Hershel Shanks (March 8, 1930 – February 5, 2021) was an American lawyer and amateur biblical archaeologist who was the founder and long-time editor of the Biblical Archaeology Review.
For more than forty years, he communicated the world of biblical archaeology to general readers through magazines, books, and conferences. Shanks was "probably the world's most influential amateur Biblical archaeologist," according to The New York Times book critic Richard Bernstein.[1]