While ancient Near Eastern peoples tended to use earthenware vessels for preparing and eating food, many Jews in Second Temple-era Judea preferred stoneware; many scholars believe they did so because pottery could become ritually impure, while stone could not. A recent discovery lends credence to this theory, as Amanda Borschel-Dan writes:

A large 2,000-year-old Second Temple-period chalkstone quarry and workshop was discovered at Reina in the lower Galilee, . . . between Nazareth and the village of Kana. . . . [The] stoneware workshop [is] one of only four in Israel. . . .

The workshop is situated in an artificially hewn cave, [as evidence by the presence of] chisel marks. Inside the cave, archaeologists discovered the detritus of lathe-made stoneware—thousands of stone cores. . . . [H]undreds of unfinished or damaged vessels were also found.

“The production waste indicates that this workshop produced mainly handled mugs and bowls of various sizes. The finished products were marketed throughout the region here in Galilee, and our finds provide striking evidence that Jews here were scrupulous regarding the purity laws,” said [Yonatan Adler, who directed the excavation]. . . . “The current excavations will hopefully help us answer the question of how long these laws continued to be observed among the Jews of Galilee during the course of the Roman period,” he said.

The nearby town of Kana (or Cana), is described in the New Testament as the place where water, held in six such stone vessels, was miraculously transformed into wine.

There is little doubt that if Hizballah had participated more intensively in Saturday’s attack, Israeli air defenses would have been pushed past their limits, and far more damage would have been done. Daniel Byman and Kenneth Pollack, trying to look at things from Tehran’s perspective, see this as an important sign of caution—but caution that shouldn’t be exaggerated:

Iran is well aware of the extent and capability of Israel’s air defenses. The scale of the strike was almost certainly designed to enable at least some of the attacking munitions to penetrate those defenses and cause some degree of damage. Their inability to do so was doubtless a disappointment to Tehran, but the Iranians can probably still console themselves that the attack was frightening for the Israeli people and alarming to their government. Iran probably hopes that it was unpleasant enough to give Israeli leaders pause the next time they consider an operation like the embassy strike.

Hizballah is Iran’s ace in the hole. With more than 150,000 rockets and missiles, the Lebanese militant group could overwhelm Israeli air defenses. . . . All of this reinforces the strategic assessment that Iran is not looking to escalate with Israel and is, in fact, working very hard to avoid escalation. . . . Still, Iran has crossed a Rubicon, although it may not recognize it. Iran had never struck Israel directly from its own territory before Saturday.

Byman and Pollack see here an important lesson for America:

What Saturday’s fireworks hopefully also illustrated is the danger of U.S. disengagement from the Middle East. . . . The latest round of violence shows why it is important for the United States to take the lead on pushing back on Iran and its proxies and bolstering U.S. allies.