At the Jubilee reception for Danish Biblical Archaelogy, Dr. Avraham Faust, Director and senior lecturer from Bar Ilan University, Ramat Gan in Israel, gave a lecture on The Jars of Shiloh and Israelite Society and Boundary Maintenance in the Period of the Settlement. This lecture celebrates the work of Danish excavator Hans Kjær, inspector and vice director of the Danish National Museum, whoose untimely death during the 1932 season at Shiloh end the first and only Danish excavation of The Holy Land.

The Jars from the Shilo 1929 season and the Early Israel: Among the finds from the Danish excavations at Shiloh were the first complete examples from a clear archaeological context of a very large storage jar, which came to be known as the collared-rim jar. The collared-rim jar was found mainly in the highlands, and subsequently most scholars identified it as a marker of the Israelite settlement in the Iron I. Due to various reasons, including the finding of such jars outside the area of the Israelite settlement, the association of the jar with the Israelites came into disfavor and most scholars today believe that the jar was popular because of its functional properties. Still, the various explanations fail to explain its qualities, for example its distribution in space (e.g., its complete absence in some regions and sites) and time (e.g., its disappearance, west of the Jordan River, during the beginning of the Iron Age II). The lecture will reexamine the Collared-Rim jar phenomenon and its relation to the Iron I society.

The Emergence of Israel. The second lecture was a more technical introduction to the new work by Avraham Faust, and it presents his monograph released by Equinox in April of 2007, and offered at a discount for the jubilee celebrations. The following is an abstract of the lecture:

The emergence of Israel is among the hottest debates in Biblical Archaeology. In the past, most scholars identified the inhabitants of the Iron Age I highlands settlements as Israelites (and their material culture was, accordingly, viewed as Israelite). While some scholars still follow this view today, many others have abandoned it. Some label the settlers "proto-Israelites", while others negate any associations between them and the Israelites, claiming that Israel became an ethnic group only later. The lecture will briefly review the debate, and will then outline a new and different approach to the study of the Israel's emergence in Canaan.