Hebrew Voices #168 – Israelite Archaeology at the Israel Museum

You are listening to Hebrew Voices with Nehemia Gordon. Thank you for supporting Nehemia Gordon's Makor Hebrew Foundation. Learn more at NehemiasWall.com.

Nehemia: Here we have one of my favorite objects in the museum; it’s on the cover of a book I wrote. This is the Seat of Moses.

This is a replica of something that is now at the British Museum. It was found in Iraq, in the palace of the Assyrian kings, and it portrays the Battle of Lachish, which is a really important scene in history. Number one, because it's mentioned in the Tanakh, but it’s also described in Assyrian art, and it’s described in Assyrian written texts. It’s mentioned in the Tanakh, and we have Hebrew written texts that were found on-site in the area of Lachish, the Lachish letters, that describe some of the events surrounding this battle as well.

And we have another source, which is the archeological excavation of the site itself. For example, here, we see a siege ramp; the Assyrians were masters in siege warfare. You can see the siege ramp, and they’re shooting arrows, and we’ve got a battering ram, and when they excavated, they found giant arrows and the siege ramp. They actually found in an archeological excavation the siege ramp, it’s described in different sources, and so it's really a beautiful dovetailing of all these different types of information, art and written documents from both the Israelite and Assyrian sides as well as what’s in the Tanakh.

What they did in the Assyrian art is they’re showing several scenes at once, all… it's called relief, and again, this is a replica; the original is in the British Museum. Here, we see the siege on the city, but then after the siege is over, they’re taking more booty and they’re taking captives. They’re taking slaves of the Judean people who were captured.

You can see there are people who they weren't really happy with, and they're executing them. And you see people bowing down before either the king of Assyria or one of his generals.

And then here, you have three people being crucified, and the way they’re crucified is what we would actually call impalement, but in Hebrew, it's the same word. You can see what they did, and the Assyrians were masters of this. They were infamous for doing this.

One of the most important things in this museum, one of my favorite things, I wrote a book about it, are the two silver scrolls found at Ketef Hinnom, what today is known as Bible Hill. They have written on them the Priestly Blessing from Numbers 6:24-26. And why are they written on these tiny little silver scrolls? One of them is significantly smaller than the other, and the reason they were written on these silver scrolls was probably as an amulet. It was probably some superstition that they believed that the Priestly Blessing would protect the person in the afterlife. There's certainly no reason to put a biblical text in a grave. That doesn’t even make sense from a Torah perspective, but this is what they did, and it's today the oldest preserved copy of any biblical text we have.

About 20 years ago, they actually took really high-resolution photographs, or what at the time was high-resolution photographs, using different types of lighting, and in the photographs, you can see, there's actually another biblical verse, from Deuteronomy, where God is referred to as “shomer habrit vehachesed.” "He who guards or keeps the covenant and the hesed, the grace, the loving-kindness." So, there are actually two different Biblical passages, Numbers 6, and another one from Deuteronomy.

Here is a recreation; this is not the actual tomb, but a re-creation of what the tomb looked like where they found the silver scrolls. And among all this rubble they had bodies laid out, and they had all kinds of pieces of pottery and lamps. Among that, they had these two tiny scrolls. One of them was found by an archaeologist directly, and the other they only found because they sifted through everything, which is more common today, but back then it was pretty rare, in the 80’s. They sifted through everything and found this tiny little scroll. Look how small it is! It's under a magnifying glass! Now, come around to the side and see how small it is. I'll show my hand for comparison. Oh, it's tiny.

Here we have a really important inscription. This was found in a place in Israel called Beit Loya, and you can see here in Paleo-Hebrew, it says Yud-Reish-Shin-Lamed-Mem – Yerushalayim, Jerusalem. It's the oldest reference to Jerusalem, outside the Tanakh and in Hebrew. There are earlier references to Jerusalem in non-Hebrew sources, in Assyrian sources and Akkadian sources.

