Since this is our last year to excavate in the Elah valley in Israel, I made a short, up-close video of David’s battlefield with Goliath. You can “be there” as we go over the events of 1 Samuel 17.
Category Archives: Archaeology
Project #1: Archaeological Dig at Ashkelon, Israel
Trent and Rebekah reporting on the archaeological excavations at Ashkelon in Israel
Facebook site for Tell el-Amarna
Some archaeological projects have Facebook pages. Check out this one on the Egyptian site of Tell el-Amarna here.
This letter dates to the reign of Amenophis III (1391-1353 B.C.).
Ashkelon excavation underway
‘Tis the season for archaeological digs. At Ashkelon, the Leon Levy Expedition runs from June 8 – July 19 this year. It is sponsored by Harvard’s Semitic Museum, Boston College, Wheaton College, and Troy University.
I have two young friends, Trent and Rebekah, who are working in the dig. They will not be writing up any marvelous new discoveries that might be made. This is always reserved for the directors of a dig to announce, and then later to publish. My friends are sharing some general information about their participation in the dig as time permits. They are there as part of Dr. Daniel Master’s team from Wheaton College.
Trent has allowed me to use one of his photos of Grid 51. This is the Grid he has been working in during the past week. He informs me that this is about 1/4 mile southwest of the Canaanite Gate…
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More about Ephraim
Check out the other articles!
In the previous post we pointed out that Ephraim, where Jesus went a short time before His death (John 11:54), is identified with Taybeh on the edge of the wilderness.
Ephraim is included on the Madaba Map dating to about 560-565 A.D. Below is a photo of a portion of the Madaba Map. The large town with palm trees around it represents Jericho. Below Jericho the land color changes to black. The entry closest to Jericho, but a little to the right, is Ephraim.
According to the website dealing with The Madaba Map, provided by the Studium Biblicum Franciscanum – Jerusalem, the two lines of white lettering read,
Ephron also Ephraia, where went the Lord
Here is a larger cropped portion of the map identifying Ephron. If your Byzantine Greek is up to date, you can make out all of the words.
The inscription is located close to the wilderness, but…
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Old Torah Scroll Found in Italian University Library
Old Torah Scroll Found in Italian University Library
Old Torah scroll found in Italy university library
By NICOLE WINFIELD | Associated Press
View GalleryOldest known complete Torah found
ROME (AP) — An Italian expert in Hebrew manuscripts said Wednesday he has discovered the oldest known complete Torah scroll, a sheepskin document dating from 1155-1225. It was right under his nose, in the University of Bologna library, where it had been mistakenly catalogued a century ago as dating from the 17th century.
The find isn’t the oldest Torah text in the world: the Leningrad and the Aleppo bibles — both of them Hebrew codexes, or books — pre-date the Bologna scroll by more than 200 years. But this is the oldest Torah scroll of the Pentateuch, the five books of Moses, according to Mauro Perani, a professor of Hebrew in the University of Bologna’s cultural heritage department.
Two separate carbon-dating tests — performed by the University of Salento in Italy and the Radiocarbon Dating Laboratory at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign — confirmed the revised dating, according to a statement from the University of Bologna.
Such scrolls — this one is 36 meters (40 yards) long and 64 centimeters (25 inches) high — are brought out in synagogues on the Sabbath and holidays, and portions are read aloud in public. Few such scrolls have survived since old or damaged Torahs have to be buried or stored in a closed room in a synagogue.
In a telephone interview Wednesday, Perani said he was updating the library’s Hebrew manuscript catalogue when he stumbled upon the scroll in February. He said he immediately recognized the scroll had been wrongly dated by the last cataloguer in 1889, because he recognized that its script and other graphic notations were far older.
Specifically, he said the scroll doesn’t take into account the rabbinical rules that standardized how the Pentateuch should be copied that were established by Maimonides in the late 12th century. The scroll contains many features and markings that would be forbidden under those rules, he said.
The 1889 cataloguer, a Jew named Leonello Modona, had described the letters in the scroll as “an Italian script, rather clumsy-looking, in which certain letters, as well as the usual crowns and strokes show uncommon and strange appendices,” according to the University of Bologna release.
