parfitt, The Thirteenth Gate: Travels Among the Lost Tribes of Israel (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1987); Tudor Parfitt, Journey to the Vanished City: The Search for a Lost Tribe of Israel (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1992); Tudor Parfitt and Yulia Egorova, Genetics, Mass Media and Identity: A Case Study of the Genetic Research on the Lemba and Bene Israel (London: Routledge, 2006).

* a corruption of two Hebrew words Gonen, To the Ends of the Earth, 30.

* I … approached Qarqa Translation following Miller and Hayes, A History of Ancient Israel, 293 (text 3) and see also discussion, with further references and bibliography, on pages 292, 308, 310; see also A. K. Grayson, Assyrian Rulers of the Early First Millennium BC, II (858-745 BC), RIMA 3 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996); Moshe Elat, “The Campaigns of Shalmaneser III Against Aram and Israel,” Israel Exploration Journal 25 (1975): 25-35.

* Tribute of Iaua [Jehu] Translation following Miller and Hayes, A History of Ancient Israel, 307 (text 5) and see also discussion on pages 292, 330-331. See also Grayson, Assyrian Rulers.

* This deportation and repopulation See Finkelstein and Silberman, The Bible Unearthed, 215; see also discussion in Na’aman and Zadok, “Sargon II’s Deportations,” 36-46; Younger, “The Deportations of the Israelites,” 219-220, 224-226; Bustenay Oded, Mass Deportations and Deportees in the Neo-Assyrian Empire (Wiesbaden: Reichert, 1979); Miller and Hayes, A History of Ancient Israel, 389.

* several different variations of deportation and repopulation tactics Na’aman, “Population Changes in Palestine,” 214. See also Younger, “The Deportations of the Israelites,” 214, 224-226, who agrees that the deportations of Tiglath-pileser III were “one-way” and those of Sargon II were “two-way”—or, as Younger puts it, “unidirectional” and “bidirectional”; Younger, “Recent Study on Sargon II,” 294, 301; Becking, The Fall of Samaria, 61; Oded, Mass Deportations and Deportees, 28-30.

* The Neo-Assyrians have a well-deserved reputation for cruelty See the Neo-Assyrian treatment of the peoples of Lachish, in southern Judah, when they captured it in 701 B.C.: Erika Bleibtreu, “Five Ways to Conquer a City,” Biblical Archaeology Review 16, no. 3 (1990): 37-44; Erika Bleibtreu, “Grisly Assyrian Record of Torture and Death,” Biblical Archaeology Review 17, no. 1 (1991): 52-61, 75.

* whose descendants may still live in Israel today See Peidon Shen, et al., “Reconstruction of Patrilineages and Matrilineages of Samaritans and Other Israeli Populations From U-Chromosome and Mitochondrial DNA Sequence Variation,” Human Mutation 24 (2004): 248-260.

* Thus, I believe that the archaeological and textual evidence indicates See Finkelstein and Silberman, The Bible Unearthed, 243-245; also Miller and Hayes, A History of Ancient Israel, 390; Hershel Shanks, “Lost and Found: Evidence of Tribes Discovered Close to Home,” in Mysteries of the Bible: From the Garden of Eden to the Shroud of Turin, ed. Molly Dewsnap Meinhardt (Washington, D.C.: Biblical Archaeology Society, 2004), 97-100.

* only a portion of the population was exiled On the “Myth of the Empty Land” situation in Judah after 586 B.C., see the discussions by Hans M. Barstad, The Myth of the Empty Land (Oslo: Scandinavian University Press, 1996); Hans M. Barstad, “After the ‘Myth of the Empty Land’: Major Challenges in the Study of Neo-Babylonian Judah,” in Judah and the Judeans in the Neo-Babylonian Period, eds. Oded Lipschits and Joseph Blenkinsopp (Winona Lake, Ind.: Eisenbrauns, 2003), 3-20; Oded Lipschits, “Demographic Changes in Judah between the Seventh and the Fifth Centuries B.C.E.,” in Judah and the Judeans in the Neo-Babylonian Period, eds. Oded Lipschits and Joseph Blenkinsopp (Winona Lake, Ind.: Eisenbrauns, 2003), 323-376; Finkelstein and Silberman, The Bible Unearthed, 305-308; see also Cline, Jerusalem Besieged, 64-65.

* As for Hezekiah, the Judaean Translation following Miller and Hayes, A History of Ancient Israel, 418-419 (text 12). On Sennacherib’s deportations in 701 B.C., see Na’aman, “Population Changes in Palestine,” 209-211, among many other possible references.

