HEAVENLY POWERS is one of the best popular introductions to Kabbalah.

In recent years it seems that most books on the Kabbalah seem to concentrate on the mystical aspects. Especially with it's growing popularity with various New Age movements. Silberman takes a different direction and concentrates on the historical and political factors that influenced the development of the Kabbalah and it's rituals. He takes the reader back to the beginnings or many of the rituals and discussed the political and historical influences of that time and how they worked together to weave a rich tapestry of religious tradition.
He has a remarkable ability to take a complex subject and put it into a readable style as he takes the reader on a journey from the Babylonian empire through the Roman and Byzantine empires, through Europe and to Israel. For the new age reader who is more interested in the rituals and methods of the Kabbalah this will probably not be their favorite book, but for those desiring an understanding of the roots of the religious tradition this is an excellent book with a perspective that others do not offer. A recommended read for any student of history, religion, or political sciences or others who just want to understand such things.

Truly a remarkable work and an excellent source for students and arm-chair archaeologists alike. Short on the hoped-for graphics and illustrations but long on information, the Oxford Companion proves its worth when one is looking for an appropriate overview of various archaeological topics. Just enough cross-referencing to excite one's imagination and more than enough to whet one's appetite to dig even deeper into archaeology and all that is has to teach us.

"The Oxford Companion to Archaeology" is a fitting friend to the recently published "Eyewitness to Discovery," an anthology of first-person archaeological writings, also edited by Brian Fagan.

Given the space and range of the subject matter, it seems that any kind of judgmental review would be superfluous. No topic is missed, and everything is written with a depth and clarity that one expects from a book in the Oxford Companion series. There are only two regrets. I would have liked to see illustrations, photos and maps of certain sites, but that is more wishful thinking than constructive criticism.

The other problem is that the 29 maps in the back of the book are inadequate. Some sites are listed, some are not. They lack a note indicating what time period they apply to What date does "Early China" map refer to? Or the "Late China?" The sole map of the Roman Empire shows it at its largest, but omits the date of when that was. One might as well review a dictionary.

These are just a few of the idle facts and notions gleaned from these pages:

* A long-term study of what people throw away has been going on out in Tucson, Arizona, since 1973. It has found that the average U.S. household throws away 10 to 15 percent of its edible solid food, that curbside recycling has conserved about 20 percent of landfill space since it began in 1982, and that paper takes up 40 to 50 percent of landfill space.

* Although the wheel was in use in Mesopotamia from about 4,000 B.C., it was not in the Americas, nor in Africa south of the Sahara.

* Diseases brought by European explorers may have reduced North American population, estimated at 18 million, (roughly the current population of South Carolina, Virginia, Georgia and North Carolina combined) by up to 80 percent.

* Silk was such a lucrative export from China that from the second century on, persons caught attempting to export the technology of silk production could be executed.

*That the Great Wall of China is not a continuous wall, but a series of walls, built and rebuilt at different times. The section outside Beijing was reconstructed recently as a tourist attraction. (This account also perpetuates the popular error that the wall is the only human product visible from the moon. Astronaut Alan Bean has written that "the only thing you can see from the moon is a beautiful sphere, mostly white (clouds), some blue (ocean), patches of yellow (deserts), and every once in a while some green vegetation.")

* Last but not least, after reading accounts of civilizations that have lasted thousands of years, only to collapse into a heap of dusty ruins and sometimes indecipherable records, it's hard to feel smug about a country with a mere 200 years of history.

The multi-disciplinary study of archaeology requires a broad database of knowlegde, and the Oxford Companion offers itself as an excellent resource. Alphabetical entries are provided in subject areas, and especially helpful is a variety of timelines and graphical data, as well as a comprehensive index. Fagan's compilation of entries from renowed social sciences in the Oxford Companion is an essential in my personal library, and is referred to consistently.

The author, although the renowned editor of archaeology magazine, has more than a little difficulty remaining unbiased all the way through this book. I would recommend the book but make sure you understand that in an emotionally charged subject such as the Dead Sea Scrolls Un-biased opinions are few and far between. The Dead Sea Scrolls at no time reference or even mention Jesus of Nazareth. The author in my opinion makes several assumptions regarding the validity and basis of biblical text. I enjoyed reading about the contrversy surrounding the scrolls and their control by the International Team. But could have done without many of the leaps the author decided to make. Overall it was a good read.

