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...
Archaeologists from the Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA) have uncovered a fortress from the 11th to 10th centuries BC in the Golan Heights region of Israel. They believe that the complex dates to...
For anyone familiar with the Bible, the story of the Israelite god Yahweh is a simple one. Yahweh appears to Abraham in the book of Genesis and enters into a covenantal alliance with him. Abraham's...
The origin of Jewish New Year celebrations has long been shrouded in mystery. Families around the world celebrate it during autumn with sweet delicacies, joyous prayers, and the blasting of the...
"Flamma, secutor, lived thirty years. Fought thirty-four times, won twenty-one times, stood to draw nine times. Won a reprieve four times. Of Syrian extraction.” An eroded inscription on an ancient...
The name of the Torah has a complicated history. It has been thought to mean a multitude of things including “instruction”, “law”, and “teaching”. The Torah is often misunderstood to represent the...
Chefchaouen (also known as Chaouen), Morocco's Blue Pearl city, is renowned for its old, traditional blue rinsed structures, casting the city in a luminescent colored hue. Situated high in the Rif...
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...
Buried beneath the themes of first fruits and wheat offerings lie deeper connections between Shavuot and Akhenaten. These are suggestive and persuasive and go far beyond delicious foods and...
According to a new paper published in the journal Tel Aviv , ancient esoteric worshippers at a Judahite temple at the fortress mound in Tel Arad in Israel “likely smoked cannabis during cultic...
The Jewish festival of Shavuot is taking place around the world. It is an ancient celebration of the spring harvest of grains and first fruits. It is the year’s first wheat harvest, and Jews around...
The people who lived in the area known as the Southern Levant - which is now recognized as Israel, the Palestinian Authority, Jordan, Lebanon, and parts of Syria - during the Bronze Age (circa 3500-...
A team of experts have made an important discovery about some Dead Sea Scroll fragments in the United Kingdom. They have found letters on four fragments that were believed to be ‘blanks’. This...
In Jerusalem, archaeologists have unearthed a very rare find. They have revealed a coin that was issued by Jewish rebels against Roman rule from the 2 nd century AD. It was minted by the last Jewish...
Portuguese researchers believe that they have identified the long-lost process and plant that provided a unique purple-blue pigment in the Middle Ages . This was used to color many things including...
…a certain prodigious and incredible phenomenon appeared; I suppose the account of it would seem to be a fable…were not the events that followed it of so considerable a nature as to deserve such...
READ PART I HERE While a crocodile showdown conjured up in Pharaoh’s court sounds incredible enough, it was only the magical warm-up for a series of 10 curses to befall the Egyptian slavers. As far...
The Jewish Holiday week of Passover is once again upon us. Millions around the world will experience the traditional Seder meal and remember an event from thousands of years ago. They will eat and...
Whether he existed as a physical person, or as some believe, was merely an archetype from Jewish mysticism, Jesus has taken the world by storm and according to the Complete Pilgrim , very rough...
John the Baptist was a Jewish preacher and prophet who is believed to have been a forerunner to Jesus Christ . In the Book of Matthew in the Greek New Testament, John is depicted as another Elijah...
The history of our world has always been a bloody and difficult affair, full of struggles, wars and conquests. And in the centuries before our own, tribes and chieftains, kingdoms and empires, all...
The famous Temple of Solomon might not have been the first or only temple in the Holy Land. Dating to around 900 BC, an Iron Age temple located near Jerusalem negates the long-held idea the ancient...
The twelve tribes of ancient Judaism were united into a single kingdom under the reigns of Saul, David, and Solomon. The destruction of this kingdom and the forced exile of its population is known as...
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...