According to some archaeologists or paleographers, here's what it says: “Yehovah Elohei kol ha’aretz," "Yehovah, the God of all the earth", "harei Yehuda lo", “the mountains of Judah belong to Him", "Elohei Yerushalayim", "to the God of Jerusalem.”

Now, why do I say, "according to some archaeologists and paleographers"? Because this is written on chalkstone. I could rub it with my finger and create a new little line that would scratch it, so it’s hard to know what’s here is actually part of the writing, and what is just a little scratch in the stone. You can see that the word Yerushalayim (י-ר-ש-ל-ם) is much wider and deeper than all the words around it. I'm quite sure this is a replica, and that was done by the people who created the replica. In the original, I believe it says "Yerushalayim", but a lot of the other words are not entirely clear.

This is the most important thing in the museum. I know I've said that before!

But here is a section on earlier Hebrew writing. Let's go in. Here, you have different inscriptions in Paleo-Hebrew, and this one here on the bottom is from Khirbet El-Qom. It's one of two inscriptions that mention “Yehovah” and His “Asherah”.

That’s a no-no. Yehovah had a wife, according to these inscriptions, named Asherah. Asherah is mentioned in the Tanakh. It says, "Tear down their altars [to Ba’al], and cut down their ashera," which were the poles or trees that were next to the altar. Asherah was, according to some sources, the mother of Ba'al. So, in the Hebrew sources they make her the wife of Yehovah.

And here, the inscription says, “Oriahu hasar katava", "Oriahu the officer, the minister, wrote it", "Baruch Oriahu leYehovah u’le'Asherato”, May Oriahu be blessed by Yehovah and by His Asherah.” Then it says, “Umitzareha hoshia lo”, " and may he be saved from his troubles". So here, he's asking Yehovah and His consort for salvation and blessing.

So, the other one we have that was found that mentions Yehovah and His Ashera was found in Sinai, and it was on display here at the Israel Museum until the late 90’s, and then it was turned over to Egypt, and no one has seen it since. That's from Kuntillet Ajrud.

So, we have two of them, and that’s important because the one from Kuntillet Ajrud mentions Samaria (Shomron), from the Northern Kingdom of Israel, or all Israel, it was from Mamlekhet Yisrael, Northern Kingdom of Israel, and this one is from the Kingdom of Judah. Until they found this one about 20 years ago, the story was, "Well, that was the people of the Kingdom of Israel who assigned to Yehovah an Asherah. The Judeans didn't do that." Well, yes, they did. It was both of us who did it.

Let’s see some of these other inscriptions. One of these is a replica here, until recently, this was the oldest Canaanite inscription in a foreign... It's a debate if it was Canaanite or Paleo-Hebrew. It's from the 13th century BCE, from Lakhish. The original, if I'm not mistaken, is on display at the British Museum. And it says, "Matan", "an offering to my lady Elat". "Matan" is a gift, an offering, "lerabati Elat”, and Elat is the feminine of El. So, "To my lord, my lordess, my mistress, Elah, the goddess," Elat.

Okay, this may be my favorite thing in the museum. I know I've said that before, but really, this time. This was written around the time of King Josiah, so we're talking about the late 7th century BCE. It's called the Mesad Hashavyahu inscription. It was written by a man who was very poor, and he's writing this as an appeal to a judge. He says, "I had this debt, and I was harvesting, and putting away my crop in the barn before Shabbat. This man came and took away my garment." He says to the judge, "I didn't do anything wrong, and I have nothing else to sleep with. Please have him return my garment."

First of all, it's the first reference to Shabbat outside of the Tanakh.

