A 5,000-Year-Old Metropolis North of Tel Aviv

While there have been archaeological digs since the 1960s at the site of the ancient settlement of En Esur—located in the Sharon region north of Tel Aviv—a major excavation begun two years ago has revealed a city far larger than expected. Archaeologists say that in the 4th millennium BCE the city covered an area of some 160 acres and had a population of about 6,000, making it much greater in size than Jericho or Megiddo, heretofore thought the biggest cities in the southern Levant at the time. Yasemin Saplakoglu reports. (Photographs and video can be found at the link below.)

The city’s intricate design of residential and public areas and alleys points to the organized society and social hierarchy that may have existed at the time, according to the statement [from the Israel Antiquities Authority]. The archaeologists also uncovered millions of pottery fragments, flint tools, basalt-stone vessels, and a large temple filled with burnt animal bones and figurines—such as one of a human head containing a seal impression of human hands lifted into the air. In the temple’s courtyard, archaeologists found a huge stone basin that held liquids, most likely for religious rituals.

“This is a huge city—a megalopolis in relation to the Early Bronze Age, where thousands of inhabitants, who made their living from agriculture, lived and traded with different regions and even with different cultures and kingdoms in the area,” Itai Elad, Yitzḥak Paz, and Dina Shalem, the directors of the excavation, said.

Below some of the houses, the archaeologists also uncovered evidence of an even older city that dates back some 7,000 years to the Chalcolithic period.

Read more at LiveScience

More about: Ancient Israel, Archaeology

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