If you travel 32 Km west northwest of Jerusalem, you will arrive today to a place called Gezer, that in literal translation in modern Hebrew means a carrot. But this “carrot” has at least 3000 years of heritage, from the days it was defeated by Joshua (Josh 10:33; 12:12), and allotted to the tribe of Ephraim (Josh 16:3) as well as to the Levites (Josh 21:21).

During excavations in the biblical city of Gezer (Tell el-Jazari), between 1902 -1907, discovered R.A. Macalister a tablet of soft limestone in a Paleo-Hebrew script. He called the tablet the Gezer Calendar. The tablet is dating to the 10^th century BCE and it’s one of the oldest known examples of Hebrew writing (It’s need to be said that some scholars thing that the tablet is in a Phoenician script).

Imagine this: the days are the unified kingdom days; King Solomon is the ruler that is building the first temple, and also the city of Gezer (see 1 kings 9:15 – Perhaps that’s an archeological evidence of the existence of the unified kingdom – but this is not our topic today). what’s written in the Gezer Calendar that is so important to us?

The calendar describes monthly or bi-monthly periods and attributes to each a duty such as harvest, planting, or tending specific crops. It reads:

 * For a different translation click here: http://holylandphotos.org/browse.asp?s=1,3,7,202,203,336,337&img=TWMRISAM04

Scholars have speculated that the calendar is either a schoolboy’s memory exercise or the text of a popular folk song, or child’s song. Another possibility is something designed for the collection of taxes from farmers (an official document, which presents in proper chronological sequence the main farming seasons in the district of the lowlands of Palestine). If you want to visit the Gezer Calendar and give another interpretation, you should travel to Istanbul to the Museum of the Ancient Orient, and offer a one. For me it seems that Abijah has done his homework perfectly!

main phrases of the post + transcription + translation

1. Seal Impression of Jeremiah’s Attempted Killer

It is rather outrageous to directly assume that the Minister Gedaliah Ben Pashur of the Bible who attempted to kill the Jerusalem prophet, is the same man mentioned on the 2,600 year old seal impression. However taking into consideration that this Biblical character was entangled in this ugly affair with another Minister, namely Yehuchal Ben Shelemayahu (Jer 38:1), and that this second man’s name was also found in the same excavation seems enough material evidence to suppose these bullae refer to true biblical-period men in the courts of King Zedekiah of Judah.

2. Roman Gold and Jewels in the City of David

In two separate incidents in the excavations of the Israel Antiquities Authority (that are digging in what used to be a large car park opposite the road from Elat Mazar’s dig in the what is commonly known as the ‘City of David’ dig) – a treasure of 264 gold coins depicting the Byzantine (Eastern Roman) Emperor Heraclius, were found; along with a magnificent example of Roman jewellery. The coins were exposed with the collapse of a wall and date to around 1,300 years ago while the single Roman earring found with pearls and emeralds dates to 2,000 years ago.

3. ‘Oldest Hebrew Inscription’ found?

Yossi Garfinkel’s excavation at Khirbet Qeiyafa has revealed a pottery fragment that has five lines of what he claims to be, the oldest attested Hebrew script known today dated to 1000- 975 BCE. His claim has naturally been contested since the break from proto-Canaanite script with its descendants, only one of which is Hebrew, is miry and be-fuddled waters. One cannot with certainty declare the script Hebrew without justifying why in the same breath it cannot represent classic proto-Canaanite script. Garfinkel makes his case- noting that a word exists on the sherd that is a typical Hebrew word. If his case holds, then we will have found in this year the oldest Hebrew Inscription!

4. Half-Shekel Temple Tax coin found in the Rubbish

The full shekel and the half-shekel were well known to have been the prescribed coin with which all the young Israeli men could pay the yearly Temple Tax. The commandment stems from the Lord’s dialogue with Moses (Exodus 30:12-15) and is well documented in the story of Jesus and Peter (Matthew 17:24–27). This year is not the first year that a half-shekel coin has been found, although they are rare, but rather it is the first half-shekel coin that has come from the Temple itself! This coin represents one man’s modest contribution to Temple maintenance and would go straight to the Temple treasury. In a small way it is an exciting find, not so much for the item itself, but from where it came from, and what it paid for.