And number two, it describes what we see in Exodus and Deuteronomy, that if you take a pledge from somebody and they can't afford it, they don't have another garment, you can't repossess that pledge because they need it. You can't take away something that somebody needs if they're desperately poor. Even if you rightfully got it as a pledge, you can't go and repossess that and take it away from them. And it says, "What will the man sleep with?" in the Torah, and here he's literally saying, "I've got nothing else." If this wasn’t found in an archaeological excavation, I'm quite sure archaeologists would say it was a fake, but since it was found in a proper excavation, there's no dispute about its provenance.

There's a discussion about the Paleo-Hebrew letters, and really what's called Proto-Canaanite, or Proto-Semitic. Here, you can see the letter we call Nun. Each letter has a name that represents an object, and the first sound of the object is the sound of the letter. So, Aleph is a bull, and so 'A' is the sound aleph. Well, this is Bet, which is a house; Gimel, which is the hump of a camel. But then Dalet is the fourth letter that we know about, and Dalet means door, but that's not a door. What is that? It's a fish. And the letter wasn't called Dalet originally, it was called Dag, meaning fish.

Then we have the letter, Nun. Nun actually is the Aramaic word for fish, and perhaps an ancient Hebrew word for fish as well, but the letter Nun wasn't unknown; it was a nachash, a snake. So, the original names of some of the letters and their shapes have changed over time.

Here we have what's believed to be the sarcophagus of King Herod. It was found in a place called Herodion, which is south of Jerusalem, and it was smashed into countless pieces. Probably that was done by the Jews during the revolt against the Romans. They took over Herodion, and one of the first things they did was smash apart the sarcophagus of Herod because the Jews hated Herod. He persecuted Jews. He was horrible to Jews; he was horrible to his own family. One of the Romans famously said, “it's safer to be Herod's pig than his son,” because he murdered one of his sons. And being “sort-of” Jewish, they thought he didn’t eat pig. So, they smashed his sarcophagus into many pieces.

Here we have the ossuary, which is a bone box. Remember, we saw these from the Chalcolithic period, and now we're seein them in the Second Temple period. These are made of limestone, and they have the names of the person whose bones were placed inside, scratched onto the side. This one says “Simon baneh heikhala”, "Simon the builder of the heikhal,” of the Temple. We have information about how Herod renovated the Temple, and it continued to undergo renovations for decades.

What's so interesting here is that we have Hebrew letters, and we have Aramaic. Baneh heikhala, that's Aramaic, but the man’s name should be "Shimon", but it's written "Simon" - Samech, Mem, Vav, Nun. And that's a Greek influence. The Greeks didn't have the "sh" sound, so they wrote "seh". So, we've got someone who's probably a Greek speaker, and an Aramaic speaker who also knows how to write in Hebrew. Maybe he didn't even know how to write in Greek. We've got this kind of mix of the three languages in this period.

Here, we have an inscription. This is new; I haven't seen this before. I've heard about this. This is an actual sarcophagus. It's the lid of a sarcophagus, and it mentions Ben Hakohen Hagadol, the son of the High Priest.

And then here you have something found at the site of the Temple, just outside the Temple Mount, and it says, "LeBeit HaTekia", or "the House of the Trumpeting". Josephus actually tells us what this was for… he was the 1st century Jewish historian. He tells us that when Shabbat began, the priests would stand at the edge of the Temple and blow on these silver trumpets to announce that Shabbat had begun. If you've been in Israel when Shabbat begins, in Jerusalem you'll hear a siren, and that siren tells you that Shabbat is beginning, and it comes from this ancient practice that was done in Jerusalem from the Temple. It’s not an accident; someone read Josephus and said, "Hey, we should do that now that we're free again in our own country."

This is incredible because this is a piece of the Temple. It was pushed down by the Romans onto the street below and excavated after the liberation of the eastern part of Jerusalem in 1967, the Place of the Trumpeting.

Now, this here is an inscription known as the Balustrade Inscription or the Sorag Inscription. The Sorag was this fence that was around the inner part of the Temple, and there was a series of signs in Hebrew, Greek, and Latin, that said that no uncircumcised may enter, and if you do, you'll be executed. Which is very strange because the Jews were under Roman rule; they didn't have the authority to execute anybody, except in this one instance.

