I’m thinking about arranging a lunch, with anyone on the blog who is interested and will be in Boston on Thursday November 16 for the Biblical Archaeology Society FEST — or who will be there for any other reason!   Would you be interested?

Here’s the deal.  The Biblical Archaeology Society (BAS) is a great organization, which brings knowledge about the Bible and especially about relevant archaeological digs to a wider interested public.  Every year – for twenty years now — they hold a special conference for anyone interested in such things, that they call the FEST.  For the FEST they bring in over 20 scholars to give talks over the course of three days.  A few of the scholars are mainly biblical types, like, me, and a lot of them are active archaeologists, some of the top ones in the world.

Here is the information for this year’s FEST.    https://travelstudy.bib-arch.org/seminars/20th-annual-bible-and-archaeology-fest

I have done the FEST every year, and I always have an arrangement with them to do the first talk on the Friday morning (the first day).   Like all the other scholars there, I will be attending the annual Society of Biblical Literature meeting that always meets in the same city (the Biblical Archaeology Society sets up their FEST to coincide with the SBL so that the scholars will all be available anyway).  The SBL is not for interested lay folk, but is a scholarly meeting with scholars reading academic papers that most humans on the planet would find mindlessly boring.   But it is my big annual meeting that I’ve attended every year since the early 1980s.

Anyway, I’ll be in Boston for the SBL, and once again have agreed to do a talk at the BAS  FEST, first thing Friday morning (Novemeber 17).   I have some other things I’ll need to be doing in Boston and it occurs to me: why not have a lunch with anyone who’s interested from the blog, who is going to the BAS FEST anyway or who is in the area?   We could all meet and talk about anything of interest for a couple of hours.  Why not?  It would be on Thursday November 16 around noon.  I’ll be staying at the Omni Parker House and so it would be somewhere near there.

So that’s what I’m suggesting, and I’ll do it if anyone is interested.  Are you interested?  It would be a chance for you to pick my brain and to hang out in each others’ glowing company.   Please let me know – just send me an email at [email protected].