For the first time in recent years, the Pontifical Biblical Institute is offering its students the possibility of taking part in an archaeological excavation in the Holy Land. Four students have joined the Lautenschläger Expedition to Azekah, close to Beth Shemesh, where Fr Josef Mario Briffa SJ has been a member of the archaeological staff since 2014, and is presently Area Supervisor in Area N.

The expedition brings together an international time led by Prof Oded Lipschits and Prof Yuval Gadot of Tel Aviv University, and Prof Manfed Oeming of Heidelberg University. It is also an opportunity for working together as a team across international and religious boundaries, with members coming from Jewish, Christian (of various denominations), Druze and Muslim traditions, some of us heavily committed within our faith traditions, some complete secular, all in an atmosphere of mutual respect.

The weekend of 9/10 August, our students of the Pontifical Biblical Institute, as well as the team from Heidelberg under the direction of Prof Oeming, joined by some colleagues from Charles University in Prague, organised a series of visits and a moment of discussion.

On Friday 9, we first headed to Kiryat Yearim to visit the excavations headed there by Prof Israel Finkelstein of Tel Aviv University and Prof Thomas Römer of the Institut de France. Prof Finkelstein very kindly showed us around the excavations. We then visited the remains of an Iron Age Temple at Moza, where we were guided by Shua Kisilevitz, co-director of the excavations. We finished our visits with the site of Nabi Samwil.

It was the turn of Jerusalem on Saturday 10, with an archaeological visit to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, led by Fr Briffa. In the afternoon, the teams met at the Museum of the PBI for a discussion session on the issues of reading archaeology and Sacred Scripture.