Word: yadin
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...hardwood floors are the clincher. Looking around Yadin Shemmer's apartment, I can handle the fax machine in the kitchen, the antique-looking toy cars, the huge red leather couch in the living room. But hardwood floors? In a spacious two-bedroom apartment, in a swanky building on the Upper West Side? A building with a doorman? For a 24-year...
...Yadin Shemmer is sprawled on the couch with his morning orange juice, looking crisp in a blue dress shirt, khakis and slicked-back hair. After graduating from the University of Pennsylvania in 1998, Yadin moved to the city to work as an analyst for Broadview, a boutique investment bank specializing in high-tech firms. There are thousands of young people like him in New York, working a two-year stint in finance, sporting dress shoes and bulging billfolds. From the outside it looks like the lifestyle of a GAP ad--urban excitement plus youth plus heaps of money...
Albright's intellectual heirs, including Israeli archaeologists Avraham Biran and the late Yigael Yadin, made similar assumptions. Said Yadin a few years before his death in 1984: "The Old Testament for me is a guide. It is the authentic history of my people." The Bible says, for example, that King Solomon fortified the cities of Hazor, Gezer and Megiddo during his reign. Sure enough, Yadin went out in the late 1950s and found a city gate at the ruins of Hazor, and dated it to Solomon's time, in the 10th century B.C. When he found that early explorers...
Modern critics point out that this approach can be scientifically perilous. Says John Woodhead, assistant director of the British School of Archaeology in Jerusalem: "It's a circular argument. Yadin used the data to prove the verse, and the verse to prove the dating of the cities." In fact, says David Ussishkin, director of the Tel Aviv University Institute of Archaeology, the gates at the the three cities don't come from a single period at all. "Hazor is probably Solomonic," he says. "Megiddo is definitely later. Gezer is either/or...
Many scholars believe the archive must exist, though, and Yigael Yadin even thought he knew where it was: in the ancient city of Hazor, in northern Galilee. At his death, Yadin was planning a major dig there to find the clay tablets he was sure lay hidden beneath the surface. His protege, Ben-Tor, has inherited the project. To date, Ben-Tor has found only a few uninformative tablets. But Hazor is the largest biblical site in the country, and it will take years of digging to explore it fully...