The renewed campus of the Israel Museum was inaugurated yesterday, as reported in articles in the Jerusalem Post and Arutz-7.  I don’t like the idea that the amount of display space has doubled but fewer items are on display.

A report at Device Magazine has some additional details about the cuneiform fragments found at Hazor.  They date to the 18th-17th centuries and include the words “master,” “slave,” and possibly “tooth.”  It is not clear whether the tablet was written at Hazor or brought to the site from somewhere else.  The article (and a similar one at Arutz-7) includes photos.

The current excavations of Megiddo are profiled in this Jerusalem Post article.  The team had the privilege recently of hosting Lord and Lady Allenby.

The Galilean synagogue discovered this summer at Horvat Kur is the subject of a brief article published by the university excavating the site.

The Second Qumran Institute Symposium will be held October 21-22, 2010 at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands.  The subject is “The Jewish War agaist Rome (66-70/74): Interdisciplinary Perspectives.” Nearly all of the lectures are in English and most sound quite interesting.

Chris McKinny has posted some aerial photos of Tel Burna and labeled some of the observable features on the surface.  What a dream to have a site without later periods “in the way.”  Chris’s wife
Mindy has some nice photos of the recent excavation of Burna.

The excavations of a temple at Tel Tayinat in Turkey are profiled by the Ottawa Citizen.

A Brazilian mega-church is building a $200 million replica of Solomon’s temple, although unlike the original, this will seat 10,000 people.

HT: Paleojudaica and Joe Lauer