William G. Dever

He was Professor of Near Eastern Archaeology and Anthropology at the University of Arizona in Tucson from 1975 to 2002. He is a Distinguished Professor of Near Eastern Archaeology at Lycoming College in Pennsylvania. Dever earned his B.A. from Milligan College in 1955, an M.A. from Butler University in 1959, and a B.D. from the Christian Theological Seminary in 1959. He received his PhD from Harvard University in 1966. He describes himself as "an unreconstructed traditionalist by temperament and training." Dever was director of the Harvard Semitic Museum–Hebrew Union College excavations at Gezer in 1966–1971, 1984, and 1990; director of the dig at Khirbet el-Kôm and Jebel Qaaqir (West Bank) 1967–1971; principal investigator at Tell el-Hayyat excavations (Jordan) 1981–1985, and assistant director, University of Arizona Expedition to Idalion, Cyprus, 1991, among other excavations. He used his background in Near Eastern field archaeology to argue, in Did God Have a Wife? Archaeology and Folk Religion in Ancient Israel (2005), for the persistence of the veneration of Asherah in the everyday religion of "ordinary people" in ancient Israel and Judah.