"The Hidden Scrolls" is a lucid outsider's look into the chaos that is Dead Sea Scrolls scholarship. Silberman's writing is constructed well with a flowing story of rich style. He shows us the consensuses that have been officially reached by the top, more "professional", scholars in the field. At this same time he reveals their own skullduggery. No, he doesn't mean the once embraced idea of conspired cover-up, but mainly their own theological evasiveness. This is due in part to the nature of scroll interpretation, which ends up being a subjective process. The humanist, Orthodox Jew, and fundamentalist Christian are all going to get a different message from a text surrounding a messianic figure. The people of the scrolls have so much in common with Christianity that the nexus can by no means be overlooked. Atleast one would think, but by looking at the differences betwixt the two, scholars manage to brush it aside. They identify Qumran as an isolated band of mystical monks, who though anticipated the End of Days and Final Judgement, occupied their massive library with events that occured centuries in their own past under Hasmonean rule. This is orthodoxy. By reducing them to this, "The 'Dead Sea Scrolls' became a harmless public fascination. But their revolutionary passion and outrage against injustice had been, consciously or unknowingly, stripped from them." Not only does he expose this inconsistency in the de Vaux orthodoxy, but even demythologizes the stories of their discovery and such. But in the inner circle of scholars, they only show disdain for alternative theories on the scrolls, and had given birth to sometimes angry, theological debates. This book is more appreciable to those who are already familiar with the saints and sinners of the Dead Sea Scrolls. It discusses their interactions and contributions, as well as their respective theories. While as Silberman thinks in light of evidence and not his scholarly contemporaries, it seems he at the same time avoids straying to the absurd. There is no "Jesus the mushroom buried in Qumran cave 7 occupied by Paul the Dinosaur's UFO" theory (OK I get a little carried away mocking the lunatic fringe, but o well..) He generally sees the voice of Jewish messianism in the scrolls, a movement that included Jesus Christ, and not the accepted tradition. This is an easy enjoyable book for those in the field of Scrolls research. Thumbs UP!!!

I have read several books on the Dead Sea Scrolls and I found this the best. The author is not afraid to bring up several important but controversial issues. There is a lot of food for thought there as well as lot of colorfull history about the people that did the research on the scrolls.

Professor Horsley has repeatedly offered us books impeccably researched and annotated in great detail. Yet despite the promise of those works, Horsley has too often hidden his gifts behind an impenetrable wall of technicalities and minutia. In his attempts to demonstrate his intelligence, Horsley has sometimes made his writing obtuse and inaccessible to the average reader.

This, however, is not one of his failures. Here Horsley finally gets it right. Here Horsley fulfills the promise of his other works.

Examining the politics, sociology, psychology and religion of the renewal movements founded by John the Baptist, Jesus of Nazareth, and Paul of Tarsus, Horsley and Silberman weave an exhilarating narrative that exposes the historical roots of Christianity. Thoroughly comprehendible by the lay reader, without sacrificing scholarship, this book demonstrates that the authors can strike an appropriate balance between academia and popular reading.

Harsley and Silberman provide a social and economic setting of the time of Jesus and Paul (10 BCE - 70 CE) and the "Jesus Movement". Without addressing the religious truth of Christianity, they describe its social context and the impact it had on Palestine and the eastern Mediterranean.

The authors draw on recent archaeological finds to present a picture of life during this time. Along with the Bible and writings of Josephus, they use non-canonical early Christian writings, and Roman documents and inscriptions.

Bibliographical Notes in addition to the Bibliography make it easy to refer to more original sources in topics of interest.

The book is somehat hard to read, visually. This edition uses a very light serif font, and the paragraphs are rather long. Some familiarity with Biblical accounts of Jesus and Paul would be helpful for the reader.

The Bible Unearthed "debunks" a few myths that were already understood to be myths 30 or 40 years ago, and adds a few myths of its own.

