Biblical World

Newly Discovered Lead Tablet on Mt. Ebal - A Roundtable Discussion

Episode: In this episode - several of the co-hosts (Oliver Hersey, Mark Janzen, Kyle Keimer, and Chris McKinny) discuss the recent announcement of the discovery of a lead tablet from Mount Ebal that potentially dates to the end of the Late Bronze Age and/or Early Iron Age and purportedly mentions the divine name - YHW (i..e, Yahweh). The discussion centers on Adam Zertal’s initial excavations, the significance of the Iron I settlement wave in the highlands of Ephraim and Manasseh (i.e., northern West Bank) for Israelite history, the background of the discovery of the tablet via wet sifting, and the potential significance of this discovery for early Israel. Like everyone else, we eagerly await the publication…

Hosts: Biblical World co-hosts Chris McKinny, Oliver Hersey, Mark Janzen, and Kyle Keimer. 

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Image: Michael C. Luddeni/Associates for Biblical Research, from the Times of Israel.

Geography of Judges (part 2): Giants Episode – Chris McKinny and Kyle Keimer

Episode: In episode 2 of the series “Geography of Judges,” Chris and Kyle talk about “Giants in Judges” in connection with the giants of Hebron mentioned in Judges 1:8–15. They also discuss the archaeological background of the fortifications of Hebron.

Hosts: Chris McKinny is a Research Fellow with Gesher Media. Passionate about the archaeology, history, and geography of the Biblical world, he has written extensively on these subjects in both academic and popular publications. Chris is a senior staff member at the Tel Burna Archaeological project and regularly leads study tours to the lands of the Bible. He is the author of My People as Your People: A Textual and Archaeological Analysis of the Reign of Jehoshaphat (Peter Lang, 2016), and has co-edited several volumes, including The Late Bronze Age and Early Iron Ages of Southern Canaan (De Gruyter, 2018) and Tell it in Gath: Studies in the History and Archaeology of Israel: Essays in Honor of Aren M. Maeir on the Occasion of his Sixtieth Birthday (Zaphon, 2018).

Kyle Keimer is Senior Research Fellow in the Department of History and Archaeology at Macquarie University, where he was Senior Lecturer in Archaeology, History, and Language of Ancient Israel. He has returned to the U.S. to found The Bible in Context, a company that produces educational content for increasing biblical literacy. For over 20 years he has been excavating in Israel and Cyprus and is currently co-director of the Khirbet el-Rai excavations. He loves digging as much as he loves working with ancient texts, especially the books of 1-2 Samuel and Isaiah. His research currently focuses on the early Israelite monarchy in text and archaeology. He’s co-edited Registers and Modes of Communication in the Ancient Near East (Routledge) and published articles in various journals.

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Image: Top image By Unknown author - The Bodleian Libraries, Oxford, CC BY 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=41970256. Map from BibleAtlas.org https://bibleatlas.org/hebron.htm

Bedouin Culture in the Bible - Clinton Bailey

Episode: Dru Johnson talks with Clinton Bailey about how he ended up living with Bedouins in the Negev, their law, gender practices, and poetry. His most recent book, Bedouin Culture in the Bible (Yale University Press, 2019), examines and explains practices, poetry, and laws from the Hebrew Bible's own bedouin roots (according to the stories of Genesis). This is a rebroadcast of an episode recorded in 2021 on the OnScript podcast. 

Guest: Dr. Clinton Bailey is a leading authority on Bedouin culture, and has done fieldwork in Sinai and the Negev for the past 50 years. His B.A. is from the Hebrew University; his M.A. and Ph.D. from Columbia University. He was born and raised in Buffalo, NY, and made Aliya to Israel in 1958. In 1994, he was awarded the Emil Grunzweig Human Rights Award for his efforts to obtain civil rights for Bedouin in Israel. His books include such titles as:

• Bedouin Poetry (Oxford University Press, 1991)
• A Culture of Desert Survival: Bedouin Proverbs (Yale University Press, 2004)
• Bedouin Law from Sinai and the Negev: Justice without Government (Yale University Press, 2010)
• Bedouin Culture in the Bible (Yale University Press, 2018)

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Jason Staples - The Idea of Israel in Second Temple Judaism

Episode: Lynn Cohick speaks with Jason Staples about concepts of Israel that emerged in the Second Temple period, and their implications for understanding the early Judaism. Staples challenges prevailing ideas about Jewish identity around the turn of the Common Era.

