c. 1997 Religion News Service

TEL REHOV, Israel _ Archeologist Ami Mazar’s constant companion _ and also the sponsor of this summer’s excavation _ is as unlikely a personality as his volunteer crew.

John Camp, a Pulitzer-prize-winning newspaperman turned novelist better known under the pen name of John Sandford, is the author of a best-selling series of 11 thriller novels, most based in Camp’s home of Minnesota.

A tall man with a bushy head of white hair covered by a floppy hat, Camp photographs and documents the process of the dig, and can often be seen after hours around the kibbutz camp quarters immersed in intense conversation with Mazar over the meaning of the day’s finds.

The writer first came to Israel on a two-week tour two years ago, but immediately was drawn to the rich layers of history he found here. He was introduced to Mazar by a tour guide and ultimately decided to dedicate some of the proceeds from his novels to furthering archaeological research in the land of the Bible.

Camp doesn’t do it for new book material.”That would spoil it,”he says,relaxing with a beer on a picnic bench at the volunteers’ small kibbutz camp after a day’s dig.

Rather the slow and patient unraveling of the archaeological mysteries of the Middle East serves as a welcome counterpoint to the pressure cooker demands of American suspense novel.

There’s also a quasi-spiritual dimension to Camp’s involvement in archaeology here, although he is hardly religious in the conventional sense of the term.”I’m a seriously lapsed Catholic,”said Camp.”Still, for anybody who grows up in Western civilization, the biblical names are familiar, the cultural baggage is there.”I was born during World War II, and I spent my first years of life living with my grandfather, while my father was in the Army. One of the major images I retain of my grandfather from my youth is of him sitting on the porch of his Iowa farmhouse, reading the Bible.” A longtime American history and archaeology buff, Camp discovered Middle Eastern history”working backwards.””American history led me into reading European medieval history, and that led to reading the history of the Ottoman Empire, which led to the Byzantine period. Eventually you end up back here,”he said.”When I first arrived in Israel, I was really overwhelmed by the history and the archaeology of this place, and what archaeologists are doing here.” Camp said he traveled the country”from its northernmost point to the southern tip of the Negev”looking at all of the archaeology.”A sort of collective memory begins to emerge. You relate to the names and the places. Like here, near where we’re sitting at the kibbutz is where King Saul was killed by the Philistines, and Jonathan, his son, was also killed. And then they were hung from the walls of Beit Shean _ in exactly the period we are digging at Tel Rehov nearby.” Camp’s interest in biblical history and archaeology also has led him to rediscover the richness of Old Testament Bible accounts of the period: Judges, Kings, Chronicles, Samuel, Ezra, are some of his favorites.”I’m not a religious person. But I read the Bible as a historical record,”he said. He also reads the text with a fiction writer’s eye for detail.”For instance, if I go to a bar, to do research for one of my novels, and write about what the bar looks like, and what the patrons look like, it has a more tactile quality to it, than if I just imagine the scene at home.”So, too, some of the Bible stories have that tactile quality of reality, although there are other stories which seem completely false.”Take, for instance, the story of Jacob wrestling with an angel. Such a story has feeling of something that really happened, whether it was a specific event, or a hallucination.”

DEA END FLETCHER