Ehud Netzer, 76, archeologist who found Herod's tomb

Beginning in the 1960s, Mr. Netzer took part in the excavation of Masada, one of Israel’s most famous digs. There, archeologists revealed the scene of a standoff between Roman legionnaires and Jewish rebels after the destruction of Jerusalem’s second Jewish temple, also built by Herod, in 70 AD. The siege famously ended when the Jews committed mass suicide.

But Mr. Netzer was best known for excavating Herodion, Herod’s winter palace, located in a largely man-made hill near the Palestinian city of Bethlehem. In 2007, after 35 years of work, he discovered what he identified as Herod’s tomb, shedding new light on the king and drawing international attention. Mr. Netzer’s team unearthed limestone fragments from an ornately carved sarcophagus with decorative urns of a type never before found in the Holy Land.

In an interview with the Associated Press in 2008, Mr. Netzer described the palace as a kind of country club, with a pool, baths, gardens, aqueducts, and a large theater.

Herod the Great was the father of Herod Antipas, the ruler from the New Testament account of the lives of Jesus and John the Baptist.

Mr. Netzer was speaking with colleagues at the site Sunday when a wooden safety railing broke and he fell several yards, suffering critical injuries, according to David Amit, a senior archeologist at the Israel Antiquities Authority. Mr. Netzer was rushed to a hospital but did not recover, he and died Thursday. His funeral was held yesterday.

Mr. Netzer helped shape Israeli archeology by leading some of the country’s biggest and most important digs and educating young archeologists as a professor at Hebrew University, Amit said.

“Ehud Netzer was a combination of a first-class field archeologist, an architect who could grasp the big picture of landscape and monumental buildings, and a man with the rare organizational abilities necessary to carry out excavations of great size,’’ Amit said.