And Josephus tells us how the Roman rulers were so upset, they said, "You Jews are complaining about taxes and all kinds of problems, but we let you execute people who aren't circumcised if they go into your temple, which is completely contrary to our religion. But we give you this one concession, and you don't obey us. You give us trouble and you rebel all the time.” Well, I guess people want freedom. Not just one little freedom, they want all their freedoms.

There are two copies of this, speaking of freedom, and this is a small piece that was found. There's another one that's full and complete, in Greek, and that is at the museum in Istanbul. I saw it myself; I was there a few years back. Why is it in Istanbul? Because we were ruled for 400 years by the Turks, and they stole it. It was found during their rule.

Now, here's another inscription, which is fascinating. It was found right next to the Temple, and it mentions a man named Theodotus. This man named Theodotus dedicated money to have a synagogue built. That's very surprising, because the story we were always told is that when the Temple was destroyed it was replaced by synagogues, they became a mikdash meh’at, a small sanctuary, and the prayers took the place of sacrifices. Yet here was a synagogue that existed while the Temple stood, meters away from the Temple, and it had been there for generations. It mentions that he's the son of a founder of the synagogue and that the head of the synagogue was the son of another head of the synagogue. So, what was the synagogue doing there? When we read the inscription, we hear the different functions of the synagogue. It was for pilgrims who were coming to have a place to sleep. It was for study of the Torah. It doesn't mention prayer, which is quite interesting. It tells you all the functions of the synagogue, and prayer isn't one of them.

It says, "Theodotus, son of Vetanos, a priest, who was also the son of the head of the synagogue, built the synagogue for the reading of the Torah and for the study of the precepts,” the commandments, “as well as a hospice, and the chambers, and the bathing establishments," so there was a mikva there, "for lodging for those who need them, from abroad." So, you come from another place, from far away, to pilgrimage to the Temple, and you need a place to sleep. You can stay there. "It was founded by his ancestors and the elders and the Simonides," which is some family from Simon.

Number one, it's in Greek and it's right next to the Temple, and it's someone who's at least the grandson of someone who founded a synagogue. And if you think about it, what does "synagogue" mean? It means a gathering place. In Greek it's synagogue, in Hebrew it’s beit knesset – house of gathering. It doesn't say anything about prayer. Prayer apparently as a formal function of the synagogue came about later.

You look in the Tanakh and you see Hanna. She comes to the Tabernacle, and she's standing there, praying silently. Eli, the priest, says, "Are you drunk?" because he doesn't know what she's doing. This idea that you would go somewhere formally for prayer, that wasn't an idea that they had. They would pray from their hearts. Later on, this idea of the synagogue as a place of prayer developed. But in the time of the Second Temple, that didn't exist.

Here we have one of the most bizarre inscriptions we will see today. Why is it bizarre? It's written in what sort of looks like a mix of Paleo-Hebrew and what we call the Samaritan script, though not exactly Samaritan script, and it's written in Aramaic. It was found at Giv’at haMivtar, which is in northern Jerusalem, not far from Mt. Scopus, and it tells a bizarre story. It says, "I, Abba, son of the priest Elezar, son of Aaron the elder, I, Abba, the afflicted, the persecuted, who was born in Jerusalem and exiled to Babylon, and brought Mathathias, son of Yehuda, to the Land of Israel, and I buried him in the cave which I bought by deed."

What on Earth is this story? He was exiled to Babylon, then he brought somebody back to Israel. And it's written in this weird script that we didn't find anywhere else... not from this period, and it's not written in Hebrew. It's very strange. So, what is the explanation? I guess we really don't know for sure. But there's one theory that this was maybe the last Hasmonean. The Hasmoneans were the descendants of the Maccabees; they were the Maccabees. We don't call them Maccabees in Hebrew; we call them the Hashmona'im. They were a family of priests who took over and started to rule Israel, and it could be that one of them was exiled when Herod took over, and fled, and then his body was brought back to Israel. Or somebody brought his body back to Israel.