* probably a gross exaggeration For a brief discussion of the accuracy of the reported number, including one suggestion that the number should be amended to read 2,150 people deported, rather than 200,150, see Broshi and Finkelstein, “The Populations of Palestine,” 54-55. Na’aman suggests in “Population Changes in Palestine,” in footnote 5 on page 211: “It is hardly conceivable that thousands of Judahites were deported to Nineveh (or other major Assyrian cities), in light of the absence of Hebrew names in the onomastica. Instead, we may assume that the people of Judah were transferred to some remote area(s), rather than the royal cities of Assyria.”

EPILOGUE

* the modern Greek poet Constantine Cavafy Translation follows Rae Dalven, trans., The Complete Poems of Cavafy (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1976), 36-37.

* Hershel Shanks, the editor and publisher of Biblical Archaeology Review Hershel Shanks, “Nor Is It Necessarily Not So,” Ha’aretz, November 5, 1999.

* Robert Eisenman, professor of biblical archaeology Quoted in Peter Sheridan, “Finder of the Lost Ark … and the Garden of Eden, Sodom and Gomorrah, the Tower of Babel and the 10 Commandments,” Daily Express, March 15, 2001.

* Randall Younker, director of the Institute of Archaeology See Randall W. Younker, “Integrating Faith, the Bible, and Archaeology: A Review of the ‘Andrews University Way’ of Doing Archaeology,” in The Future of Biblical Archaeology: Reassessing Methodologies and Assumptions, eds. James K. Hoffmeier and Alan Millard (Grand Rapids, Mich.: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2004), 43-52.

AFTERWORD

* Not to mention competing claims For good examples of the response by scholars to the “Lost Tomb of Jesus” claim, see http://www.bib-arch.org/​scholars-study/jesus-tomb-02.asp and http://ntweblog.blogspot.com/2007/03/jesus-​family-tomb-website-errors-and.html. On the “nails from Jesus’ cross” claim, see http://www.washingtonpost.com/​national/religion/archaeologist-​thinks-he-might-have-found-nails-from-jesuss-cross/2011/04/12/AFKrMDlD_story.html, addressed by http://robertcargill.com​/2011/04/12/no-​simcha-​you-didnt-find-the-nails-of-the-cross-of-christ-a-week-before-easter/ and http://www.bibleinterp.com/​articles/simcha358005.shtml, with response by Jacobovici at http://jamestabor.com/wp-​content/uploads/2011/06/The-Nails-of-the-Cross_June22.pdf.On the “Copper Scroll” claims, see http://www.copper-​scroll-project.com/; addressed by Bob Cargill at http://www.bibleinterp.com/​opeds/copper.shtml and http://robertcargill.com​/2009/09/07/now-​busted-​the-cover-up-begins-jimmy-barfield-and-the-copper-scroll-project/. On the competing Atlantis claims, see http://www.msnbc.msn.com/​id/42072469/ns/technology_and_science-​science/t/lost-city-atlantis-believed-found-spain/#.TuKAkrIk67s and http://discoveryofatlantis.com/. All Web sites listed here, and in the following notes, were last accessed on, and functional as of, January 2, 2012.

* any story broadcast by the media See in particular the blogs maintained by Bob Cargill (http://robertcargill.com/), Jim West (http://zwingliusredivivus.wordpress.com/), Chris Heard (http://drchris.me/higgaion/), and James McGrath (http://www.patheos.com/​blogs/exploringourmatrix/). A complete list of “biblioblogs” can be found at http://biblioblogtop50.wordpress.com/biblioblogs/.

* the codices were almost certainly fake See initial reports at http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/look-​out/could-lead-codices-prove-major-discovery-christian-history-20110330-083631-867.html and http://www.dailymail.co.uk/​news/article-​1372741/Hidden-cave-First-portrait-Jesus-1-70-ancient-books.html; both last accessed on December 9, 2011. Rebuttals include http://rogueclassicism.com​/2011/03/30/lead-​codices-​silliness/, and see also http://ntweblog.blogspot.com/2011/04/lead-​codices-fake.html, which has links to additional rebuttals.

* maintained by Mark Elliott and Patricia Landy See, for instance, the article by Bob Cargill entitled “Forget about Noah’s Ark; There Was No Worldwide Flood,” at http://www.bibleinterp.com/​articles/flood357903.shtml. For the Web site, go to http://www.bibleinterp.com/​index.shtml. For the archive of articles specifically on archaeology, see: http://www.bibleinterp.com/​articles/commentary/comment_Archaeology.shtml. There are also archives for the articles on biblical interpretation, the Dead Sea Scrolls, and the Old Testament.

