by hadassah | Mar 16, 2016 | What Abraham Jacob and Joseph Might Have Known
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...
by hadassah | Mar 16, 2016 | What Abraham Jacob and Joseph Might Have Known
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...
by hadassah | Mar 16, 2016 | What Abraham Jacob and Joseph Might Have Known
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...
by hadassah | Mar 16, 2016 | What Abraham Jacob and Joseph Might Have Known
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...
by hadassah | Mar 16, 2016 | What Abraham Jacob and Joseph Might Have Known
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...
by hadassah | Jan 28, 2009 | What Abraham Jacob and Joseph Might Have Known
What Abraham, Jacob and Joseph Might Have Known, c. 1850-1500 BCE Highlights- Semitic Tribe Entering Egypt, c. 1890 BCE Egyptian Curse Figurine, c.1800 BCEThe Story of Abraham, 18th century BCE It begins with a single individual. The history of the people of...