Here we have another ossuary, and it mentions a man named Caiaphas. That's a name known from the New Testament. Is it the same Caiaphas? Probably not. But who knows, it could be. Here we have an ossuary that mentions "Yehuda, bar Yeshua", Judah, the son of Yeshua. There was a theory about 20 years ago that this was the son of Jesus of Nazareth. But these are such common names. It's like, you know, every fourth person, I think, was named Yeshua. So, there was one who had a son named Judah, but it has nothing to do, I would think, with Jesus of Nazareth.

Here's another one that's really important. This one mentions… it's from the same tomb in Talpiyot, "Yeshua, bar Yosef," Yeshua, the son of Joseph. And again, these are very common names. Then next to it, his name is given in Aramaic. And what's the Aramaic form of Yeshua? It's "Yeshu". Now, why is that important? Because in the Middle Ages the rabbis developed this story that the name Yeshu meant "may his name and memory be blotted out". It was an acronym, "yimach shemo vezikhro". That's a myth they made up later. "Yeshu" is just the Aramaic form of "Yeshua", and Yeshua was an abbreviated form of Yehoshua. This is what they actually call, in linguistics, a “backronym”. You take a word that's not an acronym and turn it into a backronym. So, Yeshu has nothing to do with "may his name and memory be blotted out". That was just the name of this person whose father was named Joseph. And again, this has nothing to do with Jesus of Nazareth. There's no theology here; it's just some guy who died, and his name is Yeshua or Yeshu, the same name.

And then, how do we get from Yeshu to Jesus? Because in Greek many names end with "us." Like, "Joseph" becomes "Josephus". And so, Yeshu… the Greeks couldn't pronounce "sh", so "Yeshua" becomes "Yesu," which is “Yesus". So, it's nothing to do with Zeus, it's simply the Greek form of "Yehoshua" or "Yeshua", "Yeshu".

Speaking of which, here we have the only example ever found in archaeology of a nail through a bone from crucifixion. In every other instance from Roman archaeology, they would tie the person down, as far as we know, and some archaeologists were saying, "Well, how do we know they ever actually used nails? Maybe that's just a Christian myth." And here they found a bone; by the way, this is a replica because they wouldn't put a real bone on display. The real one's in a warehouse of the Israel Antiquities Authority somewhere, but this is what it looked like, and this was also found in northern Jerusalem.

This, I believe, is not a replica, although I could be wrong, and this is one of the references to Pontius Pilate. It says here "Pilatus", which is, of course, important for Christian history to say that this man actually existed.

Let's see, oh, this one mentions Yehosef. This is another ossuary, and it mentions Joseph, the son of Caiaphas. And we know there was a high priest named Joseph, the son of Caiaphas. So, this could be related to the Caiaphas of the New Testament; very possible.

This is something very rare in archaeology, certainly in the archaeology of Israel. Normally, you find things of stone. You rarely find things made of bronze. Why? Because bronze decays, and also, it's melted down. But here you have a bronze bust and statue of the most evil emperor of the Roman Empire, whose name was Hadrian. Hadrian is the one who tried to turn Jerusalem into a pagan city called Aelia Capitolina, and he set up on the Temple Mount a temple to what's called the Capitoline Trinity. It was the main three gods of the Romans: Jupiter, Juno, and Minerva, who was the father, the mother, and the daughter. And it had three chambers in it; they were considered a triad or a trinity, and he set that up on the Temple Mount in place of the Temple that had been destroyed decades earlier. And the Jews revolted under Bar Kokhba, and originally defeated the Romans and drove them out, but they came back and they wiped out over 1,000 villages, every man, woman, and child. And then to completely erase the Jewish connection to the Land of Israel, to the province of what they called Yudea, Judah, he ordered that the province be renamed Palestina, after the name of the ancient invaders who came from the Aegean and conquered parts of the coast of Israel. He renamed the entire province Palestina, and that's where we get word "Palestine."

