Samford Summer in Israel

June 16, 2019 Dear Family and Friends, Because today is Father’s Day, I begin with three discoveries from this season’s excavation that my father would have liked to see. There are, of course, more than three. Remember that in two articles published in 1994 and 95, he and a team from the USF Excavations at Sepphoris identified this hilltop as the “Shiḥin” ( שיחין ) of rabbinic literature and the “Asochis” ( Ασωχις ) in the writings of Josephus. They based their conclusion on their survey of the site in 1988. The first discovery is the mold for making a Northern Darom lamp that I mentioned last week. It is the first from the site that is nearly complete, and it is lovely. Before excavating, no one expected to find evidence of lamp production here, or in any village. Dad would also be interested in an emerging debate. On one hand, Yeshu Dray, who is conserving the artifact, thinks the mold’s carvers were making a political statement. This is because the ...

June 9, 2019 Today, Pentecost Sunday, is the third Sunday I’ve been in Israel. I’ve not written until now because I’ve been busier than usual. We’ve completed two weeks of good archaeology. The veterans know what to do and the new volunteers—this year mostly undergraduate students from four institutions—soon snap into place. With the instruction they receive in the field, by now they are seasoned archaeologists who are asking good questions about the method and the site. We’ve toured Sepphoris, the nearby city built by Herod Antipas in the year 4 BCE; the synagogue of Beit Alpha that was one of the first to be found with a mosaic floor depicting both biblical scenes and the zodiac wheel; and Beit She‘arim, a village famous for over 20 catacombs with 400 burials, and for the largest block of raw glass ever excavated. We’ve also been to Caesarea, one of the cities Herod the Great built in honor of his friend, Caesar Augustus. It later became the capital of t...