* reposted on Archaeology magazine’s Web site See, i.e., http://www.boston.com/​news/globe/ideas/​articles/2007/09/30/​raiders_of_the_faux_ark/ and http://www.archaeology.org/​online/features/fauxark/.

* it is not always easy to tell the two apart The material here, and in the following paragraphs, is reproduced by permission of the Boston Globe.

* the Duke conference The volume from the Duke conference is now available as Archaeology, Bible, Politics, and the Media: Proceedings of the Duke University Conference, April 23-24, 2009, Eric M. Meyers and Carol Meyers, eds. (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2012); my contribution is entitled: “Fabulous Finds or Fantastic Forgeries: The Distortion of Archaeology by the Media and Pseudo-archaeologists and What We Can Do About It.” An early version of that article, published by agreement with the editors, appeared on the Bible and Interpretation Web site in October 2009, in order to get the information out as quickly as possible. It is available as: “The Distortion of Archaeology and What We Can Do About It: A Brief Note on Progress Made and Yet to Be Made;” http://www.bibleinterp.com/​articles/duke_357921.shtml. Some of the material presented here is also in the Web site and conference volume articles.

* claims reported by the media http://www.aolnews.com​/​2010/05/02/scholarly-​squad-​debunks-biblical-discoveries/.

* clarify his statements See my blog entry, with subsequent comments and responses, originally posted at http://asorblog.org/?p=84 and also available at http://web.archive.org/​web/20110718175741/http://asorblog.org/?m=200902.

* Noah’s Ark Ministries International For instance, see my Fox News and GMA interviews regarding the Hong Kong group’s claim to have found Noah’s ark, now available at http://video.foxnews.com/v/4171840/wheres-​the-actual-site and http://www.youtube.com/​watch?v=-​kAgfh_-oSY. See also the blog post debunking the Noah’s ark claims, written by Bob Cargill and entitled “No, No You Didn’t Find Noah’s Ark,” at http://robertcargill.com​/2010/04/28/no-​you-​didnt-find-noahs-ark/. For further examples, see my online article “The Distortion of Archaeology and What We Can Do About It,” at http://www.bibleinterp.com/​articles/duke_357921.shtml

* the remains of a Canaanite palace See, for example, http://digkabri2011.wordpress.com/previous-​results/.

* pseudo-archaeological claims For examples of books debunking other pseudo-archaeological claims, see Kenneth Feder, Frauds, Myths, and Mysteries: Science and Pseudoscience in Archaeology, 7th edition (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2010); Garrett G. Fagan, Archaeological Fantasies: How Pseudoarchaeology Misrepresents the Past and Misleads the Public (New York: Routledge, 2006).

* taking place each year See, e.g., the Fieldwork Opportunities Bulletin, maintained online by the AIA at http://www.archaeological.org/​fieldwork/afob, and the annual list of digs in biblical lands, maintained online by the BAS at http://digs.bib-​arch.org/.

* Garden of Eden For full details, see my articles for the Bible and Interpretation Web site and the Duke University conference, e.g., http://www.bibleinterp.com/​articles/duke_357921.shtml.

* at Göbekli Tepe Again, for full details, see my articles for the Bible and Interpretation Web site and the Duke University conference, e.g., http://www.bibleinterp.com/​articles/duke_357921.shtml.

* challenged by scholars http://www.foxnews.com/​story/0,2933,486684,00.html. See also my piece on http://asorblog.org/?p=84 (also at http://web.archive.org/web/​20110718175741/​http://asorblog.org/?m=200902) and http://robertcargill.com​/2009/02/10/yet-​another-​ark-quest-randall-price-liberty-​university-and-pseudoscientific-​religious-fundamentalism/. Interpretation Web site and the Duke University conference, e.g., http://www.bibleinterp.com/​articles/duke_357921.shtml.

* victims of a hoax On Price’s detailed remarks, see http://web.archive.org/​web/20100522092153/​http://www.worldofthebible.com/news.htm. On the details of the supposed hoax, see http://scienceblogs.com/​pharyngula/2010/04/latest_ark_​finding_is_a_fake.php and http://michaelsheiser.com/​PaleoBabble/2010/04/noahs-​ark-paleobabble-update. See also see my Fox News and GMA interviews at http://video.foxnews.com/​v/4171840/wheres-​the-actual-site and http://www.youtube.com/​watch?v=-​kAgfh_-oSY and Cargill’s blog post “No, No You Didn’t Find Noah’s Ark,” at http://robertcargill.com​/2010/04/28/no-​you-​didnt-find-noahs-ark/.