So, this is the most evil emperor, and we’re recording this here on the day that’s observed as the fast of the Ninth of Av, when the First Temple was destroyed. And when they tried to rebuild the Temple under Bar Kokhba, he completely expunged the memory of the Jews from the Land of Israel, killing all the Jews of Israel, deporting the ones he didn't kill, and renaming the province Palestina.

If I wouldn’t get arrested, I would spit.

Something they found in massive numbers in archaeological excavations in Israel, and these are roof tiles. And they're a very distinctive type of roof tile you would find in Italy. This is not something you would normally have in Israel, and it says in it "LEG X F", which stands for Legio, X meaning 10th, Fretensis. That was the motto of the 10th Roman Legion, which destroyed the Temple in the year 70 CE. And what was the symbol of the Roman 10th Legion? A wild boar, a pig. And they conquered Israel, and now we find their symbol, the pig, all over Israel.

Now, when the Romans came and they conquered the Temple in the year 70… I can't believe we're recording this on the day that's observed, at least, as the 9th of Av, the anniversary of destruction of the Temple in the year 70. When they came to Israel, some of the Roman soldiers said, “We want a reward for what we’ve done,” and the emperor said, “No problem. We’ve just killed these Jews and taken away their land. I will set you up in a colony.” And it was called Colonia, the Latin word for colony. And until 1948, the village of Colonia, Quluniya the Arabs called it, existed until 1948. And there are so-called Palestinian refugees today who will tell you, “We are the original inhabitants of Palestine, and we come from the village of Colonia." And they're obviously not the original inhabitants; they’re the descendants of Roman soldiers, at least in that case.

Here we've got what the tiles look like; some of them don't have the pig on them. We've got a bunch more with the pig.

Now, a lot of you know that I’ve done a lot of things with the calendar over the years. I've dedicated a major portion of my life to studying the ancient Hebrew calendar. And here we have tombstones from the southern end of the Dead Sea, from a place called Tzo’ar, or Zoar. Tso’ar was one of the cities related to Sodom. There was Sodom, Gomorrah, Admah, Zeboiim, and Bela. And we're told that Bela wasn't destroyed because it was small, and so it was renamed Tso’ar, which means "tinyville", "small town".

And Tso’ar continued to exist, and there were Jews living in Tso’ar in the 4th, 5th, and 6th centuries CE, and they left these tombstones. What's so interesting about the tombstones is they mention calendrical things, specifically they mention the Sabbatical cycle. This one here in the middle says, "This is the tombstone of the son of Megalos, who died on Shabbat, the 25th day of the month of Tevet” – Tevet is the tenth month – “in the first year of the Sabbatical cycle in the year 386 after the destruction of the Temple. Peace.”

This is very exciting, because we don’t know when the Sabbatical cycle is today. And in theory you can take these tombstones, and you can say, "Wait, we know when the Temple was destroyed, and it tells me how many years since the destruction of the Temple. And it tells me what year this is of the Sabbatical cycle. We could figure out when the Sabbatical cycle is. People have been working on this for years, and there are some problems; it’s not so straightforward. There are over 20 of these tombstones, some of them aren't from Tzo’ar, there's one from Lebanon for example, and they don't exactly line up, to the best of my understanding. I did a podcast about it, if I'm not mistaken.

I’ve studied these in depth, and I couldn’t get a clear answer about when the Sabbatical cycle is. But maybe there are people smarter than me who could figure this out. There are certainly people who think they are smarter than me who think they can figure this out, and maybe they’re right! But I want to look at all the evidence and see it line up. What is interesting is that it doesn’t seem that the current tradition of when the Sabbatical cycle is, is the same as what we find in these tombstones.

