Orange Circle Studio has just published their 2011 Lands of the Bible Calendar featuring some of my favorite photos. You have a chance to “Meet the Artist” in their recent blogpost. I look forward to telling you more about this fantastic calendar in the coming weeks.
Aren Maeir has been dropping hints along the way but as the season wraps up, he is more certain. He writes:
The first [photo] is a working view of the structure which I believe we can now firmly claim to be a temple! The structure, which has at its center two large pillar bases, and some of the exterior walls, had various cult related objects found in its vicinity.
The Jerusalem Post picks up the story and explains some of the biblical significance:
Prof. Aren Maeir, of Bar-Ilan University’s Martin (Szusz) Department of Land of Israel Studies and Archaeology, said on Wednesday that the temple may shed light on the architecture in Philistia at the time when Jewish hero Samson purportedly brought the temple of Dagon down upon himself.
Maier said the architecture of the Philistine temple, the first ever found at Gath, sheds light on what the temple of Dagon would have looked like, in particular the two pillars that anchored the center of the structure.
The story is also reported in Arutz-7.
How do they know that this is a temple and not a house or a shop? If you’ve ever wondered how archaeologists make such determinations, I highly recommend that you read this morning’s brief post by Maeir in which he explains what they didn’t find as well as what they did.
- Tagged Discoveries, Philistines
From Arutz-7:
Hundreds of women came out last night to celebrate the Tu B’Av (15th of Av) holiday on the biblical site of Shiloh in the Benjamin region, renewing an ancient tradition. For centuries, the young women of Shiloh would go out to the vineyards and orchards and dance on the joyous holiday of Tu B’Av. Last night, the women returned to the orchards in a multifaceted celebration of dance, organized by the Benjamin Regional Council.
The story of the women dancing is recorded in Judges 21. There the women didn’t fare so well when they were carried off by surviving scoundrels from the tribe of Benjamin.
The full story and photos are here.
- Tagged Samaria
Have you ever thought that some ruler/king/president/official was just so evil that the Lord should strike him down? Of course not. But there was a king whose life was ended by God not long after Jesus’ crucifixion. The book of Acts describes the failure of Agrippa I to give glory to God with the result that he was eaten by worms and died (Acts 12:20-23).
The New Testament records that the episode occurred in Caesarea, but Josephus is more specific and writes that Agrippa was in the theater. For that reason, I’ve always read the story of Acts 12 with my students while in the theater. Now, however, I think I was wrong. Josephus, it seems to me, undermines his own presentation.
I make my case in an article posted this week at The Bible and Interpretation. I’d be happy if you’d read it and note in the comments if you’re convinced or not. As far as I know, no one has made these observations before.
- Tagged Analysis
Google is funding a project that will allow you to find books based on time and location.
A University of Southampton researcher is part of a team which has just secured funding from Google to make the classics and other ancient texts easy to discover and access online.
Leif Isaksen at the University’s School of Electronics and Computer Science (ECS) is working together with Dr Elton Barker at The Open University and Dr Eric Kansa of the University of California-Berkeley on the Google Ancient Places (GAP): Discovering historic geographical entities in the Google Books corpus project, which is one of 12 projects worldwide to receive funding as part of a new Digital Humanities Research Programme funded by Google.
The GAP researchers will enable scholars and enthusiasts worldwide to search the Google Books corpus to find books related to a geographic location and within a particular time period. The results can then be visualised on GoogleMaps or in GoogleEarth.
The full article is here.
HT: Explorator
- Tagged Resources, Technology
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
- Tagged Dead Sea, Galilee, Jerusalem, Shephelah, Temple Mount
