On Friday, Hershel Shanks, the founder and long-time editor of the Biblical Archaeological Review, died at the age of ninety. A lawyer by training, Shanks since 1974 devoted himself to promoting the study of ancient Israel and making the latest scholarship accessible to the general public, earning the respect of many leading academics. His persistent efforts are largely responsible for freeing the Dead Sea Scrolls from the jealous guardianship of a small group of scholars, and their eventual publication. A moving tribute to Shanks by Christopher Rollston, an expert on ancient Hebrew inscriptions, can be found here.

While Shanks provided a forum for a variety of opinions in the pages of his journal, he also fought passionately against postmodernism as well as efforts to undermine, without scholarly basis, the Jewish and biblical connection to the Land of Israel. In a 1986 article in Commentary, he took to task Glen Bowersock, the former chairman of Harvard’s classics department, for accusing Israeli archaeologists of “tampering with history in the interest of the present,” of “tendentious falsification,” and of efforts to “suppress” inconvenient discoveries. Shanks, after methodically dismantling the specific charges, observed:

[A]lthough it is certainly true that Israelis are especially concerned with their own history, just as Arabs are especially concerned with theirs, the implications to be drawn from this are not those drawn by Bowersock—who in any case finds nothing but words of praise for such a “bias” when it appears in Arab scholarship. Jordan, he observes, has “provided enlightened support for research and excavation in pre-Islamic fields, with particular attention to the culture of the Nabateans who were the Arabs who preceded the Romans in the region.” Bowersock even lauds the Syrians and the Saudis.

[Yet as Bowersock is unwilling to acknowledge], Israeli scholars have made an enormous contribution to the study of early Arab cultures. Benjamin Mazar and Meir Ben-Dov have uncovered, and restored, previously unknown Arab palaces at the foot of the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. Abraham Negev, [a victim of Bowersock’s slanders], has excavated, and restored, several Nabatean sites in Israel’s Negev desert. Israeli scholars have made singular contributions to Islamic studies.

By contrast, the way in which Arab scholars deal with issues touching on Jewish history may be gleaned from an account in the Syria Times of a symposium in Damascus on Syrian archeology. According to this account, “All participants in the symposium emphasized that Hebrew, regardless of the suspect political purposes of Zionist allegations, is no more than a Canaanite dialect.” The symposium concluded that “The Canaanite heritage was the real source of Jewish legends. The Jewish rabbis plagiarized that precious treasure.”

It is, indeed, as Glen Bowersock writes, disturbing to see scholarship at the highest and most respected level made the dirty handmaiden of politics. It is especially chilling when, as in his own case, the accuser turns out to be the guilty party.

Israel will likely respond directly against Iran after yesterday’s attack, and has made known that it will calibrate its retaliation based not on the extent of the damage, but on the scale of the attack. The specifics are anyone’s guess, but Edward Luttwak has a suggestion, put forth in an article published just hours before the missile barrage: cut off Tehran’s ability to send money and arms to Shiite Arab militias.

In practice, most of this cash comes from a single source: oil. . . . In other words, the flow of dollars that sustains Israel’s enemies, and which has caused so much trouble to Western interests from the Syrian desert to the Red Sea, emanates almost entirely from the oil loaded onto tankers at the export terminal on Khark Island, a speck of land about 25 kilometers off Iran’s southern coast. Benjamin Netanyahu warned in his recent speech to the UN General Assembly that Israel’s “long arm” can reach them too. Indeed, Khark’s location in the Persian Gulf is relatively close. At 1,516 kilometers from Israel’s main airbase, it’s far closer than the Houthis’ main oil import terminal at Hodeida in Yemen—a place that was destroyed by Israeli jets in July, and attacked again [on Sunday].