Now, where do we get the tradition of the current Sabbatical cycle? Maimonides talks about how we don’t know when the Sabbatical cycle is, and there are all these different theories. And one of the problems is, when was the Temple destroyed? Everyone knows it was destroyed in the year 70, but if you look at Jewish documents, they'll say "year-such-and-such to the destruction of the Temple." And you'll trace those back, and the Jews, at least, believe the Temple was destroyed in the year 68 or possibly 69. This is where things aren’t clear.

So, Maimonides comes along and says, "Yeah, we have all these different theories, but we have a tradition from the Land of Israel, and that’s what we need to stick with." Well, here’s a tradition from the Land of Israel that predates Maimonides by seven, eight, nine-hundred years, and it’s not the same tradition. So, when's the true time of the Sabbatical cycle? That's still an open question for me.

So, here we have the section of the Israel Museum with some very interesting mosaics from the Byzantine period, meaning the period after the Romans became Christians. The Byzantines didn’t know they were Byzantines, they just called themselves Romans. But from the year 325 we refer to them today as Byzantines.

Here… we have a mosaic where David is playing a harp, and it says David in Hebrew. And over here we have an incredible mosaic, and this mosaic talks about the Sabbatical year. So, it talks about the borders of the Land of Israel for the purpose of determining the Sabbatical year. What does that mean? The rabbis were always looking for loopholes, and if they could say that a certain area, a certain corner of a field wasn't actually part of Israel… yeah, it's part of Israel, but not for the purposes of the Sabbatical year because it had been ruled by Greeks or something, they would apply that to get people exemptions.

And this is a whole list of exemptions. What's interesting to me is it's written in Hebrew. It was at the entrance of a synagogue, and it gives the borders of where these certain Sabbatical rules have to be observed. And so, it was something very practical for farmers who came to the synagogue and who'd say, "Oh, I don't want to observe that, and the rabbis have now given me an exemption, and every time I walk into the synagogue, I get that exemption." And so, this is probably the most popular synagogue in the region, because if you were subject to that exemption, you wanted to belong to this synagogue so you could plant your fields even during the Sabbatical cycle and benefit from the produce.

What’s really interesting here for me is that it lists all these different crops, and these are things that you might not know grew in the Land of Israel. In the Torah, we've got the seven species, the seven biggest crops of ancient Israel. But here you have all kinds of different crops. It mentions the cucumbers and the watermelons and the melons and the carrots and the mint, which is tied by itself, the Egyptian broad beans, which are tied with shavings, and the leeks from the festival of Sukkot until Hanukkah, and the seeds and the fennel and the sesame and the mustard and the rice. Who knew there was rice in ancient Israel? You wouldn't know that from the Tanakh. The Tanakh doesn't mention rice; it mentions wheat and it mentions barley. It goes on, the garlic, the locally grown onions… So, we have all kinds of different crops that we hear about, and this tells us what the produce of ancient Israel was, what they grew, at least in the Byzantine period when this was written. It came from a Samaritan synagogue from the Byzantine period. And what's interesting is, the Samaritans today say they never had a temple, and clearly the mosaic represents the entrance to a temple. They say, "No, we only ever had the Tabernacle." That’s not the Tabernacle! The Tabernacle didn’t have doors with bars on it and four pillars in the front. That was the typical depiction of the Temple in Jerusalem and other temples from that period. So, this is actually a debate in history, why is it that they depict a temple, when they say today, they had no temple? Josephus mentions that they had a temple that was destroyed by one of the Hasmoneans, John Hyrcanus, in the 2nd century BCE. So, it’s possible that the early Samaritans did believe they had a temple, and later on they forgot about it. That’s unbelievable! We don’t forget the destruction of our Temple. They forgot they had a temple… It’s a mystery of history.

