In biblical archaeology, there are the Dead Sea Scrolls of Qumran, and then there are the silver scrolls of Ketef Hinnom. The former are quite important; they include biblical texts over 2,000 years old. The latter are also important, containing the earliest biblical text archaeologists have ever discovered.
The two silver amulet scrolls date to 600 BC and are inscribed with the priestly blessing of Numbers 6:24–26. They were discovered in a Jerusalem excavation in 1979 by Israeli archaeologist Gabriel Barkay, who passed away January 11, 2026. He was 81.
Barkay’s career was typical of an Israeli archaeologist in many ways, with him excavating at a series of important sites. But his influence on American archaeologists and Bible scholars, particularly evangelicals, was greater than that of any other Israeli archaeologist.
One of the volunteers who worked with Barkay at the Ketef Hinnom excavation where he discovered the scrolls was 15-year-old John Monson. His father (Jim Monson) and Barkay both taught classes at what was then The American Institute of Holy Land Studies, now known as Jerusalem University College (JUC).
“Gabby was like an uncle to me,” Monson told CT. “We contributed garden tools from our house for that excavation.”
After growing up in Jerusalem steeped in archaeology, Monson went to Wheaton College then Harvard University, where he graduated in 1999 with a PhD that covered the Hebrew Bible, biblical archaeology, and ancient Near Eastern studies. He is now a professor of Old Testament and semitic languages at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School.
“Gabby Barkay was not only a genius but a person who had depth like few others in both biblical studies and archaeology,” Monson said. “He had a profound impact by his accessibility and by the depth of his expertise.”
American seminaries and Christian colleges have been sending their students to JUC since its founding in 1957. Barkay was hired as a lecturer around 1970 and taught a semester-long class on the history of Jerusalem. His daylong field trips into the nooks and crannies of the historic city, which could last from 7 a.m. to dark, were legendary.
Monson said Barkay frequently praised the American evangelical students he taught because they came hungry to learn and knew their Bibles. And in Barkay they found not just a Jewish archaeologist but a man with a passion for God’s Word.
“He was not a narrow literalist,” Monson said, “but he was one who saw the Bible aligning with its context powerfully. And because of his immersion in Scripture and archaeology, he would talk about God as the Almighty.”
Barkay exuded a love for Scripture, in contrast to many archaeologists who do excellent work but are interested in the Bible mainly where it intersects with their excavations. They are wary of connecting the two spheres too strongly.
“Even many evangelicals are scared to go down the path of owning the alignment of Scripture and archaeology,” Monson said.
Barkay’s legacy shows itself among thousands of former students who are now in the pulpit on Sunday mornings or in front of their own classrooms, sharing their knowledge with new generations.
“I will always remember his enthusiasm,” said Jonathan Greer, who teaches anthropology at Grand Valley State University and helps direct the ongoing excavations at Tel Dan in northern Israel. He studied at JUC for a semester.
Chris McKinny teaches archaeology at Lipscomb University. He called Barkay a throwback to an earlier generation of archaeologists who could lecture for hours without notes or a break. “I think one of the keys to his effectiveness was his focus on Jerusalem,” McKinny said. “This 4,000-year-old city uniquely forces one to interact with every aspect of the archaeology and history of the Holy Land.”
“Walking around Jerusalem with Barkay, reading biblical texts, and seeing archaeology was a true gift to me as a young scholar,” said Bobby Duke, chief curatorial officer at the Museum of the Bible. He has an MA in Hebrew Bible from JUC.
One of Duke’s younger colleagues at the Museum of the Bible, exhibits coordinator Kellie Mitchell, studied at JUC with a degree in anthropology but was uncertain about her career options. “One lecture from Dr. Barkay and his legacy, as well as some other archaeology heroes, really impacted my goals, and now I work with biblical artifacts and exhibits every day.”
In the early ’90s, Todd Bolen was thankful to be one of the few students with a laptop, upon which he typed furiously as he took classes from Barkay. “He was one of the most influential teachers of my life,” Bolen recalled. “He didn’t just demand that I know it all; he made me want to know it all. His legacy is the way he mastered his subject and presented it so clearly.” Bolen is professor of biblical studies at The Master’s University and created Bibleplaces.com with the photos he took while studying and working in Israel.
Gabriel Breslauer (Barkay) was born in Budapest, Hungary, on June 20, 1944, three months after the Nazis occupied the city. Monson said he was whisked out of the Budapest ghetto as a baby, along with the Torah scroll of his family synagogue. The family immigrated to Israel in 1950.
His interest in archaeology started early; he joined the Israel Exploration Society at age 10. While working on many excavations in Israel, he studied archaeology as an undergrad with Yigael Yadin, Benjamin Mazar, and other top archaeologists at Hebrew University, then completed his PhD in archaeology at Tel Aviv University in 1985.
