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Weekend Roundup, Part 2

“Scientists at the University of Chicago are developing a machine learning system that can automatically transcribe text found on ancient clay tablets.”

The Unionville Times offers a guide to virtual tours of museums in Europe and the US.

Colette J. Loll led the investigation into the forged Dead Sea Scrolls at the Museum of the Bible and she offers her assessment of the story.

Erin L. Thompson, a professor of art crime, discusses the cost of forgeries donated to museums.

Appian Media has begun a new podcast entitled “Digging Deeper” and hosted by Barry Britnell and Dan Kingsley. You can check out the trailer here.

“Organising an Empire: The Assyrian Way” is a Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) taught by Karen Radner in six teaching units that take about 19 hours to complete. Began yesterday.

The current issue of Biblical Archaeology Review has been opened up for all to read.

Ferrell Jenkins shares “then and now” photos of the “Tomb of the Kings” in Jerusalem. See also Tom Powers’s extended comment about the date of the Pool of Hezekiah.

Israel’s Good Name went for a hike to Khirbet Luza, near Moza, and saw a striped hyena in the wild.

This year’s Infusion Bible Conference has been postponed. “Paul in His Roman World” will be the subject of the conference in June 2021.

Forthcoming: Has Archaeology Buried the Bible?, by William G. Dever

HT: Agade, Ted Weis

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Weekend Roundup, Part 1

In the ANE Today, Alex Joffe looks at pandemics in ancient and modern times.

The Museum of the Bible has begun a video podcast series entitled the “Lonesome Curator.” Episode 8 is on Lachish.

The coronavirus has changed burial practices in the Holy Land.

Church leaders are discussing how to allow some kind of celebration of Easter at the Church of the Holy Sepulcher.

There’s a report of illegal digging on the Temple Mount.

The Northwest Museum of Arts and Culture is offering its April lecture series on Pompeii via Zoom.

Google Arts & Culture has created an interesting photo story entitled “Exploring the Phoenician Shipwreck” from an expedition in 2019 off the coast of Gozo, Malta.

Mark Hoffman had some time for blogging yesterday:

Now is a good time to watch “The Week That Changed the World: A Journey through the Passion Week” with Wayne Stiles.

HT: Agade, Ted Weis

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Weekend Roundup

Israel is moving forward on plans to extend the high-speed train line to a station near the Western Wall in the Old City of Jerusalem.

Restoration work has begun on the floor of the Church of the Holy Sepulcher.

Two ritual baths south of Jerusalem are overflowing with water following the winter rains.

$1.3 million has been given to support marine archaeological research off Israel’s coast.

Volunteer applications are being accepted for excavations at Tell Keisan this coming September.

A BBC documentary describes the discovery of a hoard of silver decadrachm coins in Gaza, and what happened to them next.

Egypt has sentenced the brother of an ex-minister to 30 years in jail for smuggling antiquities.

Iran’s Basij Resistance Force is apparently threatening to destroy the historic tomb site of Esther and Mordecai, located in Hamedan.

Wayne Stiles was at Colossae last week and he reflects on the significance of the site and Paul’s letter to the church.

An archaeology park featuring a Roman theater is being developed in Ankara.

Debate continues over whether a skull unearthed 120 years ago near Pompeii belonged to Pliny the Elder.

Italian archaeologists have found underneath the Roman Forum an ancient shrine and sarcophagus that was likely dedicated to Romulus.

A conference on “Sheshonq (Shishak) in Palestine” will be held in Vienna on March 6-7.

Ferrell Jenkins answers questions about the six water jugs at the wedding of Cana.

Herod Antipas, ruler of Galilee during Jesus’s ministry, is the subject of the latest archaeological biography by Bryan Windle.

To listen to the latest episodes on The Book and the Spade, see this page.

HT: Agade, Ted Weis, Keith Keyser, Explorator

Gezer Solomonic gate from northeast, mjb1902200736

This week on our Facebook/Twitter/Instagram streams we featured sites related to Israel’s kings, including this one of the gate at Gezer that was built by King Solomon’s administration.

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Archaeology Conference in SoCal: The Time of Israel’s Kings

The Master’s University, where I teach, is hosting an archaeology conference on February 29, and you are invited. The schedule is as follows:

Afternoon Sessions
2:00 PM Dr. Chris McKinny | Archaeology of Ahab: The Strength of the Northern Kingdom
3:00 PM Dr. Seth Rodriquez | Archaeology of Hezekiah: Judah Struggles to Survive
4:00 PM Dr. Todd Bolen | Archaeology of Esther: God’s People in Exile
5:00 PM Hors d’oeuvres

General Sessions
6:30 PM Dr. Chris McKinny | Archaeology of David: Israel’s Rise to Prominence
7:30 PM Dr. Seth Rodriquez | Archaeology of Solomon: Israel’s Golden Era
8:30 PM Q&A
9-10 PM Cookies and Coffee in the University Exchange

The afternoon sessions require registration, and the modest fee of $25 includes an hors d’oeuvres dinner, a free gift from one of the speakers, and a chance to mingle with Drs. Rodriquez and McKinny. The evening sessions are free to all. (The non-chronological sequence of the lectures is intentional in order to present the most popular topics when the attendance is higher.)

Longtime readers of the blog are familiar with both Chris and Seth, as they have contributed here over the years. They live and teach in Texas and Colorado, respectively, and we are flying them in for the weekend. The other speaker is of little consequence, flown in from nowhere, and he has brazenly refused to follow the topic of Israel’s kings, even though he wrote his master’s thesis on the reign of Jeroboam II and his doctoral dissertation on the reign of Jehu. He supposed that people might find a study of the archaeology of Esther to be unique and fascinating.