Perani, however, saw in the document an elegant script whose square letters were of Babylonian tradition, the statement said.
Perani told The Associated Press it was “completely normal” for a cataloguer to make such a mistake in the late 1800s, given the “science of manuscripts was not yet born.”
Outside experts said the finding was important, even though older Hebrew bibles do exist.
“It is fairly big news,” said James Aiken, a lecturer in Hebrew and Old Testament studies at Cambridge University. “Hebrew scholars get excited by very small things, but it certainly is important and clearly looks like a very beautiful scroll.”
However, Giovanni Garbini, a leading expert on ancient Semitic languages and retired professor at Rome’s La Sapienza university, said the discovery doesn’t change much about what the world knows about Hebrew manuscripts.
“It’s an example of an ancient scroll, but from the point of view of knowledge, it doesn’t change anything,” he said in a telephone interview.
But Stephen Phann, acting president of the University of the Holy Land in Jerusalem and an expert in ancient Jewish manuscripts, said if accurately dated, the scroll is a rare and important find. “We don’t have anything much from that period,” Phann said.
There are far older scraps of Torah scrolls that can be dated back to the 8th century, but Phann said it was rare to find a complete manuscript.
The find was also emotionally important, he said because the scroll, as opposed to a bound book, is used for reading Torah portions throughout the year in synagogue.
“It’s almost a friendship — that they have come to know the Torah scroll in their midst, and they draw their knowledge and focus on worship on how they live their daily life,” Phann said.
Perani said it remains a mystery how the scroll came to be part of the Bologna university library but that he anticipated further study would now begin.
The scroll remains in the library and doesn’t require any extra conservation precautions beyond what it already has, he said.
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Diaa Hadid contributed from Jerusalem.
Excavation of the Ophel continues
April 27 I was looking at the Ophel Excavations that are under the direction of Dr. Eilat Mazar. When I saw the tarp, I decided I would make a photo in hopes of learning something new in the future. The future is now.
According to The Key to David’s City, a web site devoted to the work of Herbert W. Armstrong College in Jerusalem, Dr. Mazar officially reopened the excavations on April 22.
In this continuation of the second phase Dr. Mazar will continue uncovering what she believes is a royal complex belonging to King Solomon, dated to the 10th century B.C.E., located at the foot of the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. As she works to expose more of this massive structure, the excavation will continue “to follow the remains of the First Temple Period along the line of the City Wall,” she told us.
The Key to David’s City
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A new tool for tour leaders
Check out THIS book!
Near the end of January when I received my copy of The Satellite Bible Atlas, I decided that I would secure a copy for each member of my April tour group. Arrangements were made to have the books delivered to my tour operator in Jerusalem so that they would be available for use by the group at the beginning of the tour.
Ideally, it would be good for tour groups to meet together for classes prior to the tour. I have never been able to do this because my groups have come from many states, and sometimes a foreign country.
The first morning of touring I had the driver stop on the kurkar ridge along the Mediterranean Sea a few miles north of Netanya while we handed out the “surprise” books and explained them to the tour members. I asked them to turn to the maps that showed the…
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Herculaneum: the unknown city
via the British Museum Blog
Controversy Over Herod Exhibit – NYT
Controversy Over Herod Exhibit – YT
Anger That a Herod Show Uses West Bank Objects
Jim Hollander/European Pressphoto Agency
The exhibition “Herod the Great: The King’s Final Journey” includes a reconstruction of his tomb, with his sarcophagus, center.
By JODI RUDOREN
Published: February 13, 2013
JERUSALEM — In one room sits a sarcophagus of reddish-pink limestone believed to have held the body of King Herod, painstakingly reconstructed after having been smashed to bits centuries ago. In another, there are frescoes from Herod’s elaborate underground palace, pieced together like a jigsaw puzzle. Throughout, elaborate animated videos show the king’s audacious construction — atop the desert fortress Masada; at his burial place, Herodium; and his most famous work, the Second Temple of Jerusalem.
The Israel Museum on Tuesday opened its most ambitious archaeological exhibition and the world’s first devoted to Herod, the lionized and demonized Rome-appointed king of Judea, who reigned from 37 to 4 B.C.E. and is among the most seminal and contentious figures in Jewish history. But the exhibition, which the museum director described as a “massive enterprise” that involved sifting through 30 tons of material from Herodium and reconstructing 250 artifacts, has also brought its own bit of controversy.
