For thousands of years, the Sumerians were a forgotten people. No book recorded their achievements; no spade unearthed their treasures. The Sumerians had passed out of history, until, in the mid-19th century, linguists studying Assyrian cuneiform writing discovered cuneiform tablets written in another language. Linguists and archaeologists alike soon began to realize that in Mesopotamia, […]
Diane Wolkstein’s Inanna–Queen of Heaven and Earth is a retelling, with commentary, of one of the major texts about the Sumerian goddess Inanna. This is a difficult book for me to review. I could not possibly be more in sympathy with its aims. As a historian of religion, I find ancient mythology a fascinating and important […]
Sir Leonard Woolley was, perhaps, the most famous archaeologist of his day. He was a man of enormous energy and a prodigious worker. Between 1907 and 1949 Woolley not only directed five major excavations in Egypt and Nubia, Syria and Iraq, but published the results quickly and in a highly professional manner. Between 1922 and […]
The death of Claude Schaeffer of cancer at the age of 84 in his home at St. Germain-en-Laye, France, on August 25, 1982, marks the end of an epoch in the archaeology of the Near East. He was the last of those titanic figures whose achievements are sometimes hard for us to appreciate from our […]
Until recently, archaeology—or at least Near Eastern archaeology—has been regarded primarily as a historical science. Its focus was history and particularly political history—kings and kingdoms, battles and destructions, the rise and fall of civilizations. That focus has now shifted somewhat. It is difficult to put a date on the change because it has occurred gradually […]
American Presidents and Haman References to this ageless story of God’s divine intervention against evil have been made on several occasions by early American presidents. On December 17, 1778 (then General) George Washington wrote to Joseph Reed, newly-elected President of Pennsylvania: “I would to God that one of the most atrocious of each State […]
The findings of archaeologists sometimes seem to confirm the Biblical text. At other times, the excavation results present a problem. Perhaps the best known case of the latter is Jericho. Most scholars date the Israelite conquest of Canaan to the Late Bronze Age, to a time (13th century B.C.) when, according to Jericho excavator Kathleen […]
As we know from the Book of Esther, the casting of lots – known as ‘Pur’ – was used by Haman to establish the date on which he intended to attack and murder the Jews of Shushan. Purim is a plural of that term. Scholars note that the date of Purim falls during a Persian […]
The Festival of Purim is the celebration of God’s intervention to save the Jews of Persia from the evil Haman in the 5th Century BCE. Based on a document in the Vatican Archives we learn that the festival of Purim was celebrated in Jerusalem in the year 78 BCE. Similarly, from the Theodosian Code dated […]
Haman and Ahasuerus visit Esther, Rembrandt, Pushkin State Museum, Moscow “”So the king and Haman came to feast with Queen Esther. On the second day, the king again asked Esther at the wine feast, ‘What is your wish, Queen Esther? I shall be granted you…’” Esther 7:1-2 (JPS Tanakh) The Triumph of Mordecai, Rembrandt, Collection […]