July
11
/ 2023
In Te’omim Cave in the Jerusalem Hills of central Israel, excavations that took place between 2010 and 2016 recovered a huge collection of Roman oil lamps, weapons, pieces of pottery and actual human skulls hidden inside deep crevices. This strange assortment of artifacts has convinced a pair of Israeli archaeologists that an esoteric religious cult was active in the region between the second and fourth centuries AD, or in the Late Roman era. They believe cult members used Te’omim Cave to hold ritual ceremonies, some of which might have involved human sacrifices. In a new article appearing in the Harvard Theological Review, archaeologists Eitan Klein from the Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA) and Boaz Zissu from Bar-Ilan University argue that the