Guest: Jason Staples is Assistant Professor in the College of Humanities and Social Sciences at NC State University. Jason A. Staples is a specialist in Ancient Mediterranean Religions, focusing primarily on Early Judaism and Christian Origins. He is the author of The Idea of Israel in Second Temple Judaism: A New Theory of People, Exile, and Israelite Identity​​​​​​​ (Cambridge University Press, 2021). His second book will focus on Israel in the writings of the apostle Paul. (from the NC State University site)

Host: Lynn Cohick

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Lachish Letters - Chris McKinny and Mary Buck

Episode: Co-hosts Chris McKinny and Mary Buck discuss the discovery of the Lachish Letters (or Lachish Ostraca), and work through several example texts to help you understand their content and significance.

Hosts: Chris McKinny and Mary Buck

Series: STANE – “Special” Texts of the Ancient Near East. See our Amarna Letters, Mesha Stele and Introductory episodes in the same series.

Photo Attribution: By NenyaAleks - Own work, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=9781106

Sodom & Gomorrah and the Cities on the Plain (pt 1) - Chris McKinny and Kyle Keimer

Episode: A recent report - published in the very prestigious journal Nature - argued that the site of Tall al-Hammam and other sites in its vicinity were destroyed by an "airburst event" around 1650 BCE. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-021-97778-3 The underlying assumption of the article is that Tall al-Hammam is the site of Sodom and that the "airburst event" relates to the destruction of the cities of the Plain mentioned in Genesis 19. For a number of reasons, this article has been severely criticized for its handling of pictorial evidence, as well disagreements in interpretation regarding the archaeological data. For example, see here https://www.unm.edu/~mbeb/Publications/Boslough_Skeptical_Inquirer_Sodom_2022.pdf. In this episode, Chris and Kyle examine a more fundamental question - is Tall al-Hammam Sodom? This is part one in this series - covering much of the "background" details connected with Sodom and the cities of the Plain. The next part will cover the geographic details in Genesis itself. We have provided several maps for visualizing the discussion.

Hosts: Chris McKinny (Geshur Media) and Kyle Keimer (Macquarie University)

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Andrew Lawler - Beneath Jerusalem

Episode: What lies beneath Jerusalem? Join Kyle and Chris as they interview Andrew Lawler about his excellent and exciting new book Under Jerusalem: the Buried History of the World’s Most Contested City (also available via Audible.com as an audio book). In this interview, we discuss a variety of issues that Lawler covers in his book - he also gives some personal reflections on the writing and research involved with a book on Jerusalem’s complicated history (and present). 

Guest: (From his website) Andrew Lawler is author of three books, Under Jerusalem: The Buried History of the World’s Most Contested City (Doubleday, 2021), The Secret Token: Myth, Obsession, and the Search for the Lost Colony of Roanoke, a national bestseller, and Why Did the Chicken Cross the World?: The Epic Saga of the Bird that Powers Civilization.  As a journalist, he has written more than a thousand newspaper and magazine articles from more than two dozen countries. His byline has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, National Geographic, Smithsonian, and many others. He is contributing writer for Science and contributing editor for Archaeology. Andrew’s work has appeared several times in The Best of Science and Nature Writing.

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Photo: Archibald Heinemann, From Dan to Beersheba, p. 257

Lawson Younger - Arameans and Assyrians

Episode: In this episode Mark and Chris talk with Dr. K. Lawson Younger (Trinity Evangelical Divinity School) about the Contextual Approach and its benefits for interpreting Scripture with caution required to avoid the paradoxical dangers of "parallelomania" and "parallelophobia." Dr. Younger is an Assyriologist who also specializes on the Arameans, so naturally they had to pick his brain for info on the impact of the Assyrians and Arameans on ancient Israel, particularly during the Divided Monarchy. They also discuss the genre of ancient conquest accounts and how the book of Joshua fits that specific genre, an important interpretive aid to understanding Joshua. 