The authors have assembled enough evidence to show that ancient Jewish history did not happen as portrayed in the Bible, but we already knew that. Their version of what did happen is not very convincing.

The authors expend too much effort retelling the readily available and well known biblical stories, and not enough effort in documenting their claims. It is always good to get several points of view and additional evidence on a subject, but this narrative consists mostly of reciting passages from the Old Testament and then asserting "it didn't happen."

It is indeed hard to provide evidence if most of your arguments are based on negative findings. Since they could find no evidence of a united Israelite kingdom at the time of the rule of King David, they insist there was none, and that the entire history of Israel was reinvented about 600 BC by King Josiah, who somehow managed to hypnotize everyone and convince them to forget the recent past and substitute a new one, for his own political purposes.

Unless you were raised in a fundamentalist or Orthodox Jewish household and educated in those traditions, you are not likely to find that the points made in this book are very revolutionary or upsetting. One might be justifiably skeptical about stories of 100 year old women giving birth, and walls coming down because someone blew a trumpet.

George Gershwin pointed out that "the things that you're liable, to read in the Bible, they ain't necessarily so." Some people carried this idea to an extreme. Previous generations of philologists and archeologists who "debunked" the myth of Troy, the existence of Sargon and the authenticity of all Biblical traditions got their their comeuppance when they were eventually refuted by the evidence.

If you are really interested in learning about biblical archaeology, this should not be your first book. If you are anxious to prove some dubious political point about the Palestine-Israel controversy, or you want to read another opinion about the old testament, this polemic may be of interest.

Two reviewers on these pages (Justin S and Shindore) dismiss this book because, they say, the authors continue to claim that King David is only myth notwithstanding clear evidence to the contrary. These readers haven't read very carefully. On page 129, the authors clearly state that the "House of David" inscription found in 1993 (apparently what those two reviewers are referring to) proves the historical reality of a King David. I found this book well written and enjoyable with a balance between "scientific fact" and reverence for "religious truth." Religious truth is not undercut because its "historical accuracy" is disproven by modern scientific research. The Bible authors had little concept of history as we know it. No wonder they didn't do a very good job of writing "history."

The fundamental thesis of this book is that modern archaeology demonstrates that the remains uncovered to date in the holy land suggest a much less developed world in early Iron Age Canaan than the biblical tales would indicate. What follows from this is that the supposition that the biblical tales of David and Solomon's unified Israelite kingdom may no longer be reliable and more, that the actual post Bronze Age flowering of culture in the area didn't take place until the development of the kingdom of Israel in the northern hills, contrary to the report in the Bible which tells us that the northern kingdom was the residual portion of a mighty empire, a breakaway tribal state established after the death of Solomon. What does this mean for our understanding of biblical history? Simply put, that the Bible would have been a product of a very different set of developments than the history it reports and thus its historical veracity is questionable at best. If Israel in the north was really the first kingdom, then whence came Judah, the state ruled by the so-called Davidic kings? According to the authors, Judah came later, as indicated in the archaeological record of the area, and only reached its height after the destruction of Israel, its more sophisticated and powerful northern neighbor, had been utterly destroyed by the Assyrian juggernaut. Refugees from the more cosmopolitan, and somewhat pagan, Israel fled into the wild and more inaccessible, and less resource-rich, hills of Judah and this infusion of more cultured people of a similar ethnic heritage led to an abrupt flowering of the Judahite land. In this context, with Judah suddenly experiencing a surge in its population and seeking to assert itself in the region, the newly combined population group, reflecting the rich skills of the new immigrants and their natural interest in the land they left behind, devised for itself a common history, including a legendary unified kingdom under the Davidic kings of Judah to justify a policy of expansion into the more or less abandoned lands of ancient Israel. This, in a nutshell, is the thesis of this book and from it the authors explore the implications for the entire biblical narrative. They weave a convincing tale although much depends on current and future finds in the archaeological tels of modern Israel and Palestine. If you hold the Bible to be absolute truth, then this book will not please you. But if you have an open mind and are interested in the possibilities, wherever they lead, and you're fascinated by biblical issues and tales, then this book is for you. -- SWM