Dale Manor
“Archaeology and the Psalter”
Dale W. Manor, Professor Emeritus of Archaeology and Bible at Harding, earned his M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Arizona in Biblical Archaeology with a minor in Hebrew Bible. His undergraduate education was at Freed-Hardeman and Pepperdine. He also has an M.A. in humanities from the California State University at Dominguez Hills.
Dale met Sharon Reynolds of Toney, Alabama on the first night of freshman orientation at Freed-Hardeman and they have been married for 53 years. They have two children, Cynthia Diaz of Tucson, Arizona, and Elijah Manor, of Nashville, Tennessee. They have six grandchildren.
Manor served as a full-time minister while still a student at Freed-Hardeman and preached full-time for over twenty-five years before his employment at Harding. His work was primarily in southern California and Arizona. Manor taught at Harding for 24 years where he was twice awarded a “Teacher Achievement Award.”
Dr. Manor has 24 seasons of experience in field archaeology. Since the year 2000, he has been the Field Director of the Tel Beth-Shemesh excavation project in Israel. He has also served on the staffs of the Tel Miqne/Ekron excavation as well as the Tel Rehov project in Israel. He has also excavated at Tel Dan and Ketef Hinnom near Jerusalem. Additional work includes an archaeological survey in the Negev of Israel. He has made a total of 30 trips to Israel and five times has been a faculty member at Harding’s semester-long study program in Greece, which also took him to other points in the Mediterranean basin.
In 1988-89, he was the Kress Fellow at the Albright Institute of Archaeological Research in Jerusalem and from 2000-2012 was the organizer and chair of the session on “Hebrew Bible, History and Archaeology” for the international conference of the American Schools of Oriental Research. A book entitled Digging Deeper into the Word (Warren Christian Apologetics Center) was released in November 2015, and deals with aspects of archaeology and the Bible. He worked as an Assistant to the Editor for the Anchor Bible Dictionary (Doubleday 1992) editing some 450 articles on archaeology and historical geography that appear in the six-volume publication. In addition, he authored twelve articles that appear in the dictionary. He is also published in the Oxford Encyclopedia of Archaeology in the Near East (Oxford, 1997), the Oxford Encyclopedia of the Bible and Archaeology (2013), the Eerdmans Dictionary of the Bible (Eerdmans 2000), and the New Interpreters’ Dictionary of the Bible (Abingdon 2008-2009). He has written the introductions for the historical books in the Old Testament Introduction for College Press (2005), as well as a chapter on the relationship of archaeology to the Bible. In addition, he wrote the chapter on Ruth in the Zondervan Illustrated Biblical Background Commentary on the Old Testament (Grand Rapids, 2009) notes of which also appear in the NIV and NKJV Cultural Backgrounds Study Bibles (Zondervan, 2016 and 2017 respectively). He currently is working on the second major volume of the excavations of the work at Tel Beth-Shemesh to be published by the Institute of Archaeology at the Tel Aviv University.
