James R. Strange, professor of New Testament at Samford University, was hoping to excavate a lot of ancient pottery from Jesus’ time at Tel Shikhin, a small village in the Galilee region.
Missiles interrupted his plans.
“We had essentially one week,” Strange told CT. “When Israel launched its offensive into Iran and Iran responded, … that made staying untenable.”
Conflict in the Middle East has once again had the unintended effect of stalling efforts to excavate biblical history. Across Israel, digs were canceled when war broke out in mid-June. Though the war between Israel and Iran lasted only 12 days, it came in the middle of the dig season, when weather conditions and schedules align for archaeological work.
Scholars and volunteers who had hoped to contribute to our understanding of the world of the Bible found themselves instead ducking into bomb shelters and tracking reports of airport closures.
Strange was convinced it was time to leave when he had to take cover in a bomb shelter across the street from their Nazareth hotel four times in one night. But then Ben Gurion Airport—the main international airport in Israel—closed. Strange and his team ended up making their way to Jordan and flying home from Amman three days later.
The Associates for Biblical Research team that was excavating Tel Shiloh had an even more circuitous path out of the country. Dig director Scott Stripling called it a “reverse Exodus.”
The group woke up in a Jerusalem hotel on June 13. News of war and warnings about imminent attacks were consuming the whole country. Stripling decided they should continue with the last day of their archaeological dig anyway.
“The best thing for us to do was to go to work,” he told CT. “I thought, for the spiritual and mental health of our team in the time of crisis, the best thing they can do is to stay in the routine.”
When it was time to leave, though, things got a bit complicated. Stripling said the team took a bus to Eilat in the south of Israel, crossed the border to Egypt, took another bus across the Sinai Peninsula to Cairo, and then flew back to the United States.
Americans excavating Caesarea Maritima, one of Israel’s most-visited archaeological sites, also went home after just one week of digging.
Some archaeologists did not make it to Israel this year because of the military conflict. Wheaton College professor Daniel Master was planning an excavation at Tel Shimron in the Galilee. Lipscomb University archaeologist Steven Ortiz was going to direct a dig at Khirbet Ether. Both men’s flights were canceled. They hope to return to the field in 2026.
The excavation at Abel Beth Maacah, a site near the Lebanese border, was put on hold last year because of the fighting between Israel and Hezbollah. Dig codirector Robert Mullins from Azusa Pacific University and archaeologist Cynthia Shafer-Elliott from Baylor University could not go this year either.
“My university is currently not allowing travel to Israel,” Shafer-Elliott said.
However, codirector Nava Panitz-Cohen, from the Institute of Archaeology of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, will have some of the team back in the field at Abel Beth Maacah later in the summer.
Panitz-Cohen said the dig will proceed with archaeology students from Israeli universities and the international students who stayed in the country through the conflict.
Excavations at Hippos, on eastern shore of the Sea of Galilee, and Hazor, nine miles north of the Sea of Galilee, are expected to continue with majority-Israeli teams.
Some archaeology work in Jordan kept going too. The dig at Khirbet Safra, a site overlooking the Dead Sea, its biblical name is unknown, continued uninterrupted. Excavation director Paul Z. Gregor, a professor from Andrews University in Berrien Springs, Michigan, said the archaeologists “were able to complete our season of excavation as planned” before going home at the end of June.
An excavation planned at Abila, the site of a New Testament city located in northern Jordan, just two miles from the Syrian border, was not as lucky. David Vila, professor at John Brown University, was wrapping up a tour of Jordan with his students and preparing to begin three weeks of excavation of June 16.
He saw the Jordanian air force scramble jets to shoot down missiles. Then President Donald Trump started talking about the possibility of US involvement in the war, and it seemed like a good time to return to the US.
“The US bombed Iran, it turns out, about one hour after our flight took off,” Vila said.
An unexpected hiatus from excavation isn’t all bad news for archaeology, though. Digging in the dirt is the hard-but-fun part. It’s also just the start of the process. Scholars must study what the excavations have turned up, write about their discoveries, and publish the results in peer-reviewed journals.
Not getting into the field gives them additional, much-needed time to do the slow work of scholarship.
James Fraser, director of the W. F. Albright Institute for Archaeological Research in Jerusalem, noted the COVID-19 pandemic, too, forced digging to stop, and that turned out to be a productive time for many archaeologists.
“We’re harvesting the fruit of that now,” he said. “We’ve launched several books here at the Albright over the last several months, all of which would not have come to fruition, I think, without that enforced period.”
Fraser said if archaeologists in Israel are not able to go to their excavations, they are always welcome to come to the Albright, where he has been director since a few days after Hamas launched an attack on Israeli civilians.
“All researchers, regardless of background, can come and sit in the library,” he said, “discuss their findings, and join in shared pursuit of research excellence.”
Gordon Govier writes about biblical archaeology for Christianity Today, hosts the archaeology radio program The Book and The Spade, and is the editor of Artifax.
Correction: A previous version of this article said Strange and his wife took cover in a bomb shelter; she was not in Israel at the time of the attack.
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