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Israel is planning to build two new trails in conjunction with the restoration of 150 historic sites.  A number of sites on the list have been mentioned as in need of restoration here before, including Lachish, Hurvat Madras [Khirbet Midras], and the Sanhedrin Garden.  We’re a big fan of a number of other sites on the list as well, though we see less need for restoration on some than for others. 

Sometimes government involvement makes things worse not better, a case in point being the new Arbel National Park.  Trails, however, are always good. 

Haaretz reports:

The government is planning on spending NIS 500 million ($135 million) over five years to restore and preserve heritage sites across the country.
[. . .]
Earlier this month, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu devoted a large part of his address at the Herzliya Conference to outlining the plan.
“The guarantee of our existence is dependent not merely on weapons systems or military strength or economic strength or our innovativeness, our exports, and all these forces which are indeed so vital to us,” he said. “It is dependent first and foremost on the intellectual capacity and the national feelings that we inculcate – from parents to children, and as a state, in our educational system.”
Netanyahu said that he plans to present a blueprint to the government on February 25 that will include, among other things, the inauguration of two trails, in addition to the existing Israel National Trail (“Shvil Yisrael”).
One is an historical trail connecting dozens of archaeological sites, and the second is an “Israeli Experience” trail linking up over 100 places important to the nation’s more recent history and will include buildings that are to be preserved, settlement sites, small museums and memorials.
[. . .]
At Tel Lachish, which Netanyahu referred to in his speech, the plan is to restore the gate into the city and the city walls, to prepare trails, to build an entrance hall and to add signposts, among other things.
Other sites marked for restoration are Neot Kedumim, Susya, Qumran, Jason’s Tomb in the Rehavia neighborhood of Jerusalem, the Sanhedrin Garden, the Eshkolot Cave, Umm al-Amad, the Beit Shean antiquities, Tel Megiddo, Tiberias, Tel Arad, Tel Dan, Hurvat Madras, the park around the Old City of Jerusalem and the City of David.
There are another 109 heritage sites and projects earmarked for restoration and preservation. They are to be found throughout the country and include such sites as the Independence Hall in Tel Aviv, the Aronson farm and the signaling station at Atlit, the Emek train between Haifa and Tzemah and the Tzemah train station, the Old Courtyard Museum at Ein Shemer, the original homes of the settlers at Migdal in Ashkelon, the street of the Biluim and the winery in Gedera, the courtyard at Kinneret, the Montefoire [sic] quarter of Tel Aviv, the agricultural school at Mikveh Yisrael, the old Jerusalem train station and others.

You can read the article here.

HT: Paleojudaica

Lachish gate and palace fort, tb061100263

Lachish gate (foreground) and palace (top), in a state of neglect.  These buildings date to the late Iron Age, a time when Lachish was the second most important city in Judah (after Jerusalem).
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From the Israel Antiquities Authority:

One of the largest wine presses ever revealed in an archaeological excavation in the country, which was used to produce wine in the Late Byzantine period (sixth-seventh centuries CE), was recently exposed in excavations conducted by the Israel Antiquities Authority. The excavation was carried out in a region that will be the farmland of Ganei Tal, a new community slated to be built for the evacuees from Gush Katif.
The impressive wine press is 1,400 years old and measures 6.5 x 16.5 meters. It was discovered southwest of Kibbutz Hafetz-Haim and was partly damaged during the installation of the infrastructure there.
According to Uzi Ad, excavation director on behalf of the Israel Antiquities Authority, “What we have here seems to be an industrial and crafts area of a settlement from the sixth-seventh century CE, which was situated in the middle of an agricultural region. The size of the wine press attests to the fact that the quantity of wine that was produced in it was exceptionally large, and was not meant for local consumption. Instead it was intended for export, probably to Egypt, which was a major export market at the time, or to Europe. An identical wine press was previously exposed north of Ashkelon, about 20 kilometers from the wine press that was just found in Nahal Soreq and we can assume that the two installations were built by the same craftsman.” Ad adds that “The wine press’ collecting vats were neither circular nor square as was the custom, but octagonal. And since this method of construction is far from being practical because sediment would accumulate in the corners of the vats, it seems that they were built in this manner for primarily aesthetic reasons.” 

The report continues here and includes one photograph. The discovery is located about 5 miles (10 km) west of the Philistine city of Ekron. 

HT: Joe Lauer

UPDATE: The Jerusalem Post has an AP article with a better photo.

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I am pleased to learn that my friend A.D. Riddle and his colleague David Parker have taken first place in the animation category of the Student Web Mapping Competition of the North American Cartographic Information Society. They were given the honor for their work on The Dead Sea: A History of Change (noted here previously).  This is an excellent resource and they are to be congratulated for their work!

