Meetings to map out a “journey into modern manhood” will start Tuesday.

Lawrence Stager, a pre-eminent U.S. archaeologist who unearthed evidence that ancient Israelites worshipped a “golden calf,” as was described in the Bible, and who helped redeem the reputation of Goliath and his fellow Philistines, died Dec. 29 at his home in Concord, Mass. He was 74.

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

Captivated while excavating an Israeli site on a postgraduate fellowship, Stager decided against a legal career and pursued biblical archaeology instead.

In 1990, 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 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.

The discovery squared with the earliest legends of Judaism and biblical accounts of Jerusalem’s rivalry with the calf-worshipping Hebrew king Jeroboam.

“Stager has been a formidable influence upon the history and archaeology of the Eastern Mediterranean and the Levant for more than 30 years,” Jeff Hudon, a biblical historian, wrote in the journal Seminary Studies in 2010, “both through his own research and indirectly through his students.”

In addition to his wife and his daughter, Stager is survived by a son, David, and four grandchildren.