Canter Bridge

I once asked the Regius Professor of Hebrew at the University of Cambridge how he stays abreast of fast-moving developments in biblical archaeology, a field of investigation that is related but decidely peripheral to his own work.

‘I mostly read BAR … ‘, he said, in an unexpectedly low-brow response for the hallowed halls of the Great University. ‘Then if I want to know more about a topic, I move on to more scholarly publications.’

It was a vote of confidence in a magazine (not an academic journal!) that I’ve read for years and found equally useful in maintaining a generalist knowledge in an area of investigation that—let’s address the elephant in the room—most of us come to out of religious interests.

BAR effectively combines the well-edited prose of leading scholars with due general-interest attention to color photos and complementary resources like slides (in a past era) and phenomenally well-produced videos and dvds.

An issue pulled at random from my shelves (November/December 2001) contains articles entitled:

-Excavating Philistine Gath. Have we found Goliath’s hometown
-The Monastery of the Cross. Where heaven and earth meet
-The Rise and Fall of the Dead Sea
-Is It or Isn’t It – a Synagogue?

In addition, the usual suspects appear issue by issue in interesting columns that add color commentary to a polemical field where personalities as well as artefacts and theories loom large.

You’ll want to ignore the over-heated reader responses on one brand of disillusionment or another. But you’d be wrong to heed some reviewers’ critiques of the political headbashing that goes on among archaeologists. When elephants of this kind collide, it’s usually over an ideological argument that matters. It does us no good to deride such battles as mere politics. BAR has had the good sense to play both a spectator’s and a provocateur’s role in such infighting over the complaints of readers who wish things were more placid around here.

They are not. And the things we continue to dig up from the rocky ground of Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, Egypt and other locations continue to insure that we never fall prey to boring consensus regarding the history of these great lands and the faiths they engendered.

Read BAR if this sounds remotely interesting and decide for yourself.