024 Many people assume that Jesus’ Last Supper was a Seder, a ritual meal held in celebration of the Jewish holiday of Passover. And indeed, according to the Gospel of Mark 14:12, Jesus prepared for the Last Supper on the “first day of Unleavened...

031 Take even a one- or two-day trip through the Sinai or Negev deserts and you’ll come across scores of them—standing stones erected in a variety of combinations. These stone installations may help us understand the very origins of Israelite...

031 When the patriarch Jacob returns to Canaan with his family after a 20-year sojourn with his uncle Laban, God instructs him to go to Bethel and build an altar (Genesis 35:1). Jacob immediately tells his entourage to rid themselves of the alien...

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’...

034 Some see her as an ancient Israelite Joan of Arc, a devout maid who led her people to victory against a hated national foe.1 Others picture her as the prototype of the modern militant feminist, who challenged the forces of an oppressive...

030 Sometime around the year 1225, a Latin Bible with illustrated commentary was made for King Louis VIII of France.1 It is called the Bible moralisée, and it is a remarkable and disturbing work. This Bible is massive both in size and...

038 038 The Bible,” wrote American poet Emily Dickinson, “is an antique Volume…/ Written by faded Men / At the suggestion of Holy Spectres.” Condemning contemporary pastors for rendering the...

044 To most people, Yemen is an obscure part of southwest Arabia that appears to have escaped major currents of history. Yemen’s greatest claim to fame is that it is known as the birthplace of the queen of Sheba and that it was once the center of...

043 Most people assume that the name Palestine derives from “Land of the Philistines” (Peleshetin the Hebrew Bible; see Psalms 60:10; Isaiah 14:29, 31), via the Greek Palaistinêand the Latin Palaestina. But there is evidence...

038 In August of 1847, the British Museum mounted the first major display of Assyrian antiquities in England. For a year, the public had pored over sketches from Austen Henry Layard’s Mesopotamian excavations in the Illustrated London News...

012 For 4,000 years Lilith has wandered the earth, figuring in the mythic imaginations of writers, artists and poets. Her dark origins lie in Babylonian demonology, where amulets and incantations were used to counter the sinister powers of this...

033 In the twenty-third chapter of his gospel, Matthew describes Jesus speaking against the Pharisees and scribes. “Woe to you,” Jesus cries out, labeling these Jews “hypocrites,” “blind fools,” “blind men,” “serpents” and a “brood of vipers” (...

036 037 We were lucky. There’s no other way to explain it. When our archaeological survey team, part of a larger expedition known as the Madaba Plains Project, discovered Tall al-‘Umayri1 in...

020 022 “So long as the Colosseum stands, Rome also stands; when the Colosseum will fall, Rome also will fall; when Rome will fall, the world also will fall” (The Venerable Bede).1 The...