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Hebrew Inscription Discovered on Mount of Olives

Earlier this week a discovery was announced of an inscription of “Menahem” from an excavation on the southern end of the Mount of Olives (JPost or, with photo, Arutz-7). The name “Menahem” gets attention because it is the name of one of the last rulers of the northern kingdom (c. 752-742 BC).

There is some difficulty with this reading, and other proposals have been made, including that it says “M / Nahum” or “[B] N (son) / Nahum.” It sure seems like there have been a lot of Old Testament-era Hebrew inscriptions found in Jerusalem (and Judah) this decade.

Tagged Discoveries, Jerusalem

Ancient Submerged Village at Atlit

This story about a Neolithic village submerged at Atlit has something of everything except a biblical character: environmental activism, the earliest known fishing town, undisturbed burials, a healthy diet but poor health, the earliest case of tuberculosis, ancient and modern global warming, and a Stonehenge-like circle of stones. The title of the Jerusalem Post article is “Israel’s Atlantis”:

But in 1984, during an underwater archeological survey, Galili and his colleagues discovered the Atlit-Yam village – some 400 meters offshore. The submerged village, he says, is the largest and best-preserved prehistoric settlement ever uncovered off the Mediterranean coast. In an area of 40,000 square meters eight to 12 meters below sea level, the archeologists found remains of human habitation dating back 9,000 years to the late Pre-Pottery Neolithic period.
Putting together the jigsaw puzzle of their findings, the architecture of the dwellings and the radiocarbon dating sets the scene for what is thought to have been the earliest-known agro-pastoral fishing community, a claim that has gone undisputed by archeological authorities. Marine discoveries from the site are published in professional journals worldwide….
Recently, researchers identified signs of tuberculosis in the skeletons of a mother and child at the site. Mycobacterum tuberculosis, the principal agent of human TB, is believed to have evolved over the millennia. A multi-disciplinary team from Tel Aviv and the Hebrew Universities in Israel and Centers for Infectious Diseases in the UK together with the Israel Antiquities Authority put together the tests, including DNA. TB was generally held to have been transferred to humans from cattle, but there were no cows at Atlit-Yam. This led to the suggestion that the high density of the fishing village’s population had facilitated the transmission of the disease. According to Dr. Helen Donoghue, the infected organism is “definitely the human strain of TB, in contrast to the original theory that human TB only evolved from bovine TB later on in history, after the domestication of animals.”

The full article is here.

HT: Joe Lauer

Tagged Discoveries

For Biblical Maps, Start Here

By “here,” I mean Mark Vitalis Hoffman’s excellent summary of “Digital Resources for Biblical Mapping.” Mark has done a fantastic job in the last couple of years of helping Bible teachers with electronic resources. You can stay up-to-date with the latest fruits of his labor at his blog, Biblical Studies and Technological Tools.

Mark has a variety of resources from his website Scroll and Screen (including a roundup of resource for biblical photos), and your favorite section will probably depend upon your particular interest, but truly outstanding and unique (as far as I know) is the listing of maps related to the biblical world. As you’ll see, there is no “one-size-fits all” for biblical maps (as there is, ahem, for biblical photos), and that’s what makes such an annotated survey so very helpful. Enjoy, and if you have feedback from your experience with these resources, I’m sure that Mark would be happy to hear it.

Tagged Resources

Seal of “Saul” Found in Jerusalem

A seal of a person named Saul dating from the time of Hezekiah (c. 700 BC) has been discovered in the City of David in Jerusalem. The Israel Antiquities Authority has released a high-resolution photograph and a press release:

The seal, which is made of bone, was found broken and is missing a piece from its upper right side. Two parallel lines divide the surface of the seal into two registers in which Hebrew letters are engraved:

