Have Archaeologists Discovered the Biblical Sodom?

Archaeologists excavating Tell el-Hammam in Jordan have found the ruins of a massive Bronze Age city that seems to have mysteriously disappeared for 700 years. They believe it may be the city of Sodom, described in Genesis as having been destroyed by God in the time of Abraham:

“Tall el-Hammam seemed to match every Sodom criterion demanded by the text,” says [Steven Collins, the head of the excavation]. “Theorizing, on the basis of the Sodom texts, that Sodom was the largest of the kikkar (the Jordan “disk,” or “well-watered plain” [mentioned] in the biblical text [as the location of] cities east of the Jordan, I concluded that if one wanted to find Sodom, then one should look for the largest city on the eastern kikkar that existed during the Middle Bronze Age, [which would have been] the time of Abraham and Lot. When we explored the area, the choice of Tall el-Hammam as the site of Sodom was virtually a no-brainer, since it was at least five to ten times larger than all the other Bronze Age sites in the entire region.” . . .

[B]ased on the excavated evidence, the city’s Bronze Age heyday seems to have . . . come to a sudden, inexplicable end toward the end of the Middle Bronze Age—and the ancient city became a relative wasteland for 700 years, for the most part void of human habitation. The comparatively paltry presence or lack of Late Bronze Age material is a testament to this, with the same pattern shown in the smaller, nearby sites.

Read more at Popular Archaeology

More about: Abraham, Ancient Israel, Archaeology, Genesis, History & Ideas, Sodom

It’s Time for Haredi Jews to Become Part of Israel’s Story

Unless the Supreme Court grants an extension from a recent ruling, on Monday the Israeli government will be required to withhold state funds from all yeshivas whose students don’t enlist in the IDF. The issue of draft exemptions for Haredim was already becoming more contentious than ever last year; it grew even more urgent after the beginning of the war, as the army for the first time in decades found itself suffering from a manpower crunch. Yehoshua Pfeffer, a haredi rabbi and writer, argues that haredi opposition to army service has become entirely disconnected from its original rationale:

The old imperative of “those outside of full-time Torah study must go to the army” was all but forgotten. . . . The fact that we do not enlist, all of us, regardless of how deeply we might be immersed in the sea of Torah, brings the wrath of Israeli society upon us, gives a bad name to all of haredi society, and desecrates the Name of Heaven. It might still bring harsh decrees upon the yeshiva world. It is time for us to engage in damage limitation.

In Pfeffer’s analysis, today’s haredi leaders, by declaring that they will fight the draft tooth and nail, are violating the explicit teachings of the very rabbis who created and supported the exemptions. He finds the current attempts by haredi publications to justify the status quo not only unconvincing but insincere. At the heart of the matter, according to Pfeffer, is a lack of haredi identification with Israel as a whole, a lack of feeling that the Israeli story is also the haredi story:

Today, it is high time we changed our tune. The new response to the demand for enlistment needs to state, first and foremost to ourselves, that this is our story. On the one hand, it is crucial to maintain and even strengthen our isolation from secular values and culture. . . . On the other hand, this cultural isolationism must not create alienation from our shared story with our fellow brethren living in the Holy Land. Participation in the army is one crucial element of this belonging.

Read more at Tzarich Iyun

More about: Haredim, IDF, Israeli society