From the BBC: The remains of a huge 12,000 year old feast have been found in a cave in Northern Israel. Archaeologists working in Hilazon Tachtit found what they thought was a late Palaeolithic campsite, when they discovered tools and animal bones. However they soon realised they were looking at a large burial site, with [...]
From YU: The Yeshiva University Center for Israel Studies presents an international conference for Sunday and Monday, March 27-8, 2011, which will take place at Yeshiva University Museum and on our historic Washington Heights campus. The conference is titled: Talmuda de-Eretz Israel: Archaeology and the Rabbis in Late Antique Palestine. In the century since Samuel [...]
Biblia Hebraica continues to gather more reactions to the Khirbet Qeiyafa inscription. See here for his latest summary. He also links to this post by Christopher A. Rollston. Rollston categorically states that “[the] script of this ostracon is definitively NOT Old Hebrew” and offers the following sober reaction, emphasis added. Because of its state of [...]
As a follow-up to this post on a recently discovered Hebrew epigraphical text and the problems of its interpretation, one of the more famous examples of interpreting epigraphical texts through potentially Biblically-biased eyes comes to mind. For some years people felt that an Ugaritic text describing the cooking of a kid in its mother’s milk [...]
(photo courtesy of the University of Haifa) Never a dull moment for the history of the Hebrew language. A breakthrough in the research of the Hebrew scriptures has shed new light on the period in which the Bible was written. Prof. Gershon Galil of the Department of Biblical Studies at the University of Haifa has [...]
One place that I don’t miss visiting is Megiddo Prison. I had a number of stints of miluim (reserve duty) there and it was far from a pleasant place. Jeffrey Goldberg got a book from his prison guard stint and all I got was…the oldest Christian house of worship ever discovered! To be honest, while [...]
INN is reporting that archaeologists have discovered a synagogue dating from the late second temple period in Migdal/Magdala, north of Tiberias. See this press release and these posts. Below are some pictures from the Antiquities Authority. The article quotes Dina Avshalom-Gorni saying that this is the first time that a menorah decoration has been found [...]
It seems that another burial cave of a rabbi was discovered in Tzippori. (hat tip) See here for a previous post on epigraphical rabbis. Apparently this inscription is in Aramaic and says “This is the burial[place-MM] of Rabbi Yehoshua ben Levi ha-Kappar.” That he inscription says “Rabbi Yehoshua ben Levi ha-Kappar” leads some to think [...]
In 1981 Shaye J.D. Cohen wrote a very influential article “Epigraphical Rabbis” [The Jewish Quarterly Review, New Ser., Vol. 72, No. 1. (Jul., 1981), pp. 1-17]. In this article Cohen examines the names of rabbis for whom we have epigraphical evidence of their existence, comparing the “epigraphical” to the “literary” rabbis. His conclusions were that [...]
What a few weeks it has been for the study of the Dead Sea Scrolls. Scholarship suggesting the existence of the Essenes, a religious Jewish group that lived in the Judea before the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE, is wrong, according to Prof. Rachel Elior, whose study on the subject will be [...]
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