The Israel Antiquities Authority has posted the preliminary report (pdf) of the Qumran excavations (1993-2004) by Yitzhak Magen and Yuval Peleg.  You may recall that a recent article in Biblical Archaeology Review indicated that these archaeologists conclude that Qumran was a pottery manufacturing site, not the home of the Essenes.  They state their motivation for this report in the preface:

We felt it necessary to separately publish this article due to the fact that until now, most of the discussion regarding our new theory on the nature of the site has been in newspapers–in articles not initiated by us–and has been based upon unsubstantiated evidence from certain scholars.

The report is well written and illustrated with many beautiful photographs and drawings.

In yesterday’s Asia Minor Report, Mark Wilson has good news for those books you can buy only in Turkey:

Purchasing books published in Turkey has been difficult for scholars not living in Turkey.  However, Ahmet Boratav of Ege Yayınları has just made ordering such books easier. His web site (www.zerobooksonline.com) is now available in English and features thousands of books, journals, and magazines. The home page features the Bookseller’s Choices as well as recent releases.

Registered surface shipping is included in the price for orders placed from anywhere outside of Turkey.

I sent out the December 2007 issue of the newsletter today.  If you thought you were subscribed but did not receive it, here are a few suggestions:

1. Check your spam box.  Despite the fact that neither I, nor the newsletter distribution company, ever practice anything but the highest ethics in regard to email, some spam filters stop the newsletter.

2. Consider whether you are subscribed at your current email address.  If you’ve moved in the last year and changed addresses, you can fix that easily by subscribing with your new address here.

3. Maybe you never subscribed at all.  There’s an easy fix here.

Even if you do #2 or #3, you will not get today’s newsletter automatically sent to you.  If you would like that, you can send me an email at tbolen81 at bibleplaces dot com [spelled out because I get and hate spam too], and I’ll send you one.  But I won’t be able to send it until the end of the week, as I’m busy until then.

I love Google Earth, and with the help of a friend, have located most important biblical sites and many other historical sites as well.  I have hopes of getting them in sufficient order to share, but time has not yet permitted.  (I know that there are places on the web that distribute files with the locations but some that I have looked at are not reliable.)  But a friend just let me know that some of the terrain is Turkey is much improved.  So if you’ve looked in the past, you might try again.  Ephesus looks great, and there’s finally sufficient resolution to see Colossae.  A few more for fun: Laodicea, Antioch on the Orontes, Haran, and Carchemish.  (The links are kmz files which you can import into Google Earth for the site’s location.)

I’ve updated the post about this below, listing the differences with it and The Sacred Bridge.  Eisenbrauns skipped the Evangelical Theological Society conference in San Diego last week, so I didn’t get to see the book myself.  I hope this doesn’t mean that Eisenbrauns is losing interest in the evangelical market.

Carta’s New Century Handbook and Atlas of the Bible has arrived at Eisenbrauns.  Because this is a shorter version of The Sacred Bridge, it’s been dubbed by some as “The Sacred Abridgement.”  The longer volume costs $100; the shorter is $50.  The length though is more than half, and I’m sure there’s plenty of “bang for the buck.”  I haven’t seen it, but based on the longer version, I’m sure that it will be a superb resource.

The publisher’s description says this:

The object of this concise version is to augment the personal Bible study of all who seek a straightforward understanding of biblical history. Nevertheless, the reader will still have the sense that sacred history came about in a real world, a realm illumined by a multitude of discoveries and studies during the past two hundred years. Furthermore, the geographical dimension of the Bible accounts is being thoroughly presented. Every Bible student may thus put himself in the ancient reality and feel the events as they were experienced by the ancient Israelites and their neighbors.

UPDATE (11/19): Author Anson Rainey told a friend of mine that the differences between the two editions are these:

1) Bibliography and in-text references removed in shorter edition

2) Original language texts removed but translations remain

3) Two chapters on Bronze Age reduced to one

4) Typographical errors corrected

Thus it seems that with CNCHAB you get about 80% of the content for 50% of the price.