The lone blast of the shofar trumpet stretches out across the hills, illuminated by the first rays of the morning sun. The distinct sonorous call marks the important day of Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish...
The Essenes were a Jewish sect that flourished around the end of the Second Temple Period, i.e. between the 2nd century BC and the 1st century AD. The main source of information regarding this...
Herod the Great was a Roman client king of Judaea (known also as the Herodian kingdom) who lived during the 1st century BC. He was also the founder of the Herodian dynasty, whose members, like Herod...
The Vision of the Valley of Dry Bones prophecy is one of the most powerful prophecies of the prophet Ezekiel . In this vision, Ezekiel finds himself in a valley full of dry human bones of Israelite...
The Copper Scroll is part of the extraordinary cache of 1st Century documents first discovered in caves at Qumran , popularly known as the Dead Sea Scrolls. The Copper Scroll, however, is very...
Lilith is first mentioned in ancient Babylonian texts as a winged female demon that attacks pregnant women and infants. From Babylonia, the legend of “the lilith” spread to ancient Anatolia, Syria,...
The gothic horror novel, Frankenstein , is one of the most well-known stories in which man tries to play god by attempting to manufacture a living being. A similar story, that of the golem, exists in...
Isaiah the prophet is known for having urged Israel to rely on Yahweh, their national god, instead of on the political power, and the gods of nations like Egypt or Assyria for protection and...
Although Jewish people usually, but not always, share a common gene pool, they are not a race because any non-Jew who converts to Judaism will be recognized as being Jewish by all those rabbis who...
When was circumcision first practiced? How did it evolve? Why was it practiced? The earliest literary evidence of the practice of circumcision goes back to ancient Egypt. There are many hypotheses...
Recent discoveries by a team of specialists and students at Huqoq in Israel's Galilee, led by University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill professor Jodi Magness, shed new light on the life and...
Two ancient jars dated to over 2000-years-old are mystifying archaeologists, as they were lowered down an “almost totally inaccessible... sheer 30 meter cliff-face” and stashed inside a tiny cave in...
Experts have made the remarkable discovery of a curse on a lead amulet from the Eastern Roman Empire. According to the Jerusalem Times, experts were shocked when they finally deciphered the message...
In the 6th-century BC, the armies of Babylon destroyed Jerusalem and the Kingdom of Judah. They tore down the city walls, burned the temples, and ran down every person who tried to escape. The few...
Ashkenazi Jews are a Jewish ethnic group who have their earliest ancestors from the indigenous tribes of Israel…at least on one side of the family tree. A study published in 2013 in Nature...
Joan Taylor / The Conversation Over the past few decades, the question of what Jesus looked like has cropped up again and again. Much has been made of a digital reconstruction of a Judaean man...