It’s a shame that Hershel Shanks didn’t do his research and fact-checking properly before he wrote his First Person editorial (“In Defense of Eilat Mazar,” March/April 2008) dragging people’s names through the mud. Had he really paid attention to what was said on the National Geographic blog to which he refers in his column, he would have noticed that my comment—about being wary of anyone claiming on a Web site or in multiple publications to have found more than one thing from the Bible was not made in connection with Eilat Mazar and her discoveries, but in connection with the various amateur enthusiasts who have claimed to find Noah’s Ark, the Ark of the Covenant, Sodom and Gomorrah, etc. That is one of the major points of my book From Eden to Exile: Unraveling Mysteries of the Bible (National Geographic, 2007).