An Ancient Engraving of a Menorah Is Discovered a Second Time

In 1980, an excavation of the town of Michmas—located about six miles outside of Jerusalem—uncovered a 2,000-year-old engraving of an menorah, which was then forgotten. Recently a scholar has re-examined it in light of new evidence, dating it to the mid-2nd century BCE, around the time of the Maccabean revolt. Amanda Borschel-Dan writes:

Ancient Michmas is best known from the book of Maccabees. As depicted in 1Maccabees 9:73, Jonathan, the youngest of the five sons of the revolt-instigating priest Mattathias the Hasmonean, makes peace with the Seleucid general Bacchides and settles in Michmas before the beginning his reign, which spanned 161-143 BCE. “Thus the sword ceased from Israel: but Jonathan dwelt at Michmas, and began to govern the people; and he destroyed the ungodly men out of Israel.”

According to the report from the 1980s, the menorah is approximately twenty inches wide and twelve inches high, with a flat base of some four inches. It has a total of seven branches, with six coming out of a central stem. [The] menorah was crowned by an intriguing but unclear paleo-Hebrew letter, which was scratched into the cave wall. . . . The new study . . . outlines [various] evidence supporting the hypothesis that ancient Michmas was an agricultural settlement populated mainly by kohanim (priests).

This newly rediscovered menorah and mysterious letter join another 1980s find of a hideaway cave, in the nearby el-’Aliliyat region. There, archaeologists discovered a mikveh (ritual bath), a cistern, and two menorahs drawn with a charcoaled stick, one crowned by an Aramaic/Hebrew inscription.

Read more at Times of Israel

More about: Archaeology, Hasmoneans, Menorah

Egypt Is Trapped by the Gaza Dilemma It Helped to Create

Feb. 14 2025

Recent satellite imagery has shown a buildup of Egyptian tanks near the Israeli border, in violation of Egypt-Israel agreements going back to the 1970s. It’s possible Cairo wants to prevent Palestinians from entering the Sinai from Gaza, or perhaps it wants to send a message to the U.S. that it will take all measures necessary to keep that from happening. But there is also a chance, however small, that it could be preparing for something more dangerous. David Wurmser examines President Abdel Fatah el-Sisi’s predicament:

Egypt’s abysmal behavior in allowing its common border with Gaza to be used for the dangerous smuggling of weapons, money, and materiel to Hamas built the problem that exploded on October 7. Hamas could arm only to the level that Egypt enabled it. Once exposed, rather than help Israel fix the problem it enabled, Egypt manufactured tensions with Israel to divert attention from its own culpability.

Now that the Trump administration is threatening to remove the population of Gaza, President Sisi is reaping the consequences of a problem he and his predecessors helped to sow. That, writes Wurmser, leaves him with a dilemma:

On one hand, Egypt fears for its regime’s survival if it accepts Trump’s plan. It would position Cairo as a participant in a second disaster, or nakba. It knows from its own history; King Farouk was overthrown in 1952 in part for his failure to prevent the first nakba in 1948. Any leader who fails to stop a second nakba, let alone participates in it, risks losing legitimacy and being seen as weak. The perception of buckling on the Palestine issue also resulted in the Egyptian president Anwar Sadat’s assassination in 1981. President Sisi risks being seen by his own population as too weak to stand up to Israel or the United States, as not upholding his manliness.

In a worst-case scenario, Wurmser argues, Sisi might decide that he’d rather fight a disastrous war with Israel and blow up his relationship with Washington than display that kind of weakness.

Read more at The Editors

More about: Egypt, Gaza War 2023