5. The Messianic Stone

An inscription known as “Gabriel’s Vision” was published this year- the text was written in ink onto a stone sometime in the last first century B.C. and early first century A.D. and due to its Messianic content has come to wide attention. This pre-Christian Jewish text is said to relate to two different concepts of the Messiah. So the text is difficult to read in some places it describes how there will be a militant Messiah of David who will be involved in some king of military victory, while Ephraim, otherwise known as the Messiah son of Joseph will be involved in suffering and death. There is a debate if the inscription also describes how the Messiah son of Joseph will rise from the grave “in three days, live!”

It is of no surprise to hear another personal seal has been uncovered in one of the many on-going excavations in the Old City of Jerusalem (the Western Wall Plaza). What may be the twist in this tale is the possibility that the seal may have been planted – a fake.

Anyone who has seen the beautiful depictions of King Sennacherib’s assault on the Judean city of Lachish (701 BCE) will recall the rows of Assyrian archers sending a hail of arrows into the defending city. The depiction of the Assyrian archer is a well-known stylized form – a man walking right with his left hand on the bow as his right hand (the stronger one) pulls back the string. This image is duplicated so two archers appear together side-by-side as in battle formation.

What then becomes interesting and slightly suspicious, is to see this new discovery showing a single archer wearing two quivers of arrows (as if two men were standing together), and he is standing (when impressed into the seal/wax) back-to-front! His weaker arm (the left hand) pulls the string back and his feet are reversed.

One would expect a seventh-century artisan who makes and manufactures artifacts that reflects the images of his own age, would know that the archer needs to be inscribed in the reverse on the stone- thus only when impressed in the wax – does it appear in the stylized format with the right hand on the strong string and his left hand steadying the bow.

This seal has correctly reversed the inscription “for Hagab” – a Hebrew name (appears in Ezra 2:46) – on the stone. The image is not reversed, though! It is a possibility that this seal is the result of a simple and recent sketch of a walking Assyrian archer as lifted from (the inscription of the destruction of Lachish?) any source depicting Assyrian archers.

Let’s wait for more news. After all, there may have been a military commander in Jerusalem famed for his mighty left-handed feats and dexterity!

A 3rd Century CE Roman grave has revealed a startling find- a small golden scroll with the Hebrew prayer, known as the Shema, "Hear, O Israel! The Lord is our God, the Lord is one" (Deuteronomy 6:4). The scroll is a Greek transcription of the prayer, and was found resting in an infant’s grave. This finding may push back by 600 years the evidence of a Jewish Presence in modern day Austria.

To read more go to the University of Vienna.

Some caution needs to be exercised however since the finding is an isolated one, and may have been carried as an amulet by a non-Jew. Despite these concerns, it is an exciting find given the quality of the amulet and its dating.

This finding is analogous with the silver-scrolled amulets found outside of Jerusalem at Ketef Hinnom which are much older than the Dead Sea Scrolls. These amulets were also found in a family grave and parallel the Priestly Blessings found in Numbers 6: 24-26.

"The Lord (Yhwh) bless you, and Keep you,
The Lord make his face shine upon you, and be gracious to you,
The Lord lift up his countenance upon you, and give you peace."

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A new seal stamp bearing a Hebrew name has been found in the excavations in the Old City of Jerusalem under the authority of Eilat Mazar. If one recalls it will be remembered that many other exciting seals and bullae have already been uncovered in older excavations at the same site, such as the name ‘Gemaryahu, son of Shaphan’, who is recorded in Jeremiah 36:10-12, 25 and was the scribe to King Jehoiakim (608-591) in Jerusalem.

It was then with some excitement that this seal was revealed with another Biblical name, that of Temech- a Priestly family mentioned in the book of Nehemiah. However the reading was quickly changed, after it was realized one needed to read the Hebrew characters in the reverse, since that is how it was inscribed on the stamp. Once the stamp is then impressed into wet clay it would leave the name of the bearer the correct way, from right to left.

The proper reading is shin, lamed, mem, taw and can be pronounced a variety of ways, one being ‘Shlomit’. This name appears to be female because of the characteristic taw ending, although it can be argued was the name of a man. King Solomon (in Hebrew Shlomo) is the largest personality in the Bible who bore the male version of this name. Both names come from the verb meaning ‘to be safe’; and the word for ‘peace’, Shalom is also derived from this verb.

‘Shlomit’ forms the bottom register of the seal while above it, flanking what appears to be a horned altar, are two bearded figures. In the top register is a crescent moon. The dating is still under debate and shall not be concluded until we have information as to the stone material of the seal, and its stratigraphic placement in the excavation. However a date may be proposed based on the glyptic scene which is common for the Iron Age period, and more specifically the late seventh and early sixth centuries. This is a small but very impressive seal, offering us a wealth of information. Let us hope for many more this year!

