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.

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...

029 The evidence that Phoenicians ritually sacrificed their children comes from four sources. Classical authors and biblical prophets charge the Phoenicians with the practice. Stelae associated with burial urns found at Carthage bear decorations...

032 033 We call them “acts of God”—the natural disasters over which we have no control. They fill us with fright and awe: fright at the possible human toll, and awe at the enormous force of...

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’...

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...

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...

042 042 043 Ancient Israelite society was structured in a way that few of us in modern times experience. Its focus was on family and kin...

036 Ashkelon—an ancient city whose name comes from the same root as shekel—was indeed a city of buying and selling. If archaeologists were to design a place to examine the economy of the ancient world, they could hardly pick a better site...

051 The Song of Deborah (Judges 5) is one of the most powerful pieces of poetry in the entire Bible. A prose version repeats the same story, with many variations, in Judges 4. The account tells of the deliverer (Judge) Deborah and her reluctant...

024 025 Ashkelon. The summer of 1990. The sixth season of the Leon Levy Expedition, sponsored by the Harvard Semitic Museum. In the waning days of the season, on the outskirts of the Canaanite...

026 026 In the time of Abimelech, a powerful warrior in early Israel, great events occurred in a fortified temple in Shechem. I believe that temple was found in an excavation at Shechem more...

036 For ancient Israel, the Temple of Solomon—indeed, the Temple Mount and all Jerusalem—was a symbol as well as a reality, a mythopoeic realization of heaven on earth, Paradise, the Garden of Eden. After King David’s conquest of Jerusalem, the...