An excavation in Israel has uncovered a pottery fragment bearing one of the oldest known Hebrew inscriptions. One, containing only the words “Ishbaal son of Beda,” suggests something notable about religion in the time of King David, as Hershel Shanks writes:

The name Ishbaal or, more commonly, Eshbaal, is well known from the Bible. It means “man of Baal” [a storm god worshipped in the area]. The name Beda appears for the first time in this inscription.

Dating to about 1000 BCE, the inscription reads from right to left and consists of whole and partially preserved letters incised into the clay pot before firing. . . . In the Bible, various Baal names appear of people who lived in King David’s time or earlier: Jerubbaal (Judges 6:32), Meribbaal (1 Chronicles 9:40), etc. But the Bible mentions no Baal names after this—neither Baal nor Eshbaal. Baal names simply do not appear in the Bible after David’s time.

The archaeological situation is a bit, but not completely, different. We have more than a thousand seals and seal impressions (bullae) and hundreds of inscriptions from Israel and Judah from the post-David period (the 9th to 6th centuries BCE). The name Eshbaal is not to be found among these names. The situation with the name Baal is slightly different; it does occasionally appear in [northern] Israel—and of course in Philistia, Ammon, and Phoenicia. But not in Judah.

It seems that Baal and Eshbaal were banned in David’s kingdom. One reason may have been that, at least officially, Judah was monotheistic.

While it is commendable that administrators of several universities finally called upon police to crack down on violent and disruptive anti-Israel protests, the actions they have taken may be insufficient. At Columbia, demonstrators reestablished their encampment on the main quad after it had been cleared by the police, and the university seems reluctant to use force again. The school also decided to hold classes remotely until the end of the semester. Such moves, whatever their merits, do nothing to fix the factors that allowed campuses to become hotbeds of pro-Hamas activism in the first place. The editors of National Review examine how things go to this point:

Since the 10/7 massacre, Columbia’s Jewish students have been forced to endure routine calls for their execution. It shouldn’t have taken the slaughter, rape, and brutalization of Israeli Jews to expose chants like “Globalize the intifada” and “Death to the Zionist state” as calls for violence, but the university refused to intervene on behalf of its besieged students. When an Israeli student was beaten with a stick outside Columbia’s library, it occasioned little soul-searching from faculty. Indeed, it served only as the impetus to establish an “Anti-Semitism Task Force,” which subsequently expressed “serious concerns” about the university’s commitment to enforcing its codes of conduct against anti-Semitic violators.

But little was done. Indeed, as late as last month the school served as host to speakers who praised the 10/7 attacks and even “hijacking airplanes” as “important tactics that the Palestinian resistance have engaged in.”

The school’s lackadaisical approach created a permission structure to menace and harass Jewish students, and that’s what happened. . . . Now is the time finally to do something about this kind of harassment and associated acts of trespass and disorder. Yale did the right thing when police cleared out an encampment [on Monday]. But Columbia remains a daily reminder of what happens when freaks and haters are allowed to impose their will on campus.