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Discovered in Jerusalem: a Two-Millennium-Old Weight with the Name of the High Priest’s Family

Sept. 16 2016

Digging beneath the ruins of a 19th-century synagogue that was destroyed by the Jordanians during their occupation of the West Bank, the archaeologist Oren Gutfeld has uncovered a number of Second-Temple-era artifacts. Among them is a scale weight whose inscription includes the name of the high priest’s family. Eli Mandelbaum writes:

This is the second time that such a weight has been uncovered. Excavations at the nearby Burnt House found a similar weight.

Gutfeld explained that he himself unearthed the weight, which has two lines of Aramaic text and a lyre between them. This was initially obscured by a burnt layer, which is presumably from the burning of Jerusalem [by the Romans in 70 CE]. While the first line of text has not been fully deciphered, the family name of the high priest was discernible.

“It doesn’t happen very much that I get emotional when I find artifacts. But here, I went pale and even felt a small tremble to see the name of the high priest,” [Gutfeld said].

Read more at Ynet

More about: Archaeology, History & Ideas, Second Temple, Synagogues

The Summary: 10/7/20

Two extraordinary events demonstrate something important about Israel’s most fervent adversaries. One was a speech given at something called The People’s Forum (funded generously by Goldman Sachs), which stated, “When the state of Israel is finally destroyed and erased from history, that will be the single most important blow we can give to destroying capitalism and imperialism.”

The suggestion that this tiny state is the linchpin of a global, centuries-old phenomenon like capitalism goes well beyond anything resembling rational criticism. Even if Israel were guilty of genocide, apartheid, and oppression—which of course it is not—it would not follow that its destruction would help end capitalism or imperialism.

The other was an anti-Israel protest that took place in front of New York City’s Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, deemed “complicit” in Israel’s evils. At organizers’ urging, participants shouted their slogans at kids in the cancer ward, who were watching from the windows. Given Hamas’s indifference toward the lives of Gazan children, such callousness toward non-Palestinian children from Hamas’s Western allies shouldn’t be surprising. The protest—like the abovementioned speech—deliberately conveyed the message that Israel is the ultimate evil and its destruction the ultimate good, cancer patients be damned.

The fact that Israel’s adversaries are almost comically perverse does not mean that they can be dismissed. If its allies fail to understand the obsessive and irrational hatred that it faces, they cannot effectively help it defend itself.

Read more at Mosaic