Here, we have one of my favorite objects in the museum, of course. It’s on the cover of a book I wrote, and this is the Seat of Moses from Korazin in northern Israel. Now, if you go to the site of Korazin, a synagogue in northern Israel, they have a replica of this. So, this is the original Seat of Moses, and the idea was that in every synagogue they had a chair where somebody would sit. And they would teach with authority, and you had to obey what they said. And famously, in the New Testament, Jesus, Yeshua, says, "The scribes and the Pharisees sit in Moses' seat” in the Greek, “all therefore whatever they bid you observe, they command you to observe, that observe and do."

What is the Seat of Moses? It was a special chair in the synagogue where the person with authority would sit and you had to obey them. That's an interesting symbol on the back. Have we seen that anywhere before? Hmmm… I'll let you look at some of the other videos and figure that out.

Now, here we have something from the early Islamic period. And it looks like a carpet, but it’s made of mosaic. So, what happened was, the Muslims conquered Israel, and they had Byzantine artisans who knew how to make mosaics but didn’t know how to make carpets. So, when they set up a mosque in Ramla, the only city that was established by Arabs, I guess until the 21st century, in the Land of Israel, they didn’t have carpet-makers, but they had somebody come make a mosaic. That must have been a killer on the knees, to bow down on that thing. But what’s interesting is, you look at the mosaics in synagogues and they look like carpets. They have a carpet layout.

Here you have coins that are from the first revolt against the Romans. These are drawings of them; these aren't the actual coins. I don’t know if you can see them on the camera. But you can read this, it says shekel Yisrael in Paleo-Hebrew. It’s just easily readable. And it says Shin-Bet, which is shana-bet, or “Year 2”. Here’s Shin-Gimel, "Year 3, Shekel Yisrael,” the Shekel of Israel. At this point, shekel is no longer a weight, it's a coin. Here is Shin-Dalet, shana-dalet, the 4th Year.

Now, these coins are written in a script that wasn’t used on a daily basis. On a daily basis, they used what we call the Assyrian script, which is very similar to the modern script we use. But for the coins they used Paleo-Hebrew script, which in Jewish sources isn't called Paleo-Hebrew, it's just called Ktav Ivri, “Hebrew Script.” And the other script is called Ktav Ashuri, Assyrian script, because it came from Aramaic.

So why did they put the script on their coins? It is a way of saying, "This is our real language." It was essentially a sort of nationalist statement. "This is our authentic language, our authentic expression of ourselves, and we’re going to put that on our coins." And modern Israeli coins have that same script on them, even though most people can't read them. But they're replicas, many of them, of ancient Paleo-Hebrew coins.

I don't know if you can get in closer and see what they actually look like.

So here is the actual coin, but here we have a drawing of a coin that the Romans minted in the year 80-81 CE after the destruction of the Temple, and the coin says on it, "Judea Capta" - Judea has been captured, has been subjugated. And it shows a soldier standing in victory with his spear and it shows a woman weeping under a date tree. And the woman weeping under the date tree represented Judea; Judea was known for the dates. And so, it says Judea Capta.

Here's one, the third one from the right. That's an actual Judea Capta coin.

Now, here we have a coin from the second revolt against the Romans, which was in the year 132 to 135 CE, under a man named Bar Kochba. But until modern archaeology, we didn’t know his first name. We just knew his name was called Bar Kochba, and in some cases he was called Ben Koziba.

And what we found out from the archaeology was that his name was Simon, Shimon. And you can see it says in Paleo-Hebrew, perfectly readable, Shin-Mem-Ayin-Vav-Nun, Shimon. And so, he was Shimon Ben Kosiba, or Ben Kosba.

And some of the Dead Sea Scrolls have this signature, which is pretty cool. So, here is the coin… let's see, this is the coin of Shimon… Oh, we can't see the front. We're only seeing one side of it, not the side that says Shimon. Ah, here's the one that says Shimon, there with the…

And what does it have there? It has the building with the four pillars, which represents the Temple. So, the purpose there was to rebuild the Temple.

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