In another case, again at kids’ eye level, are tiny gold ingots and gold flakes whose glitter evokes in kids and adults alike those subtle stirrings about acquisitions and wealth.
As the visitor turns a final corner, there is a swift intake of the breath before a perfect replica of a skeletal form, lying in the sand, along with his grave goods of food, scarab jewelry, amphora, bowls, and offerings. Bury me with my fathers in the cave that is in the field of Ephron, the Hittite, says Genesis 49:29. The subject here is death and burial, a subject which Western civilization has pushed out of sight, as if modern medicine and a youth culture could “disappear” death.
For the ancients of Beth Shemesh, excavated in 1929, death was not an absence but a presence, and the terracotta sarcophagus lids, circa 1175 B.C., with their beautiful, outsized faces, modeled in the natural style or the exaggerated “grotesque” style, are utterly compelling.
Communal tombs were also uncovered, containing several generations of a family line, and among the findings displayed here -- in ivory, alabaster, and bronze -- are toggle pins, mirrors, and cosmetic spoons. One culminates with the head of a duck and another with the trailing curly locks of a swimming girl. There are even tweezers so much like our drugstore tweezers today that the alikeness of human impulses and solutions erases the 2,800 years between then and now.
And finally, there is the small fragment of an 8th century B.C. Judean clay figurine from Beth Shean in which a mother wearing a necklace and bearing a tambourine, holds a clinging naked infant in her left arm. Such tender embraces are rarely represented in ancient art, yet here she is, from time immemorial, both Everywoman with her infant and the Madonna and Child.
Whenever we “meet the people” through their artifacts in a museum, we are, after all, being given another chance another way of meeting ourselves....
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