Dr. James Tabor is a retired Professor in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina in Charlotte where he taught Christian origins and ancient Judaism for thirty-three years, serving as Chair of the Department for a decade. His Ph.D. is from the University of Chicago (1981). He previously taught at the University of Notre Dame and at the College of William and Mary.
Dr. Tabor now devotes himself full-time to research, archaeological field work, and publishing. Over the past three decades he has combined his work on ancient texts with extensive field work in archaeology in Israel and Jordan. Since 2008 he has been co-director, along with Shimon Gibson, of the acclaimed Mt. Zion excavation in Jerusalem and been involved in a half dozen other archaeological projects in the Holy Land over the past thirty years.
Dr. Tabor has worked at several sites in Israel and Jordan including Qumran, site of the Dead Sea Scrolls (1991, 1996), Wadi el-Yabis in Jordan (1992, 1996), Masada (1994), and Sepphoris (1996, 1999, 2000). In 2000 he teamed up with Dr. Shimon Gibson to excavate a newly discovered cave at Suba, west of Jerusalem that dates back to the Iron Age but was used for ritual rites in the early Roman period (2000−2006). Tabor and Gibson were also the principals involved in the discovery a 1st century Jewish burial shroud in a looted tomb at Akeldama. Their latest project is an ongoing excavation in Jerusalem on Mt Zion (Southwestern Hill) just outside Mt Zion Gate along the Turkish city wall (2006−2022).
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