As you can see from the banner below, this series is part of the university’s annual Creation Summit, though this year the organizers have opted to deviate from the origins theme in order to focus on biblical archaeology. So this is an exciting and unusual opportunity, and if you are able, I hope that you will join us.

Creation Summit banner

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Weekend Roundup

The stories this week are about as random as I can remember, making it challenging to figure out a logical sequence. We’ll start with Jerusalem, and we’ll end with a photo that was popular this week on our Facebook/Twitter/Instagram stream.

Journalists were given a tour of the newly reopened Roman square underneath the Damascus Gate of Jerusalem.

With the water level up nearly 6 feet in the last month, Israeli authorities may have to open the dam of the Sea of Galilee for the first time since 1992. (There’s a beautiful sunrise photo at the end of this article.)

Nof Ginnosar and the Sea of Galilee are the focus of the latest in the “Life Lessons from Israel” video series.

“Russian Archaeology in the Holy Land,” by Yana Tchekhanovets and Leonid Belyaev, is the lead article in the latest issue of ANE Today.

Biblical Byways is offering a low-budget study tour of Israel for Spanish speakers in September.

A replica of a 2,600-year-old Phoenician ship finished its five-month transatlantic voyage last week when it arrived in Miami.

Archaeologists have recovered 1,400 cuneiform tablets from the lost Sumerian city of Irisagrig, but they don’t know where that ancient city was located.

The traditional tomb of Ezekiel (in Iraq, not the one in Iran) is again becoming a place of pilgrimage.

Saudi Arabia plans to create the world’s largest living museum in Al Ula by 2035.

For more than a decade now, “Athens-based photographer and animator Dimitris Tsalkanis has cultivated a sort of unusual hobby: recreating ancient Athens via 3D modeling software.”

An archaeologist in Spain is on trial for forging a third-century depiction of Jesus’s crucifixion.

Salman Abu Sitta will be lecturing in London on February 28 on the subject of the “1871 Survey of Western Palestine Revisited: The Visible and The Hidden.”

New book: Roman-Period and Byzantine Nazareth and Its Hinterland, by Ken Dark

Cynthia Shafer-Elliott talks about her recent book Food in Ancient Judah on the OnScript podcast.

Ferrell Jenkins shares photos of the atad tree, the worthless bramble mentioned in Jotham’s parable in Judges 9.

The archaeological biography on King Ahaz features an altar, a seal, and a toilet.

The Global Smyrna Meeting on the Seven Churches of Revelation offers lectures and sites visits given a whole host of popular teachers, including Mark Wilson, Ben Witherington, Mark Fairchild, Carl Rasmussen, and Dana Harris.

HT: Agade, Joseph Lauer

Wadi Lubban view northwest of Shiloh, db6604081205

This beautiful valley is located in the tribal inheritance of Ephraim, not far from Shiloh. Photo taken in 1966 by David Bivin.

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Weekend Roundup

Note: this blog moved to a new location a few days ago. The old address should forward to the new, but you can update your bookmark to https://www.bibleplaces.com/blog/. Email subscriptions should not be affected, but those using a feed reader will need to update to the new address.

Archaeologists have published a report that they have discovered a “massive Iron II temple complex” at Moza, in use from 900 to 600 BC.

An Egyptian anchor discovered off the coast near Haifa is now on display at the Israel Museum. The impressive artifact features hieroglyphics and images.

Excavations at Tel Tsaf in the Jordan Valley have uncovered homes and food silos made of mudbrick and preserved since the Neolithic period.

“Archaeologists on Thursday unveiled 16 ancient Egyptian tombs filled with sarcophagi and other artifacts from a vast burial ground” near Minya in central Egypt.

Israeli researchers have successfully grown six trees from seeds discovered at the sites of Masada, Qumran, and Wadi Makkuk. The seeds date to the 4th century BC to the 2nd century AD, and like their predecessor Methuselah, they have been given biblical names. Photos here.

Shlomit Bechar argues that the Hazor complexes with standing stones were part of a “ruin cult.”

A professor has found a technique to solve quadratic equations that the ancient Babylonians used.

Laerke Recht takes a look at human sacrifices in the ancient Near East.

War has devastated a museum in Maaret al-Numa, Syria known for its Roman and Byzantine-era mosaics.

A terrorist near St. Anne’s Church fired shots toward the Temple Mount, wounding a policeman.

USA Today is having a contest for the Best Religious Museum in the USA. Nominees include the Museum of the Bible, the Ark Encounter, and the Biblical History Center.

The latest video in the “Life Lessons from Israel” is a 6-minute devotional video on Megiddo.

Upcoming events at the Albright Institute include a lecture by Israel Finkelstein on the excavations at Kiriath Jearim.

After renovations to steps and railings, the Ramparts Walk from the Damascus Gate to the Lions Gate of the Old City of Jerusalem has re-opened.

Agrippa II is the subject of Bryan Windle’s latest archaeological biography.

HT: Agade, Joseph Lauer, Ted Weis, Charles Savelle

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About the BiblePlaces Blog

The BiblePlaces Blog provides updates and analysis of the latest in biblical archaeology, history, and geography. Unless otherwise noted, the posts are written by Todd Bolen, PhD, Professor of Biblical Studies at The Master’s University.

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