* promote their findings See now http://www.noahsarkmovies.com/​arkmovie/eng/. See also the volume published by Philip E. Williams, The Archaeological Evidence of Noah’s Flood (Christian Leaders & Scholars Press, 2011), whose epilogue is devoted to a discussion of this find.

* by the scholarly establishment See the press releases at http://www.pressreleasepoint.com/​new-​support-alleged-​noah%E2%80%99s-ark-discovery, http://www.pressreleasepoint.com/​alleged-​noah%E2%80%99s-ark-​discovery-confronts-​attacks-and-bias, and http://​www.​press​release​point.​com/​archaeologist-​counters-​critics-​mount-​ararat-​discovery-​prehistoric-​site, from November 11, 2011, December 16, 2001, and December 20, 2011, respectively. The Web site of the Paleontological Research Corporation can be found at http://www.paleorc.com/, although a username and password are now apparently required to even access the site. Klenck’s various publications are listed at http://www.goodreads.com/​author/show/​4395829.Joel_Klenck and can also be found on Amazon. The accusations against him are posted at http://www.mountainararattrek.com/​ark/arkfraud3.htm.

* theory of Revolution See the press release for the book at: http://www.religionnews.com/​press-​releases/has-noahs-ark-​been-discovered-new-book-noahs-ark-​ancient-accounts-and-new-d; see the publisher’s description at: http://www.scanpublishing.dk​/​products/other-​books/noahs-​ark-ancient-​accounts-and-new-discoveries/ (as of October 26, 2012, it still reads “revolution” instead of “evolution”). See also http://global.christianpost.com​/news/new-​noahs-​ark-book-claims-real-evidence-​for-greatest-discovery-ever-81767/.

* skepticism by scholars http://www.prnewswire.com/​news-​releases/3-d-ground-penetrating-​radar-confirms-great-​discovery-135106988.html, http://www.christianpost.com​/​news/overwhelming-​evidence-​of-noahs-ark-​discovery-featured-on-website-64492/, http://archives.midweek.com/​content/columns/newsmaker_article/​Dan_McGivern/, and http://www.noahsarkfound.com/, with immediate reactions from bibliobloggers at http://zwingliusredivivus.wordpress.com​/2011/12/09/hate-​yourself-​want-an-aneurism-not-had-enough-of-the-false-​claims-of-discoveries-​of-noahs-ark/ and http://freethoughtblogs.com​/dispatches/2011/12/13/noahs-​ark-​found-again/. See previously http://www.msnbc.msn.com/​id/4838007/ns/technology_and_science-​science/t/explorers-plan-​quest-search-noahs-ark/#.TuKTSrIk67s and http://wwrn.org/articles/3624/?&place=turkey&section=general, with a skeptical response by myself in an interview by National Geographic posted at http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/​2004/09/0920_040920_noahs_ark.html.

* about 200 years later Barbara Sivertsen, The Parting of the Sea: How Volcanoes, Earthquakes, and Plagues Shaped the Story of Exodus (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009), 148.

* the Exodus narrative Sivertsen, Parting of the Sea, xix.

* a second exodus Sivertsen, Parting of the Sea, 148-149.

* supposed destruction of Jericho Sivertsen, Parting of the Sea, 93-101, which cites the articles published by myself and Amos Nur on the topic, but not the present book.

* took place on a Wednesday See http://www.ibtimes.com/​articles/135477/20110418/colin-​humphreys-last-supper-challenge-​biblical-calendar-jewish-calendar-final-​days-of-jesus-​good-fri.htm, regarding Humphreys’s newest book, The Mystery of the Last Supper: Reconstructing the Final Days of Jesus (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2011).

* not taken seriously by scholars See http://www.dailymail.co.uk/​news/article-​517641/The-real-Indiana-​Jones-Intrepid-British-don-​Tudor-Parfitts-mission-​Lord-Ark.html. See review by Sean Kingsley, Minerva, March/April 2008: 54-57.

* in chapter 6 See now http://web.archive.org/web/​20070111110711/http://www.wyattmuseum.com/.

* Jerome Niswonger, Richard Rives http://web.archive.org/web/​20070207043423/http://www.wyattmuseum.com/​ac_update.htm.

* conclusive evidence http://web.archive.org/web/20110314152823/​http://www.wyattmuseum.com/arkofthecovenant.htm and still now http://www.wyattmuseum.com/​arkofthecovenant.htm.

* among his discoveries http://www.bnainoah.net.

* as well as Mount Sinai See links under the “Investigations” tab at http://www.baseinstitute.org/.

* The research continues See http://www.baseinstitute.org/​index.php?option=com_content&view​=article&id=51​&Itemid=65.