Why 1 and 2 Kings?
Why 1 and 2 Kings?
Why were the books of 1 and 2 Kings written […]
In ancient Mesopotamia, people knew how to appreciate a good beer […]
Petrovitch’s blog does not offer any grounds for accepting his ideas. Many scholars have written […]
What is the language behind the world’s first alphabet? For over 150 years, scholars have studied the world’s first alphabetic […]
What stories do we tell about our own origins? What tales do we recount about the origins of others? What happens when our narratives […]
There is one question that I am asked all the time, which has a short answer but is long on associated implications. The question is simply “Do you get to keep what you find?” […]
This year marks the seventieth anniversary of the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls. […]
The people of Kamid el-Loz set up urban structures three times. The first and second were built during the Middle Bronze Age II period […]
Inebriation is a cross-cultural habit whose origins can be traced back to Prehistory. But humans are not the only […]
Societal collapse has always been intriguing. For this reason, scholars have been attracted to the Early Bronze IV of the Southern Levant since the early 20th century. […]
Their masculine identity was considered to be ambiguous. These persons can be classified as belonging to a third gender. […]
There was indeed a “Sumerian bowl” found in the late 1950s near Lake Titicaca, at the site of Hacienda Chúa, about 75 miles north of La Paz. The dark bowl has a prominent rim and a […]
Why does the Bible matter? Why do we continue to talk about, turn to, and study a diverse assortment of narratives, poems, laws and prophetic proclamations at least two millennia […]
Stretching from Egypt to the Indus River, the Persian Empire was the largest empire yet seen in the ancient Near East. Typically, the Hebrew Bible depicts ancient […]
Of course, there is no such thing as a Sumerian king list. The text usually referred to as the ‘Sumerian King List’ (SKL) is a composition somewhere between a literary text and a list proper […]
Marriage is ubiquitous in human societies. But any examination of marriage in ancient Egyptian society requires us to disengage from modern social and […]
In contrast, the antiquities market is how most modern hoaxes are circulated, including forgeries of ancient texts. Alleged ancient texts are often said to come from particular archaeological sites, but there is rarely a way to verify such assertions. […]
Elephantine Judaeans suggests that the emergence of a Scripture-based Yahwism—the “victorious” form of Yahwism in the succeeding Hellenistic and Roman […]
One motivation that unites Greco-Roman pilgrimage traditions, some Jewish pilgrimage traditions, and early Christian pilgrimage is the search for authenticity. This is found in ‘proofs’ like miracles, and the way […]
This particular removal of gods, called “godnapping” by modern scholars, is attested over a long period of Mesopotamian history, from the start of the 2nd millennium through the 5th century BCE. But how can […]