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Biblical archaeology's sphere of interest centers on one of the world's most tense and torn landscapes. A half-century ago, archaeologists such as Yigael Yadin used excavations at sites like Masada to develop the ethos and traditions for the new Jewish state. At the site of the Herodian fortress overlooking the Dead Sea, Yadin excavated what he said were remains from the final battle of the first-century Jewish revolt against the Romans. Today, Israeli soldiers who are sworn in at the ruin hear these words: "Masada shall not fall again."

But the site most precious to Jews, the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, is off-limits to archaeologists. In 1998 the Muslims who control the area began constructing an underground mosque in the southeastern corner of the area they call Haram al-Sharif ("the noble sanctuary"). Trucks carried off and dumped the excavated dirt with no oversight from archaeologists.

Muslims, some of whom claim there is no evidence for any Jewish temples on that site, said no archaeological precautions were necessary. Many archaeologists, Jews, and Christians were outraged. Some Israelis are concerned that irreplaceable artifacts have been lost.

Some Jews, for their part, use findings from archaeology to buttress their own claims to the land. But so do Palestinians. The Palestinian Authority created its own department of tourism and archaeology after signing the Oslo Accord in 1993.

Dever says archaeologists, whether Israeli, Palestinian, Jordanian, or American, usually seek to avoid political disputes. "Archaeology is supposed to be a science, and it's simply perverted by introducing modern political issues," Dever says. "Archaeology cannot contribute anything directly to the solution of Middle East problems. And its abuse can only make it worse."

Conservative archaeologists are facing their own unique political pressures. The James ossuary has brought back into the open a long-running academic dispute about the historicity of the Bible.

Dever can't resist tweaking those he calls "fundamentalist Christians" regarding the ossuary. They "jumped on it, assuming that now we had proof that Jesus had lived," he says. "The ossuary doesn't add anything to what we already knew, even if it were genuine."

Dever, the son of a Protestant preacher, left his evangelical background in college and eventually converted to Judaism. Today he considers himself a secular humanist.

A colleague describes Dever as being planted at the "radical center" of archaeology. Dever—whose latest book is Who Were the Early Israelites and Where Did They Come From?—rejects the conservative dating used by many (though not all) evangelicals—such as a date of 1,400 B.C. for the Exodus. Like a number of secular scholars, however, he still sees value in using the Bible as an archaeological reference.

He reserves his harshest words for the minimalist revisionists. Members of this camp deny the historicity of the Bible and say the stories it contains are myths written for nationalistic reasons.

"I suggest that the revisionists are nihilist not only in the historical sense but also in the philosophical and moral sense," Dever writes in his earlier book, What Did the Biblical Writers Know and When Did They Know It? "Here their basic approach to the texts of the Hebrew Bible gives them away as all-too-typical postmodernists."

In March 2002, Harper's published a cover story espousing this viewpoint ("False Testament: Archaeology Refutes the Bible's Claim to History"). "Some twelve to fourteen centuries of 'Abrahamic' religious development, the cultural wellspring that has given us not only Judaism but Islam and Christianity, have … been erased," author Daniel Lazare wrote. "Judaism appears to have been the product not of some dark and nebulous period of early history but of a more modern age of big-power politics in which every nation aspired to the imperial greatness of a Babylon or an Egypt."

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October 2003, Vol. 47, No. 10