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...
Archaeologists working at Mount Zion in Jerusalem have unearthed a rare, gold and silver jewel and a Scythian arrowhead in a layer of ash that dates to the Babylonian destruction of the city (587 BC...
The fall of Babylon is a historical event that occurred in 539 BC. This event saw the conquest of Babylon by the Achaemenid Empire under Cyrus the Great and marked the end of the Neo-Babylonian...
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...
Does a hidden garden hold the encoded secrets of the Kabbalists? Hidden away in a cul-de-sac at the base of the towering medieval walls of Girona, Catalonia, Spain, is a tranquil garden. A statue of...
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...
Separate archaeological teams working at the vast ancient site of Shiloh city on the West Bank are confident they have made finds consistent with the area being the location of an ancient tabernacle...
An ancient blue dye, known as tekhelet, once adorned the precious robes of kings, priests, and high-ranking Jews. But around two millennia ago, this highly-valued commodity became lost to the pages...
Troglodyte (which means ‘cave dweller’) cave houses are a type of dwelling that may be found in certain parts of the world. In Libya, this unique type of house can be found in the Jabal Nasufah (...
A team of archaeologists from Tel Aviv University have returned to Masada in Israel, after a 11-year hiatus, in order to excavate previously unexplored areas of the desert mountain fortress,...
The Cave of the Patriarchs is a very famous site in the Middle East. Known as Ibrahim Mosque or the Sanctuary of Abraham today, it appears in the Bible, the Torah, and the Quran. Legends tell of a...
Mosaics and rare frescos discovered in Sepphoris, close to Jesus’ reported hometown of Nazareth, cast new light on Roman Galilee, where Jesus and his father, Joseph, are said to have worked. The...
Amy Pullan-Sheffield For decades, linguists have questioned the origin of Yiddish, the millennium-old language of Ashkenazic Jews. Now, the Geographic Population Structure (GPS), which converts DNA...
The Spanish Inquisition was not only a controversial organization, but also little understood by the general public. It was an institution that is haunted by a dark legend and, as you know, legends...