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March 10, 2009
 Dr. Eric Cline, associate professor of Classics and of Anthropology in the Judaic Studies Program at The George Washington University in Washington, D.C., will be the featured speaker for the annual Goldstein Lecture to be held at 7 p.m. on Thursday, March 19, in Klinger-Neal Theatre, 3700 Peters Avenue.
Cline’s talk will be entitled “The Battles of Armageddon: From the Bronze Age to the Nuclear Age.”
Aside from his lecture on the Morningside campus, Cline will also present a talk on “Jerusalem Besieged: 4,000 Years of Conflict in the City of Peace” during the 7:30 p.m. Shabbat Service at Congregation Beth Shalom, 815 38th Street, on Friday, March 20.
The Goldstein Lecture is co-sponsored by Morningside’s Academic and Cultural Arts Series (ACAS) and the Jewish Federation of Sioux City. The Goldstein Lectures are made possible through a permanent endowment provided by the Harold and Bernice Goldstein Foundation.
Cline’s address at the Shabbat Service is sponsored by Congregation Beth Shalom and the Jewish Federation of Sioux City.
Both events are free and open to the public.
Cline’s lecture at Morningside will focus on the military history of the ancient site of Megiddo and the adjacent areas of Israel’s Jezreel Valley. The name Armageddon derives from the Hebrew word Har Megiddo and literally means “the mount of Megiddo.” The Megiddo-Jezreel Valley region is one of the bloodiest sites in the world and has seen at least 34 battles over the last 4,000 years, including those fought by historical figures such as Pharaoh Thutmose III, Jezebel, Napoleon, and General Allenby. It is also where the Book of Revelation says the penultimate battle between good and evil will take place.
Cline, a former Fulbright Scholar and an award-winning teacher and author, currently serves as chair of the department of Classical and Semitic Languages and Literatures at George Washington, where he holds a joint appointment as a professor in both the Classics/Semitics and Anthropology departments. He is also the advisor for the undergraduate majors in Archaeology, for which he received George Washington’s 2006 Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Departmental Advising. He received George Washington’s Morton Bender Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching in 2004 and the national Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching Award in 2005 from the Archaeological Institute of America.
His primary fields of study are the military history of the Mediterranean world and the international connections between Greece, Egypt, and the Near East during the Late Bronze Age (1700-1100 BCE). He is an experienced field archaeologist with 25 seasons of excavation and survey to his credit since 1980, including seven seasons at the site of Megiddo in Israel.
Cline is a prolific researcher and author with eight books and 70 articles to his credit. He is best known for his book “The Battles of Armageddon: Megiddo and the Jezreel Valley from the Bronze Age to the Nuclear Age,” which was published by the University of Michigan Press in 2000 and received the 2001 Biblical Archaeology Society’s Publication Award for Best Popular Book on Archaeology. His most recent book is “From Eden to Exile: Unraveling Mysteries of the Bible,” which was published by the National Geographic Society in 2007.
He holds degrees in Classical Archaeology, Near Eastern Archaeology, and Ancient History from Dartmouth College, Yale University, and the University of Pennsylvania, respectively. Cline previously taught at Stanford University, Xavier University, the University of Cincinnati, and California State University-Fresno.
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