In the midst of renovating their home in Jerusalem’s Ein Kerem neighborhood, a family discovered an ancient, underground ritual bath. Ilan Ben Zion writes:

Last week the Israel Antiquities Authority finished excavating the subterranean bath, which archaeologist Amit Reem said . . . may have belonged to a private home in a 1st-century CE Jewish village. The ritual bath adheres to halakhic requirements and measures 1.8 meters deep, 3.5 meters long, and 2.4 meters wide.

More intriguingly, it lends some support to a Christian tradition linking Ein Kerem, today a quaint neighborhood clinging to a hill on Jerusalem’s southwestern edge, with the birthplace of John the Baptist. . . .

“[U]ntil now we didn’t have archaeological evidence supporting the notion that there was a Jewish community in Ein Kerem” during that period, [Reem] said, standing next to the gaping maw of the mikveh in the [house’s] living room. . . .

While Reem was reluctant to draw any direct associations between John the Baptist and the ritual bath found in the Shimshoni home, he said its discovery pointed to the presence of religious Jews who were fastidious about matters of ritual purity.

Early Friday morning, Israel attacked military installations near the Iranian cities of Isfahan and nearby Natanz, the latter being one of the hubs of the country’s nuclear program. Jerusalem is not taking credit for the attack, and none of the details are too certain, but it seems that the attack involved multiple drones, likely launched from within Iran, as well as one or more missiles fired from Syrian or Iraqi airspace. Strikes on Syrian radar systems shortly beforehand probably helped make the attack possible, and there were reportedly strikes on Iraq as well.

Iran itself is downplaying the attack, but the S-300 air-defense batteries in Isfahan appear to have been destroyed or damaged. This is a sophisticated Russian-made system positioned to protect the Natanz nuclear installation. In other words, Israel has demonstrated that Iran’s best technology can’t protect the country’s skies from the IDF. As Yossi Kuperwasser puts it, the attack, combined with the response to the assault on April 13,

clarified to the Iranians that whereas we [Israelis] are not as vulnerable as they thought, they are more vulnerable than they thought. They have difficulty hitting us, but we have no difficulty hitting them.

Nobody knows exactly how the operation was carried out. . . . It is good that a question mark hovers over . . . what exactly Israel did. Let’s keep them wondering. It is good for deniability and good for keeping the enemy uncertain.

The fact that we chose targets that were in the vicinity of a major nuclear facility but were linked to the Iranian missile and air forces was a good message. It communicated that we can reach other targets as well but, as we don’t want escalation, we chose targets nearby that were involved in the attack against Israel. I think it sends the message that if we want to, we can send a stronger message. Israel is not seeking escalation at the moment.