Hershel Shanks profiled in the NYT

HERSHEL SHANKS is profiled in the New York Times:

Shining a Light on Ancient Israel

By RICHARD BERNSTEIN
Published: June 16, 2010

NEW YORK — He’s not exactly a household name, but anybody who has been paying only intermittent attention to the tricky, contentious and occasionally litigious world of biblical archaeology will know that Hershel Shanks, who at the age of 80 has just published his autobiography, is the leading non-archaeologist in the field.

Mr. Shanks is the founder and editor of the Biblical Archaeology Review, a position from which he led the campaign a quarter-century ago to make the famed Dead Sea Scrolls available to pretty much any scholar who wanted to examine them — after forty years during which only members of a small and possessive group of experts were allowed access to them.

In acknowledgment of that, Mr. Shanks has titled his new book, the 21st he has either written or edited, “Freeing the Dead Sea Scrolls: And Other Adventures of an Archaeology Outsider.”

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