In 1996, Barkay was awarded the Jerusalem Prize for his work. But one of his most important and challenging jobs was still ahead.
In 2000, one of the students he had taught at Bar Ilan University after joining the school in 1997 came to his door carrying a bag of pottery collected from a trash dump. Nine thousand tons of dirt—400 truckloads—had been scraped out of a remodeling project on the Temple Mount by Muslim authorities and unceremoniously hauled to the Jerusalem dump or scattered along the Kidron Valley.
Archaeology removed from its context is typically seen as of little value. Although the project was controversial and raised the ire of many, no one paid attention to the dirt. Studying the pottery, Barkay realized the pieces represented all the biblical periods of Israel’s history, as well as the Christian Byzantine period and the Arabic and Crusader periods.
Barkay and his student, Zachi Dvira, applied for a permit to excavate the dirt. The request was denied, but people circulated a petition and printed it on the front page of several newspapers. Academic leaders, artists, military leaders, 80 Knesset members, and former Jerusalem mayor Teddy Kollek all signed it.
After more refusals, authorities finally granted the excavation license. The Temple Mount Sifting Project (TMSP) began in 2004 and continues to this day in an outpost near The Hebrew University of Jerusalem’s campus on Mount Scopus.
In several interviews over the years, Barkay pointed out to me that Jerusalem is one of the most excavated places on earth. “No other city has so many stories to tell,” he said. Yet the most important archaeological site in Israel, “perhaps in the world,” he said, has never been excavated and perhaps never will be—except for that illicit 1999 dirt removal.
“In this curse, there is a blessing,” he said. “It’s the only way to find out about the history of the Temple Mount archaeologically.”
As with typical excavations in Israel, TMSP volunteers do most of the work. Tour groups, school classes, civic groups, soldiers, and other individuals by the hundreds of thousands have dumped half buckets of wet dirt onto a screen in a waist-high frame and hosed the dirt until all that was left were coins (over 7,000 so far), stones, pottery shards, mosaic tesserae, bone fragments, arrowheads, and a stunning variety of other historical refuse.
Barkay innovated this wet sifting process to ensure not even the smallest item would escape notice. Other Israeli archaeologists, such as the late Eilat Mazar and Ronny Reich, also saw the effectiveness and efficiency of wet sifting and sent material from their Jerusalem digs to TMSP. Without that additional step, finds such as bullae (seal impressions) naming biblical personalities like King Hezekiah, the prophet Isaiah, and the prophet Jeremiah’s oppressors Gedaliah and Jehukal (Jer. 38:1) might never have been found.
Archaeologist Scott Stripling worked two seasons as a supervisor with TMSP. He was amazed at Barkay’s encyclopedic knowledge and impressed with the scrutiny wet sifting yielded. Years later, when he became the director of the Associates for Biblical Research excavation at Tel Shiloh, he included wet sifting as part of the daily regimen and advocated that other digs do the same.
In 2020, TMSP sponsored an online seminar on the archaeology of Jerusalem’s Temple Mount. Barkay related the history of the project and the significance of some of its finds. The fact that there’s no dearth of material from the Byzantine period, when the Temple Mount was thought to have been barren, between the destruction of the Second Temple and the construction of the Dome of the Rock, convinced him it had to have been occupied in some way.
“Most of what has been discovered is not sensational, but it has a cumulative value,” Barkay once told me. It’s new information about the Temple Mount. During the 2020 conference, he acknowledged it would have been better if the material they were sifting and studying had been carefully excavated rather than pulled out of a trash heap.
“It has lost 90 percent of its scientific value,” he said. “But we have 10 percent left. That’s much more than zero percent.”
If you go to the TMSP website, you can find the numbers for tons of dirt sifted so far (4,742 out of 5,210 at last check), people participating in the sifting (more than 260,000), and artifacts waiting to be published in archaeological reports (more than 635,000). Once all the evidence has been accumulated and published, a fuller picture of the history of the Temple Mount can be told.
Barkay’s earlier discovery of the silver amulet scrolls also has more to tell scholars, Monson said: “It’s one of the great finds of biblical archaeology, but its impact has yet to be digested fully in biblical studies.”
The fact that these amulets containing Scripture from Numbers and Deuteronomy were worn around necks in the days of Jeremiah shows how popular the texts were at that time. And they presumably had a long life before that. They are further evidence against the documentary hypothesis, or the JEDP theory, that was popular among critical Bible scholars for much of the 20th century and that suggested Scripture was written and compiled late in biblical history.
“Gabby, without intending to be so, represents a kind of an anchor to the reality of the Bible and the biblical world—and indirectly to the veracity of Scripture,” Monson said, adding that we still need Barkay’s voice to guide pastors who don’t know the Bible and Christian communities that fall prey to theological and philosophical whims.
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