Tonight I thought I would share a little bit more of the Research Reading that I am doing to prepare for future wanderings.

Most of you already know that I am preparing for a trip this summer to participate in an archaeological dig at Lacish. I shared my main source of research reading for the trip in my post Research Reading II.

I am also preparing class material for a Sunday morning class that I will teach starting in July. The class will be on Joshua, Judges and Ruth. I have written a series of posts on these book, but I never quite made it all the way through Judges. One of my goals is to complete my Walls of Jericho series while teaching the course.

I picked up The Ancient Near East by Clarice Swisher at the library. This book will give me a broad overview of the setting for the events at the time of Joshua and the Judges.

The Assyrian Empire by Don Nardo is also in the World History Series and will help me better understand the Assyrian Empire which plays a pivotal part in the history of Lachish.

I have skimmed through the content of these two books and there is a lot of overlap between them. However, I am sure that I can pick up some important information when I read them.

I pulled the next two book from my own shelves at home.

Archaeology and the Old Testament by J. A. Thompson was published in 1957, so definitely does not have the latest information. However, I find that reading older books about a subject will often give an interesting perspective.

This reminds me of a project that I did in Junior High where our teacher had us make a family tree of man while we were studying evolution. I found the oldest possible sources and combined that information with more current findings. Of course the current findings from that time have now been invalidated. Luckily the teacher gave me a good grade since I was showing that the understanding of scientific research changes over time when new facts or new analysis methods are discovered. The same is true with Archaeology.

Discovering the Biblical World by Harry Thomas Frank was published in 1975. This book was published only 18 years after the one above, but there were many new finds during that time period.

The book is full of maps and pictures. I found it interesting to compare the pictures taken at that time with what I saw when I visited some of the same places in 2012.

Which book should I dig into first?

Steven