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The main source of water in ancient Jerusalem was the Gihon spring, located just outside the city walls. When the Assyrians waged an attack against Judah towards the end of the 8^th century BCE, led by king Sennacherib, king Hezekiah realized that in order to sustain throughout an Assyrian siege, the city must be better protected and the water must be accessible from inside the walls of the city. Hezekiah, considered to be one of the better kings of Judah both from a moral standing and as a leader of the people, substantially enlarged the area surrounded by a defensive wall to include more civilians, and built a tunnel that led the water from the Gihon spring into the city. Thus, when the Assyrians attacked in 701, Jerusalem withstood their attack and they eventually withdrew. The great importance of Hezekiah’s building projects is emphasized in the summary of his reign: “And the rest of the deeds of Hezekiah and all his might and the building of the pool and the tunnel bringing the water into the city are written in the book of the chronicles of the kings of Judah” (2 Kings 20:20).

While the tunnel had been well known, the Siloam inscription was discovered by accident in 1880 by a young student from the nearby mission, who happened to look up while walking through the dark tunnel and noticed the inscription. The Siloam tunnel is a rare case in which we have an archaeological finding, including a written inscription, which enriches our knowledge of a biblical report of events. In order to build the tunnel, the workers split into two teams, digging from either end of the future tunnel while following a crack in the rock. When the two work-teams approached each other, they heard the sound of the axes of the other team and knew that the breaking through of the tunnel was almost complete. The inscription they placed at the place of the meeting of the two teams describes the day on which this meeting occurred.

The Siloam inscription is one of the only pieces of written evidence surviving from the First Temple period. Aside from the historical data it provides, it also supplies us with knowledge of the scribal practices of the time (separation of words using dots), the evolution of Ancient Hebrew handwriting, and facts about grammar and pronunciation which are very valuable to the linguistic research of biblical Hebrew.
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The city of Lachish, located in the maritime lowlands of Judea, is first mentioned in the Bible during Joshua’s conquest. After the Gibeonites deceptively made a covenant with Joshua, many of the Canaanite kings were alarmed that they might be conquered with Gibeonite assistance, and therefore set out to fight the Gibeonites. Joshua took over all of these rebellious cities, and Lachish, being one of them, was later part of the territory assigned to the tribe of Judah.

Lachish, located on an important cross-roads between the coast and Hebron, became a major city in the Judean kingdom during the reign of Rehoboam, and was conquered by the Assyrians in the time of Hezekiah (in 701 BCE), when it became the Assyrian local headquarters. Due to the fact that the Assyrians failed to conquer Jerusalem, it was Lachish that was depicted as the main Judean city overcome during the Assyrian invasion and carved reliefs describing its destruction were placed in the central room of Sennacherib’s new palace in Nineveh.

The archaeological findings from Lachish are extensive and include a temple, inscriptions and more from the Canaanite period, and an impressive fortress which should probably be dated to the Israelite period. Many ostraca, stamps and weights containing Hebrew writing that probably should be dated to a period after the destruction by the Assyrians when the city was re-inhabited teach us of the every-day life there.

Most famous among the archaeological finds are the “Lachish Letters.” In these letters, which were written on re-cycled pieces of broken earthenware pottery (known as “ostraca”) we find an extensive correspondence between an outpost in the vicinity of Lachish and the Lachish military headquarters. The letters were all written within a few days, and deal with a book (meaning, a letter) which was read by someone unauthorized to do so or possibly was misread and misunderstood. These letters also mention a military delegation sent to Egypt and other information. Based on archaeological data, the letters are apparently from the eve of the Babylonian destruction, and therefore can be connected to the Babylonian conquest of Judea and the siege over the few remaining cities – Jerusalem, Lachish and Azeka.
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The oldest part of Israelite Jerusalem, known as the city of David, is located on a narrow ridge just south of the walls of the current old city of Jerusalem. After conquering Jerusalem from the Jebusites, David established the city as his capital and began to develop it. David’s Jerusalem was extremely small and was populated mainly by the king and his staff. David laid the groundwork for building a royal Acropolis, including a palace, administrative building, and naturally, the Jerusalem temple. It was his son, Solomon, who completed this building project, as well as the wall of the city, which was not completed by David: “Solomon built the Milo and closed the breaches [in the walls] of the city of his father David” (1 Kings 11:27).