לשאל

]ריהו

A period followed by a floral image or a tiny fruit appear at the end of the bottom name.
The name of the seal’s owner was completely preserved and it is written in the shortened form of the name שאול (Shaul). The name is known from both the Bible (Genesis 36:37; 1 Samuel 9:2; 1 Chronicles 4:24 and 6:9) and from other Hebrew seals.
According to Professor Reich, “This seal joins another Hebrew seal that was previously found and three Hebrew bullae (pieces of clay stamped with seal impressions) that were discovered nearby. These five items have great chronological importance regarding the study of the development of the use of seals. While the numerous bullae that were discovered in the adjacent rock-hewn pool were found together with pottery sherds from the end of the ninth and beginning of the eighth centuries BCE, they do not bear any Semitic letters. On the other hand, the five Hebrew epigraphic artifacts were recovered from the soil that was excavated outside the pool, which contained pottery sherds that date to the last part of the eighth century.

The press release continues here (temporary link).

HT: Joe Lauer

Tagged Discoveries, Jerusalem

The Israel Museum Renovation

The Israel Museum in Jerusalem is in the midst of a $100 million renovation and the Jerusalem Post has an update on the transformation. Here are some snips:

There are two main aspects to the renewal project. The first is to create a completely new approach from the entrance of the museum to the center of the museum campus. To do this, the museum has hired New York architect James Carpenter, who has worked on a variety of high-profile projects, such as the new Hearst headquarters (which involved saving the original facade of an existing building), the podium light wall of the Seven World Trade Center building in New York, a proposed multi-use sports enclosure for the Brooklyn Bridge Park, and the Madison Square Garden renovation…. This second main aspect of the campus renewal – the reconstruction of the original museum complex from within – has been taken up by Tel Aviv-based Zvi Efrat of Efrat-Kowalsky Architects. Efrat, who is also the head of the architecture department at the Bezalel Academy of Art and Design, has created a central circulation point from which all the museum’s main exhibit wings – Archeology, Judaica and Jewish Ethnography, Fine Arts, and Temporary Exhibitions – are accessible on the same level. To achieve this internal redesign without, in Snyder’s words, "increasing the breadth of the existing envelope," the museum is being gutted from the inside, its exhibit halls are reconfigured, and a number of connecting passages are being added. The key to the project, though, is turning an area previously dedicated to internal museum service activity into exhibition spaces, resulting in an additional 9,290 sq.m. of gallery space that does not involve expanding the museum campus…. One of the final touches to the renewal project was a revamping of the museum’s central outdoor plaza, raising two-thirds of it by a meter to improve its position as a vista point, and to split its length to make it more human-sized. The east side will lead to the underground passage that connects with the museum entrance, and the west side will open up on a wide staircase that feeds into the Isamu Noguchi-designed sculpture garden, making it more central to the campus.

The TimeOnline has a story about the new Egyptian gallery at the British Museum in London. (HT: Explorator)

Tagged Jerusalem, Museums, New Exhibits

Archaeological Surveys and Their Limitations

My friend A.D. Riddle sends along this interesting quotation from J. B. Pritchard, Recovering Sarepta, A Phoenician City: Excavations at Sarafand, Lebanon, 1969-1974 (1978):

The western face of the promontory had been eroded by heavy seas. In the scarp, stubs of walls and masses of Roman sherds could be seen, but nothing earlier. Scouring the surface of the fields on top of the mound for diagnostic sherds that might date its occupation, we found two handles from amphorae that had been imported from the Island of Rhodes. They could be dated to the Hellenistic period by the labels in Greek which had been stamped on them. Obviously the site had been occupied at least two centuries before the Roman port was built. Below the Hellenistic debris there might be the remains of an Iron Age settlement, but on the surface there was no evidence—not a single potsherd—to witness a Phoenician presence (p. 71).

In the excavations, Pritchard revealed seven layers preceding the Hellenistic period, including five from the Iron Age.

Zarephath (Sarepta) harbor and tell from east
Photo by A.D. Riddle, May 2009

Tagged Analysis