The Israel Postal Authority is releasing dozens of stamps that may be of interest to readers here, including Maritime Archaeology in Israel and Fruits of Israel.
Bryant Wood has a description of the infant jar burial excavated last summer at Khirbet el-Maqatir (Ai?).

Bible and Interpretation has posted a report of the 2005-2009 excavations at Tamar (Ein Hazeva) is now available.  The 11-page pdf file (html version here) gives a review of the site’s history and includes numerous illustrations.  I stopped at this site with a group last month and certainly would have benefitted if I had already read this report.

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A couple of weeks ago I read an article in Time Magazine on archaeology in east Jerusalem.  I would normally link to this kind of article (and many other bloggers did), but this one was so thoroughly one-sided that I couldn’t in good conscience link to it without a lengthy refutation.  But you can waste your life on such drivel and I decided to pass. 

A couple of days ago, the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America (CAMERA) reviewed the article and noted some of its problems.  For instance,

The journalist respectfully refers to Daniel Seidemann, an outspoken foe of Israeli sovereignty and habitation in eastern Jerusalem, as a lawyer who works for a civil rights organization and, elsewhere in the article, as “Lawyer Seidemann,” but does not afford similar honorifics to the archeologist who heads the Jerusalem excavation. McGirk conveniently omits her credentials, introducing her simply as “Eilat Mazar” and incorrectly describing her as “an associate of the right‑wing Shalem think tank” And while he includes this incorrect affiliation – Time has already issued a correction stating that Mazar is not currently affiliated with the Shalem think tank – McGirk neglects to inform readers that Dr. Mazar is a respected archeologist – the granddaughter of Benjamin Mazar, who was a prominent archeologist, historian and former president of the Hebrew University. She received her PhD in archeology more than a decade ago, has published in scholarly journals, was a visiting scholar at the Hebrew University’s Institute of Archeology and is currently a research fellow there.
By contrast, McGirk characterizes those who oppose the field of biblical archeology and disagree with Mazar and her team’s findings as “scholars” and “experts.”

Note that this has nothing to do with the essence of the controversy, which is whether Israel has the right to excavate in Jerusalem.  The “journalist” has carefully selected and withheld information in the manner of a defense lawyer or political lobbyist.  This is all the more distasteful when it involves mischaracterization of scholars and archaeologists.

The conclusion:

Time’s readers cannot reliably learn about the controversies and arguments surrounding the history, archeology, and future of Jerusalem as long as Time’s Jerusalem bureau chief continues to serve as an advocate for one side of the debate instead of as a responsible and ethical journalist.

Time should be ashamed of this article.  To the degree that it is not, we know that objective reporting is not its goal.  If you read the original Time article, you should read this response

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First-time tourists excited to see the walls of the Old City may be a bit disappointed in 2010.  Scaffolding has been erected along sections of the western and southern walls in an effort to restore the Turkish wall built in 1540.  From Haaretz:

Three years ago a stone from the Old City wall in Jerusalem fell into a church school yard next door. Fears that the wall was crumbling spawned a complex project to restore its stones while preserving traces of history left by inscriptions, shells and animals.
It turned out later that the stone had fallen from a Jordanian support column rather than the Ottoman wall. But by then the NIS 15 million renovation project was already on its way.
[…]
As elsewhere in the world, Jerusalem’s wall consists of two stone walls with earth in between. The greatest threat is from water penetrating the stone layers, causing the stones to shift and topple. The renovators must seal the cracks without changing the wall’s facade. In some cases they have no choice but to replace a flawed stone at the cost of changing its original color or appearance.
“We don’t clean the stones completely,” says Mashiah. “The wall doesn’t have to look like a new building. It should remain ancient.”
[…]
The wall’s renovation is due to be completed in about a year, except for the section surrounding the Temple Mount, where the Muslim Waqf trust refused to allow restoration work. The owners of various sections of the interior wall also refused the renovators access.
The Zion Gate, ravaged by thousands of shells in the War of Independence and by exhaust fumes and countless car collisions, has been painstakingly renovated. The memorial stone for the Harel Brigade combatants, which blocked one of the gate’s lattices, has been moved.

Read the full story here.

