David is described in the Hebrew Bible as king of the United Monarchy of Israel and Judah. In the Books of Samuel, David is a young shepherd who gains fame first as a musician and later by killing the enemy champion Goliath. He becomes a favorite of King Saul and a close friend of Saul's son Jonathan. Worried that David is trying to take his throne, Saul turns on David. After Saul and Jonathan are killed in battle, David is anointed as King. David conquers Jerusalem, taking the Ark of the Covenant into the city, and establishing the kingdom founded by Saul.
According to the Bible, Admah was one of the five cities of the Vale of Siddim. It was destroyed along with Sodom and Gomorrah. It is supposed by William F. Albright to be the same as the "Adam" of Joshua 3:16. The location of Admah is unknown, although Bryant G. Wood a proponent of the southern theory for the Cities of the Plain identified the site with Numeira, but later changed it to Khirbat al-Khanazir Jordan, although it was only a cemetery during the Bronze Age and proponents of the northern theory for the Cities of the Plain identify the site with Tall Nimrin, Jordan.
The Dead Sea Scrolls are ancient Jewish religious manuscripts that were found in the Qumran Caves in the Judaean Desert, near Ein Feshkha on the northern shore of the Dead Sea in the West Bank. Scholarly consensus dates these scrolls from the last three centuries BCE and the first century CE. The texts have great historical, religious, and linguistic significance because they include the second-oldest known surviving manuscripts of works later included in the Hebrew Bible canon, along with deuterocanonical and extra-biblical manuscripts which preserve evidence of the diversity of religious thought in late Second Temple Judaism. Almost all of the Dead Sea Scrolls are held by the state of Israel in the Shrine of the Book on the grounds of the Israel Museum, but ownership of the scrolls is disputed by Jordan and Palestine.
William Foxwell Albright was an American archaeologist, biblical scholar, philologist, and expert on ceramics.
Dan is a city mentioned in the Hebrew Bible, described as the northernmost city of the Kingdom of Israel, and belonging to the tribe of Dan. The city is identified with a tell located in northern Israel known as Tel Dan in Hebrew, or Tell el-Qadi.
Hippos is an archaeological site in Golan Heights disputed between Syria and Israel, located on a hill overlooking the Sea of Galilee. Between the 3rd century BCE and the 7th century CE, Hippos was the site of a Greco-Roman city, which declined under Muslim rule and was abandoned after an earthquake in 749. Besides the fortified city itself, Hippos controlled two port facilities on the lake and an area of the surrounding countryside. Hippos was part of the Decapolis, or Ten Cities, a region in Roman Jordan, Syria and Israel that were culturally tied more closely to Greece and Rome than to the Semitic ethnoi around.
Israel Finkelstein is an Israeli archaeologist, professor emeritus at Tel Aviv University. Finkelstein is active in the archaeology of the Levant and is an applicant of archaeological data in reconstructing biblical history. He is also known for applying the exact and life sciences in archaeological and historical reconstruction. Finkelstein is the current excavator of Megiddo, a key site for the study of the Bronze and Iron Ages in the Levant.
Biblical archaeology is an academic school and a subset of Biblical studies and Levantine archaeology. Biblical archaeology studies archaeological sites from the Ancient Near East and especially the Holy Land, from biblical times.
Bryant G. Wood is a biblical archaeologist and young earth creationist. Wood is known for arguing that the destruction of Jericho could be accorded with his own biblical literalist chronology of c. 1400 BC. This date is some 150 years later than the accepted date of c. 1550 BC, first determined by Kathleen Kenyon and subsequently confirmed with a variety of methods including radiocarbon dating.
Eilat Mazar is an Israeli archaeologist, specializing in Jerusalem and Phoenician archaeology.
Ur Kaśdim, commonly translated as Ur of the Chaldeans, is a city mentioned in the Hebrew Bible as the birthplace of the Israelite and Ismaelite patriarch Abraham. In 1862, Henry Rawlinson identified Ur Kaśdim with Tell el-Muqayyar, near Nasiriyah in southern Iraq. In 1927, Leonard Woolley excavated the site and identified it as a Sumerian archaeological site where the Chaldeans were to settle around the 9th century BCE. Recent archaeology work has continued to focus on the location in Nasiriyah, where the ancient Ziggurat of Ur is located.
In the Bible, Mount Sinai is the mountain at which the Ten Commandments were given to Moses by God. In the Book of Deuteronomy, these events are described as having transpired at Mount Horeb. "Sinai" and "Horeb" are generally considered to refer to the same place by scholars.
Alan Ralph Millard is Rankin Professor Emeritus of Hebrew and Ancient Semitic languages, and Honorary Senior Fellow, at the School of Archaeology, Classics and Egyptology (SACE) in the University of Liverpool.
Frank Moore Cross Jr. (1921–2012) was the Hancock Professor of Hebrew and Other Oriental Languages Emeritus at Harvard University, notable for his work in the interpretation of the Dead Sea Scrolls, his 1973 magnum opusCanaanite Myth and Hebrew Epic, and his work in Northwest Semitic epigraphy. Many of his essays on the latter topic have since been collected in Leaves from an Epigrapher's Notebook.
Biblical archaeology, occasionally known as Palestinology is the school of archaeology which concerns itself with the biblical world.
Sodom and Gomorrah were two cities mentioned in the Book of Genesis and throughout the Hebrew Bible, the New Testament, and in the deuterocanonical books, as well as in the Quran and the Hadith.
Dan Warner is the Director for The Michael and Sara Moskau Institute of Archaeology and the Center for Archaeological Research, professor of Old Testament and Archaeology at New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary, and is a co-director of the Tel Gezer Water System excavation and preservation project. He has also served various roles on other excavations at Tel Kabri, Megiddo, Tell el-Far'ah, Gerar, and Ashkelon.
Walter Julius Veith is a South African zoologist and a Seventh-day Adventist author and speaker known for his work in nutrition, creationism, and Biblical exegesis with the Amazing Discoveries media ministry and on their international television network found in North America on Galaxy 19.
Steven Collins is an American professor with the College of Archaeology at the unaccredited Trinity Southwest University in Albuquerque, New Mexico, an institution that states that biblical scripture is the "divinely inspired representation of reality given by God to humankind, speaking with absolute authority in all matters upon which it touches". Collins is also the Professor of Archaeology and Biblical History along with Professor of Biblical and Theological Studies at Veritas International University, which is accredited by the Transnational Association of Christian Colleges and Schools which requires all accredited schools to have a statement of faith that affirms "the inerrancy and historicity of the Bible" and "the divine work of non-evolutionary creation including persons in God's image". He has been working as an archaeologist for 30 years, researching and teaching on Near Eastern archaeology and biblical studies.
