019 Blood, frogs, lice, cattle disease, boils … Every spring at the Jewish holiday of Passover, the ten nasties that plagued Egypt are described in the Haggadah, the midrashic retelling of the Exodus from Egypt that is read aloud during the...

The oldest Torah manuscripts survive incomplete and barely legible. But not the scroll sheet acquired recently by the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. Penned more than a millennium ago, this uniquely preserved parchment represents the oldest complete Torah scroll sheet totally legible by the naked eye. Explore the manuscript’s history and what makes it such a remarkable artifact.

016 Open your Bible at random and you will notice something striking: Female characters abound. And it’s not simply a lot of women, it’s a lot of strong women. These women are the antithesis of what we might expect from a patriarchal society...

056 The Book of Ezra/Nehemiah begins where the two books of Chronicles end—at the proclamation of Cyrus, king of Persia, allowing the Jews to return to their land after the Babylonian Exile. The conventional wisdom—for the past 150 years—has it...

020 For the last two hundred years, a central question in biblical studies has been the authorship of the Torah (or Pentateuch). The Age of Enlightenment led scholars to realize that the traditional Jewish and Christian belief in Moses’...

046 Israel emerged as a people just before the period of the Judges, at the end of what archaeologists call the Late Bronze Age (1550–1200 B.C.) and the beginning of Iron Age I (1200–1000 B.C.)—the time when the Israelite tribes settled in the...

012 In 586 B.C.E.a Jerusalem lay devastated—the Temple in ruins, the king’s palace destroyed. The Babylonians, led by the fearsome Nebuchadnezzar, had deported Judah’s most prominent citizens to Babylonia. There they lived in exile for 50 years...