HT: Joe Lauer
Jaffa Gate under scaffolding, tb011610598

Jaffa Gate under renovation, January 2010

Old City southern wall under renovation, tb010910195

Southern wall of Old City under renovation, January 2010
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This post relates more to blogging than to biblical sites, but it may be of interest to fellow bloggers and those curious about some of the issues we face.  A couple of days ago I received an email informing me that this blog had been named “a top 50 biblical history blog” by “A Blog of Biblical Proportions.”  I’ve seen a handful of similar emails over the last year and they always struck me as a bit strange.  For one, the name of the domain is unrelated and sounds commercial, such as accreditedonlinebiblecolleges.org.  For another, when I look at the “Blog of Biblical Proportions,” I see that the blog posts are sporadic (none since November) and there is no consistent theme (other posts are “25 Excellent iPhone Apps for Bible Study” and “Top 50 Blogs for Online Scripture Study”).  Each of these posts consists of annotated listings of blogs or websites.  That’s nice, but why?  Who is creating this and what is their motivation?  I don’t see any Google ads or other obvious advertising which would suggest a profit motive.  Another observation is that this site (and ones similar) is pseudo-anonymous.  By that I mean that they have names associated with them, but they are only first names and they seem generic (Linda, Miranda, James).  There is nothing else on the website that gives any background about the writer(s).  Bloggers don’t necessarily put their address online, but they have some kind of identity.  It’s clear to me that something is fishy, but I just can’t put my finger on it.  Last week, I received an email suggesting that my readers would enjoy the new post at the “Biblical Learning Blog” (notice the goofy name again) on 25 Open Courseware Classes about Early Christianity.  The post listed a few good options for study (but not related to “Early Christianity”) and I included the link on the Weekend Roundup, though I was still not sure what was going on. I think I understand now how the operation works.  Some entrepreneur (probably a single individual with multiple pseudonyms) wants to earn a few bucks and he knows he can do that through a service that pays you if you collect address details for prospective college students.  I don’t know what this pays, and apart from what I’ve deduced, I didn’t know that colleges paid for address lists.  But that clearly seems to be going on at this website with their links to nine different schools at the bottom of this page.  None of the links go directly to the colleges, but all are directed through a third-party site, which suggests that this is not someone primarily concerned with getting you information about the school. How does this tie in to the “top 50 biblical history blogs”?  In order to make money, the site needs visitors interested in going to college.  The best way to get visitors is from Google (though BiblePlaces.com is linked from thousands of websites, more visitors come from Google searches than from the rest combined).  The key to getting visitors from Google is to be highly ranked.  If a prospective college student searches for “online bible college,” he probably will never click on your site unless it is ranked in the top three.  Securing a high rank for the website is a challenge.  Many, many “entrepreneurs” have tried various methods for years to trick Google into thinking a purely commercial portal is actually a worthy site with content.  Google learns their tricks, and so new methods evolve.  The current method appears to combine a commercial portal with some “genuine content.”  So in our example, a list of top blogs or best courseware is written.  It doesn’t take that much time to create such a list (a few hours with Google), especially when the “annotations” reflect nothing more than a brief visit.  For instance, the annotation on the “top 50” list for this blog simply copies what is given in the blog description (professor in Israel…).  I wouldn’t say that that is not helpful, but it is fast and easy and could be written by absolutely anyone.  Google likes it that the site has “real content.” But what is even more necessary are incoming links.  Google isn’t a person and it doesn’t evaluate each website individually.  Rather it lets other humans do its work.  If lots of humans are adding links from their websites/blogs to a particular site, then Google thinks that people must value it and its ranking goes up. The old way to get links to your site was by “link exchanges,” but these are basically dead now.  I get a couple of requests a week, asking me to add a link to a website such as “Real Estate in Cyprus” and in return they’ll add a link to BiblePlaces.com.  The problem with this is that the requests are rarely to websites of interest or value to my readers.  Even if they were, I have no idea if the company is honorable or not.  So how does the commercial website get links when reputable websites won’t link to them? One strategy apparently is to post “top 50” lists.  The entrepreneur then emails everyone who has been “named a top 50 blog” with the comment that “I thought you and your readers at Bible Places might be interested in taking a look.”  The blogger is “honored” and when he mentions his ranking on his blog, he links back to the “top 50.”  A link exchange has just occurred.  The “top 50” websites/blogs may not be the most popular websites, but they have a real author and real readers and they have just made the “online bible college” website more worthy in Google’s eyes.  Furthermore, given that many of these websites are blogs, the links last forever.  Years ago, many websites had lists of links which were occasionally revised.  If the website owner got wise to the fact that a certain site was never updated and appeared to be a front, he would delete the link.  But bloggers are very unlikely to dig back through previous posts to check and remove links.  Even if no one ever goes back to read the old posts, the links still exist in Google’s index. The approach is rather ingenious.  The website has one goal (earn commissions from college recruits), but it achieves its goal primarily through the creation of unrelated content.  Bloggers are flattered by the “honor” and may not realize that the list was created by someone without any interest in or knowledge of their discipline. As I said at the beginning, this discussion is only tangentially related to “Bible Places,” but it may be helpful to a few bloggers who don’t realize what is going on.  I don’t want to criticize websites or blogs that make money through advertising or sales (this one does), but knowing that things are not exactly as they seem makes me less likely to link to these sites in the future.

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