Lawrence E. Stager, a pre-eminent American archaeologist who unearthed evidence that anxious ancient Israelites sinned by worshiping a “golden calf,” just as the Bible said, and who helped redeem the vulgar reputation of Goliath and his fellow Philistines, died on Friday at his home in Concord, Mass. He was 74.

The cause was injuries from a fall, his daughter, Jennifer Stager, said.

Captivated while excavating an Israeli site on a postgraduate fellowship, Dr. Stager decided against a legal career to pursue biblical archaeology. He donned an improvised fedora and packed a Bowie knife to became a rumpled, roly-poly incarnation of Indiana Jones.

In 1990 Dr. Stager, a Midwest farmer’s son, immediately recognized a bronze figurine found in dusty Canaanite ruins dating to the second millennium B.C. as a bull calf.

The four-and-a-half-inch-long icon, found by Dr. Stager’s team as it cleared rubble at a ruined temple in Ashkelon, on the Mediterranean Sea south of Tel Aviv, was similar to the golden idols that God inveighed against in Old Testament accounts of the 40 days that Moses spent on Mount Sinai receiving the Ten Commandments.