J. Randall Price

Overview

J. Randall Price is an American biblical archaeologist, Distinguished Research Professor and Executive Director of the Center for Judaic Studies at Liberty University. He founded World of the Bible Ministries in 1993 and has served as its president since.

Academic Career

Price holds a master of theology in Old Testament and Semitic languages from Dallas Theological Seminary and a doctorate in Middle Eastern studies from the University of Texas at Austin, and did graduate work in Semitic languages and archaeology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

Qumran

He has directed excavations on the plateau of Khirbet Qumran since 2002. In 2017, with Oren Gutfeld of the Hebrew University, he co-directed the excavation of a cave in the cliffs west of Qumran that yielded broken storage jars, scroll wrappings and string, but no scrolls, together with iron pickaxe heads from the 1950s, evidence that the cave had been emptied by looters. Liberty University described it as the first discovery related to the Dead Sea Scrolls in sixty years. He has written widely on the Dead Sea Scrolls, including Secrets of the Dead Sea Scrolls (1996).

Jericho

Price has argued that the archaeological evidence from Jericho, at Tell es-Sultan, supports a destruction in the Late Bronze Age, consistent with the biblical date of about 1406 BC, and that Kathleen Kenyon's earlier dating rested on an incomplete reading of the pottery, drawing on the work of Bryant G. Wood.