Gabriel Barkay, a leading figure in biblical archaeology whose many discoveries in and around Jerusalem, including a pair of silver amulets from the seventh century B.C. that contained a priestly inscription, changed how historians understood early Jewish life, died on Sunday in Jerusalem. He was 81.
His daughter, Naama Barkay, said his death, in a care facility, was from complications of an autoimmune disease.
Dr. Barkay, whose name was sometimes written Barkai, spent more than 50 years leading some of the most important digs into the ancient history of central Israel, a record that earned him a reputation as the “dean” of biblical archaeologists.
Zachi Dvira, an archaeologist and former student of his, wrote in a biographical essay for Dr. Barkay’s 80th birthday that he “believes that archaeology serves as a vital link between the past and the present, and he embodies this principle through his actions.”
Dr. Barkay was especially interested in how the region’s earliest residents treated the dead. During the late 1970s, he examined a network of burial caves carved into the hills southwest of Jerusalem, where he found a pair of amulets containing scrolls from the mid-600s B.C..
It took years to figure out how to unravel the scrolls without ruining their script, but when they were finally opened and the Paleo-Hebrew text was translated, in 1986, Dr. Barkay found that they contained a priestly benediction from the Old Testament book of Numbers. It was the oldest instance of writing from the Bible — and evidence, he argued, that the writing of the Old Testament began several centuries earlier than many historians had thought.
When it came to the history of Jerusalem itself, Dr. Barkay considered himself a “maximalist” in the debate over the ancient city’s size and importance. He used the placement of burial sites, which had to be set a specific distance outside the city walls, to show that it was much larger than the so-called minimalists had argued.
Dr. Barkay was very much a public-facing archaeologist, offering his expert opinion in TV series like “The Naked Archaeologist” and documentaries like “The Real Da Vinci Code.” He gave frequent public lectures and offered training for tour guides around the Old City of Jerusalem.
He was also something of an activist: In 2000, after the Israeli government refused to stop a Muslim organization, the Waqf, from digging out space for a subterranean mosque on the holy site in Jerusalem known to Jews as the Temple Mount, he and several other archaeologists formed the Committee for the Prevention of the Destruction of Antiquities on the Temple Mount.
They did not oppose the mosque, they said, but rather the lack of archaeologists’ involvement in a project involving the removal of thousands of tons of earth.
In 2005, he and others founded the Temple Mount Sifting Project, a crowdsourced program to examine the estimated 400 truckloads of dirt taken from the site. Since then, volunteers have identified about a half-million artifacts.
The project was sometimes criticized as a tool of right-wing Israeli governments eager to establish historical claim to the Temple Mount, which is a holy site for Jews, Muslims and Christians but is primarily controlled by the Waqf.
But Dr. Barkay insisted that his interest was purely intellectual.
“Sneezing in Jerusalem is an intensive political activity,” he told The Times of Israel in 2019. “You could turn your head to the right, or the left.”
Gabriel Breslauer was born in Budapest on June 20, 1944, soon after Nazi Germany occupied the city. He and his mother, Rosa (Legaty) Breslauer, were forced into the newly created ghetto and barely escaped a death march to Vienna, saved only by the liberation of Budapest by Soviet troops in January 1945.
“I owe my life to the Russian army, to nobody else than Joseph Stalin,” he said in a 2023 interview. “Many others owe him their death; I owe him my life.”
His father, Eliezer Breslauer, had already been sent to a camp in Ukraine, though he survived and later rejoined the family. Mr. Breslauer later worked for the Jewish Agency, which facilitated emigration to Israel. Gabriel and his parents emigrated themselves in 1950, settling in Jerusalem, and they changed their surname to Barkay.
As a child, he was taken with the empty, arid stretches of land outside the city that, he knew, bore the imprint of millenniums of human habitation. By 10, he was conducting his own digs, and a few years later, he joined the Israel Exploration Society, an amateur archaeological club.
He received his bachelor’s degree in archaeology and geography from Hebrew University in 1967 and his doctorate in archaeology from Tel Aviv University in 1985.
By then, he was already a veteran archaeologist, with a series of digs in Israel, Egypt and Iran to his name. He was a popular lecturer as well, first at Tel Aviv University and later at Bar-Ilan University and Jerusalem University College.
Dr. Barkay’s first marriage ended in divorce. Along with his daughter, from his first marriage, he is survived by a son from that marriage, Elad; his partner, Esther Yerushalem; and six grandchildren.
Dr. Barkay insisted that archaeology was not just about the past, but was also a tool for examining the way history reaches up into the present through the materials people left behind. And he remained in thrall with Jerusalem, one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities in the world.
“This is my 56th year in Jerusalem,” he said in a 2006 lecture at Bar-Ilan. “I know the city. But every day, I discover there is more and more to be known about it.”
Robert Berman contributed reporting.
Clay Risen is a Times reporter on the Obituaries desk.
The post Gabriel Barkay, 81, Dies; His Discoveries Revised Biblical History appeared first on New York Times.
