July
10
/ 2026
Near a busy ceramic workshop on the edge of ancient Yavne, sometime during the seventh century BC, a craftsman misplaced a small limestone seal carved with a scene of worship–a bearded man raising his hand toward the moon and a star. Rediscovered by the Israel Antiquities Authority almost 2,700 years later, the object offers a rare, intimate link between an industrial corner of a Levantine town and the astral cults that the Bible’s own writers condemned by name. Christoph Uehlinger of Zurich, together with Israel Antiquities Authority archaeologists Pablo Betzer, Revital Golding-Meir, and Daniel Varga, and Gunnar Lehman of Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, documented the seal in their description of the excavation site in the journal Tel Aviv. The