Guest: (From the TIU website) Dr. K. Lawson Younger, Jr. (PhD. Sheffield University) is Professor of Old Testament, Semitic Languages, and Ancient Near Eastern History at Trinity Evangelical Divinity
School of Trinity International University, Deerfield, Illinois. A specialist in Assyriology, Aramaic, and Hebrew Bible, Younger has published numerous works involving ancient Near Eastern texts and their relationship to the Hebrew Bible. He is the author of A Political History of the Arameans: From their Origins to the End of Their Polities (2016), the Winner of the Biblical Archaeology Society 2017 Publication Award for Best Scholarly Book on Archaeology. He is also the author of Ancient Conquest Accounts: A Study of Ancient Near Eastern and Biblical History Writing (1990), and The NIV Application Commentary for Judges, Ruth (2002). He is the associate editor of the three-volume The Context of Scripture: Canonical Compositions, Monumental Inscriptions and Archival Documents from the Biblical World (Brill), the editor of volume 4 of The Context of Scripture: Supplements (2016), editor of Ugarit at Seventy-Five (2007), and the co-editor of The Canon in
Comparative Perspective (1991), Mesopotamia and the Bible: Comparative Explorations (2002) and “An Excellent Fortress for his Armies, a Refuge for the People”: Egyptological, Archaeological and Biblical Studies in Honor of James K. Hoffmeier (2020). He has also contributed to numerous collections of essays, dictionaries and journals. He is a past trustee of the American Schools of Oriental Research, as well as an active member of the American Oriental Society, the International Association of Assyriology, and the Society of Biblical Literature. 

Among his many scholarly papers, he has given lectures at the British Academy, the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World at New York University, the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago, the Vorderasiatisches Museum (Pergamonmuseum, Berlin), and the Israel Museum (Jerusalem). He was the Seymour Gitin Distinguished Professor at the Albright Institute of Archaeological Research in Jerusalem, Israel (2012–13). He is presently writing a book on Aramean Religion.

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Geography of Judges (part 1) - Chris McKinny and Kyle Keimer

Episode: Who was Adoni-bezek? (Judges 1:1–7) Geography in Judges is a new series where hosts Kyle and Chris (sometimes with friends) will discuss historical geographical and archaeological issues that arise in the Book of Judges. This weeks discussion is on the enigmatic character of Adoni-bezek (Judges 1:1–7). Who was he? Where was he from? What can geography and archaeology tell us about this character?

We would also like to point our listeners to a new online class at Jerusalem University College - the Archaeology of the Judean Shephelah https://juc.edu/academics/course-descriptions/course/archaeology-judean-shephelah/ co-taught by Chris McKinny and Kyle Keimer along with a whole host of excellent guest lectures from the leading archaeologists in the field. Sign-up today! https://www.juc.edu/juc-online/semester-learning/

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Images: Top image from https://palopenmaps.org/view, and the bottom image from https://bibleatlas.org/full/bezek.htm

The Alleged Isaiah Seal - Christopher Rollston

Episode: We discuss the alleged Isaiah Bulla (clay seal impression) with one of the finest epigraphers in the field. The seal was found by the Temple Mount in 2009 by Eilat Mazar, and first announced in Biblical Archaeology Review last month (February, 2018). Matt L. and Dru J. discuss the find with Prof. Christopher Rollston, who urges caution when making bold claims about the seal's link to the biblical prophet Isaiah. We also discuss our desire to make connections between archaeology and the bible, and for a material connection with the past.

Guest: Professor Rollston is Associate Professor of Northwest Semitic languages and literatures at George Washington University. Rollston works in more than a dozen ancient and modern languages, including various ancient Semitic languages (e.g., Hebrew, Phoenician, Aramaic, Palmyrene, Nabataean, Ammonite, Moabite, Edomite, Ugaritic, Akkadian), several ancient and modern Indo-European languages (e.g., Hellenistic Greek, Classical Latin; Modern German, French, Spanish, and Italian), as well as Sahidic Coptic. He is the author of Enemies and Friends of the State: Ancient Prophecy in Context (Eisenbrauns), Writing and Literacy in the World of Ancient Israel: Epigraphic Evidence from the Iron Age (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2010), which was selected by the American Schools of Oriental Research (in November 2011) as the recipient of the prestigious “Frank Moore Cross Prize for Northwest Semitic Epigraphy,” a prize named for the late Harvard University Professor Frank Cross. He has also edited several volumes. Needless to say, he's very accomplished in his field! (adapted from the GWU website).

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Photo: Photo of seal impression, Ouria Tadmor. Copyright Eilat Mazar.