William G. Dever

William Gwinn Dever, an American archaeologist and historian of the ancient Near East, is one of the leading excavators of the land of Israel: he directed the Harvard Semitic Museum and Hebrew Union College digs at Gezer between 1966 and 1990, the excavations at Khirbet el-Kôm and Jebel Qacaqir, and the work at Tell el-Hayyat in Jordan, and he was Professor of Near Eastern archaeology and anthropology at the University of Arizona from 1975 to 2002 before becoming Distinguished Professor at Lycoming College.

His research on the history of Israel and Judah in biblical times, and on finds such as the Asherah figurines, has shaped the modern debate on what archaeology can and cannot confirm of the biblical text. The son of an evangelical pastor, raised an evangelical and for a time an evangelical preacher himself, he took a bachelor of divinity in 1959 and a doctorate at Harvard in 1966, then rejected Christianity and converted to Reform Judaism; he says today that he is a secular humanist and a non-theist — a trajectory it is only honest to state as he states it himself.