The Palestinian Authority says the exhibition is a violation of international law because much of its material was taken from near Bethlehem and Jericho, both in the Israeli-occupied West Bank. An Israeli group of archaeologists and activists complains that the museum, however unwittingly, is helping the Jewish settlement movement advance its contention that the West Bank should be part of Israel and not a Palestinian state.
“What the Israel Museum is doing is like coming and saying, ‘Listen, the heritage of the West Bank is part of our heritage first of all,’ ” said Yonathan Mizrachi, an archaeologist who helped found the Israeli group, Emek Shaveh, in 2009. “It’s part of the idea to create the narrative that those sites, no matter what the political solution,” are “part of the Israeli identity.”
James S. Snyder, the director of the museum, dismissed such criticism as propaganda and political opportunism. The Oslo Accords signed by the Israelis and Palestinians in the 1990s provide for Israeli involvement in archaeology in the territories until the resolution of the overall conflict, and Mr. Snyder said that at the end of the exhibition, the museum plans to return the artifacts to the West Bank, to Israel’s civil administration, which he said would arrange for their return to the sites from which they were taken or to store the material until “the site can be prepared for its care and/or display.” He noted that the museum had spent a “huge” sum — he would not specify how much — to restore and make available for public consumption artifacts that might otherwise have been lost, like many of the antiquities in Iraq and Egypt.
“We’re not about geopolitics, we’re not about minefields, we’re about trying to do the best and the right thing for the long term for material cultural heritage,” Mr. Snyder said. “Our goal was to invest in the preservation of this material and return it to the sites. We are but custodians, and we are always ready for it to be where it belongs.”
But Hamdan Taha, director of the Palestinian Authority’s department of antiquities and cultural heritage, said that while Oslo provides for Israel’s excavation in the West Bank, exhibiting the material was another story. He complained that the Palestinians were never consulted about the project, which he called “an aggression against Palestinian cultural rights in their own land,” and said it would “not help to reconstruct peace between the Palestinians and Israel.”
The exhibition is dedicated to the memory of Ehud Netzer, a Hebrew University archaeologist who spent 40 years searching for Herod’s burial place before discovering it in 2007 at Herodium. He died after being injured in a fall at the site in 2010. The tholos, a circular set of columns that topped the tomb, is partly rebuilt in the exhibition, along with the sarcophagus said to be that of Herod and two others.
The many rooms are filled with pottery, coins, busts and frescoes that illustrate the legend of Herod. The king has been admired by historians for his remarkable buildings, but condemned for the murder of his wife and children, among many others. His Judaism was questioned, and he was often denounced as a puppet of Rome, an image the exhibition does little to defy as it explores his relationships with Antony and Cleopatra, Augustus and Marcus Agrippa.
Shmuel Browns, a tour guide and expert on Herodium who helped Netzer excavate the site as a volunteer, said he was awed by the meticulous reconstruction, particularly of a large basin adorned with several heads that was found in pieces in two disparate places at the site, now an Israeli national park.
“They’ve built things from what was found that you could never imagine from what you saw at the site,” Mr. Browns said. “The message is very, very strong about who Herod is and what he did. He wasn’t intimidated by topography, he wasn’t intimidated by material, he wasn’t intimidated by lack of water.
“He’s a fascinating character,” Mr. Browns added. “He just got very, very bad press.”
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: February 15, 2013
An article on Thursday about the Israel Museum’s new archeological exhibition devoted to King Herod and the controversy generated because many artifacts were taken from West Bank territories occupied by Israel since 1967 referred incompletely to plans for returning the items. The Oslo Accords signed by the Israelis and Palestinians in the 1990s provide for Israeli involvement in archaeology in the territories until the resolution of the overall conflict, and the museum director, James S. Snyder, said that at the end of the exhibition, it plans to return the artifacts to the West Bank, to Israel’s civil administration, which he said would arrange for their return to the sites from which they were taken or store the material until “the site can be prepared for its care and/or display.” There are no plans to hand the items over to the Palestinians at the end of the exhibition.
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