The city of David has undergone massive excavations since the 19^th century, revealing public buildings, private houses, water systems and other archaeological findings. These excavations also reveal the slow expansion the city underwent and its extension towards the eastern hills of the area.

Of special importance among the archaeological finds is an ancient water system which enabled the inhabitants of Canaanite Jerusalem to reach a protected accumulation pool outside the city walls using an underground tunnel. This and the 8^th century water system built by king Hezekiah – the impressive Siloam tunnel – show that the need to channel the water from the sources outside the walls to the inhabitants living inside them was crucial to every-day life in Jerusalem.

In recent excavations, the archaeologist Aylat Mazar claims to have found the remnants of the palace of king David, an identification made with the aid of the biblical account.

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In 1947, by the north-western tip of the Dead Sea, a few Bedouins accidentally stumbled upon what would turn out to be one of the most important archaeological discoveries of the century: the Dead Sea Scrolls. Following this initial discovery of parts of seven scrolls, archaeologists uncovered a huge library, comprised of thousands of scroll fragments in different states of preservation, found in eleven different caves in the vicinity of the ruins called Qumran.

The community preserving the scrolls led a segregate lifestyle at the Qumran site from the second century B.C.E., a time at which they retreated to this desert asylum as a result of ideological disputes with mainstream Judaism based in the Jerusalem Temple, up to their destruction by Roman troops in 68 C.E. The Qumran community (considered by most scholars to be a sect called the Essenes, mentioned by Josephus, Philo and Pliny the Elder) observed strict interpretations of various laws, especially those concerning purity, and also held different views than mainstream Judaism as to the calendar that should be observed and the importance of the luminaries in setting this calendar, keeping a 364-day year, an accurate sun year according to their calculations.

The large library, kept in clay jars and preserved thanks to the dry desert air, includes many biblical scrolls, exposing to us different biblical versions current at the time as well as linguistic and spelling developments, scribal practices, and interpretations of the sacred texts. They also include many sectarian writings, revealing to us the beliefs and practices of the inhabitants of the village and some of the inner-politics of Second Temple Judaism. Some scholars suggested that the roots of early Christianity could be found at Qumran, due to the centrality of purity and baptism, however the abundance of differences causes others to doubt this hypothesis.

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The Jerusalem Temple is a general name which conveys two different temples, operating from the 10th century BCE to the 1st century CE on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, with a seven-decade-long gap during the 6th century CE due to the Babylonian exile.

The Temple was the religious center of the Israelite and later Judean religion, and was the place of offerings and festivals, and included many ritual objects: the candlestick which provided light for the temple, the altar upon which the sacrifices were given, the altar of incense, and the Tabernacle, existing only during the First Temple Period, which contained the tablets of stone with the Ten Commandments and the manna. But first and foremost, the Temple was a place of prayer for all those wishing to pray to YHWH, whether Israelites or gentiles. The Temple became the religious center of the people only during the reign of Solomon, and was preceded by the desert Tabernacle and the temples of Shilo and Bethel.

The First Temple was built by Solomon, who completed David’s task of establishing the kingdom and its religious and governmental institutions. The Temple was to be the symbol of God’s presence amongst his people, as God says to Solomon: “This house which you are building, if you walk in my statutes . . . then I will keep my word with you . . . And I will dwell among the people of Israel, and I will not forsake my people, Israel” (1 Kings 6:12-13).
The First Temple was destroyed by the Babylonians in 586 BCE, and approximately 70 years later, the first exiles returned from Babylon and re-established the Temple. This Temple was a small and meager version of the first, but was an important symbol of the return of Israel to their land. In the 1st century CE, King Herod renovated the building and turned it into a beautiful and glorious architectural masterpiece, as the Rabbis said: “He who did not see the Temple of Herod has never seen a truly beautiful building” (Babylonian Talmud Baba Batra 4a).
The Second Temple was the center of Jewish religious and political life for over half a millennium, witnessing revolts, changes of external empires and internal governments, and many religious disputes. Among the reformers active in this Temple was Jesus, who overturned the tables of the money-changers who were working inside the temple court and drove out the animals being sold for sacrifice, in order to protest the state of the Temple and the fact that it had become a place of market rather than the house of God. The Second Temple was destroyed by the Romans in 70 CE.

Map of Jerusalem

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