An Ancient Incense Shovel Discovered in the Galilee

Archaeologists have found a bronze incense shovel and a bronze jug, both carved with ornate designs, in the ancient town of Magdala. Ilan Ben Zion writes:

The 2,200-year-old artifacts were found during excavations being carried out at the archaeological site on the western shore of the Sea of Galilee. . . . They were resting one on top of the other on a stone floor in a storeroom near the fishing village’s pier and likely belonged to a local Jewish family, archaeologists said.

Ritual shovels were used in Jewish cultic practice for burning incense in the Temple in Jerusalem. They are depicted in contemporary Jewish iconography as . . . articles associated with the Temple. . . .

“At the beginning of the study we assumed that the shovel was used only as a cultic object for treating coals and incense used in ritual ceremonies,” Dina Avshalom Gorni, [the archaeologist heading the dig], said in a statement. “Over the years, after incense shovels were found with no cultic context, it would appear that the incense shovel was also used as a tool of daily use.”

Read more at Times of Israel

More about: Ancient Israel, Archaeology, Galilee, History & Ideas, Second Temple

What a Strategic Victory in Gaza Can and Can’t Achieve

On Tuesday, the Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant met in Washington with Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin. Gallant says that he told the former that only “a decisive victory will bring this war to an end.” Shay Shabtai tries to outline what exactly this would entail, arguing that the IDF can and must attain a “strategic” victory, as opposed to merely a tactical or operational one. Yet even after a such a victory Israelis can’t expect to start beating their rifles into plowshares:

Strategic victory is the removal of the enemy’s ability to pose a military threat in the operational arena for many years to come. . . . This means the Israeli military will continue to fight guerrilla and terrorist operatives in the Strip alongside extensive activity by a local civilian government with an effective police force and international and regional economic and civil backing. This should lead in the coming years to the stabilization of the Gaza Strip without Hamas control over it.

In such a scenario, it will be possible to ensure relative quiet for a decade or more. However, it will not be possible to ensure quiet beyond that, since the absence of a fundamental change in the situation on the ground is likely to lead to a long-term erosion of security quiet and the re-creation of challenges to Israel. This is what happened in the West Bank after a decade of relative quiet, and in relatively stable Iraq after the withdrawal of the United States at the end of 2011.

Read more at BESA Center

More about: Gaza War 2023, Hamas, IDF