Built in Jerusalem’s City of David during the Second Temple period, the so-called “Pilgrimage Road” led from the Siloam pool to the Temple Mount. In a recent study of the coins found beneath the road, archaeologists have dated it to the tenure of Pontius Pilate—who, according to the New Testament, presided over the trial of Jesus—as the Roman governor of Judea, from roughly 26 to 37 CE. JNS reports:

According to Donald Ariel, an archaeologist and coin expert with the Israel Antiquities Authority, “Dating coins is very exact. As some coins have the year in which they were minted on them, what that means is that if a coin with a date on it is found beneath the street, the street had to be built in the same year or [in the year] after that coin had been minted.” . . .

He suggested the possibility that Pilate had the street built to reduce tensions between the Romans and the Jewish population. Although “we can’t know for sure,” he said, “these reasons do find support in the historical documents.”

Although the excavation of the road began more than a century ago following its discovery in 1894 by British archaeologists, in the past six years Israeli archaeologists from the Israel Antiquities Authority and Tel Aviv University uncovered 350 meters of the road as well as artifacts such as coins, cooking pots, complete stone and clay tools, rare glass items, a dais used for public announcements, and parts of arrows and catapults.

Surveying news websites and social media on Sunday morning, I immediately found some intelligent and well-informed observers arguing that Iran deliberately warned the U.S. of its pending assault on Israel, and calibrated it so that there would be few casualties and minimal destructiveness, thus hoping to avoid major retaliation. In other words, this massive barrage was a face-saving gesture by the ayatollahs. Others disagreed. Brian Carter and Frederick W. Kagan put the issue to rest:

The Iranian April 13 missile-drone attack on Israel was very likely intended to cause significant damage below the threshold that would trigger a massive Israeli response. The attack was designed to succeed, not to fail. The strike package was modeled on those the Russians have used repeatedly against Ukraine to great effect. The attack caused more limited damage than intended likely because the Iranians underestimated the tremendous advantages Israel has in defending against such strikes compared with Ukraine.

But that isn’t to say that Tehran achieved nothing:

The lessons that Iran will draw from this attack will allow it to build more successful strike packages in the future. The attack probably helped Iran identify the relative strengths and weaknesses of the Israeli air-defense system. Iran will likely also share the lessons it learned in this attack with Russia.

Iran’s ability to penetrate Israeli air defenses with even a small number of large ballistic missiles presents serious security concerns for Israel. The only Iranian missiles that got through hit an Israeli military base, limiting the damage, but a future strike in which several ballistic missiles penetrate Israeli air defenses and hit Tel Aviv or Haifa could cause significant civilian casualties and damage to civilian infrastructure, including ports and energy. . . . Israel and its partners should not emerge from this successful defense with any sense of complacency.