061 In the book of Numbers, the Lord speaks to the Israelites through his servant Moses and commands them to wear tassels (or tsitsit) on the corners of their garments. The tassels must include a blue thread. The Biblical passage reads as...

022 The quest for the historical Jesus began as a protest against traditional Christian dogma. But when the supposedly “neutral” historians peered into the well, all they saw was a featureless Jesus. Even when these scholars decided that...

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...

070 In “The Case of the Gilded Staircase,” BAR 10:05, Professor Morton Smith attempts to prove that the Temple envisioned by the Essenes had a gilded staircase to reach the roof of the Temple where members of the Dead Sea sect worshipped the sun...

048 One of the oldest prohibitions in the entire Bible is the injunction against boiling a kid in the milk of its mother. It is repeated three times in identical words: “You shall not boil a kid in its mother’s milk.”a From these words, 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...