Fabric from the Time of King David Stained with the Ancient World’s Most Precious Dye

In describing the vestments and curtains used in the Tabernacle and the Temple, the Hebrew Bible often mentions wool dyed purple using a rarefied pigment produced from the murex snail. Archaeologists recently confirmed that three textile scraps they found in the Timna Valley, near Israel’s southern tip, were colored with this particular dye. Amanda Borschel-Dan writes:

The tiny, vibrantly colored Iron Age cloth pieces are the earliest evidence of this precious dye in the entire southern Levant and shed new light on the early Edomite kingdom and Israelite kingdoms 3,000 years ago—a period when the Bible details the conquering of the Edomites by King David.

Until now, the earliest textile evidence of the royal purple dye dated to at least 1,000 years later in the Roman period, when it was highly valued. [Tel Aviv University’s] Erez Ben-Yosef explained that Timna is first and foremost known for its copper, which was mined by residents of the ancient Land of Israel as early as the 5th millennium BCE, going all the way to the early Islamic period some 1,400 years ago. Even recently, he said, the nascent state of Israel had a small factory that produced copper there.

The dry climatic conditions at Timna, deep in the Arava desert, allow for the unusually good preservation of organic materials, similar to the much later Roman-era textile and leather finds discovered in the caves of the Judean desert and at Masada.

What is noteworthy in Timna, said Ben-Yosef, is that the “big story” is related to the early Iron Age. “We’re talking about the 11th to the 9th centuries BCE, and it is a very debated period in the history of the land”—the period of the rise of the biblical kingdoms of Judah and Israel.

Read more at Times of Israel

More about: Ancient Israel, Archaeology, Davidic monarchy, Edomites, Temple

What a Strategic Victory in Gaza Can and Can’t Achieve

On Tuesday, the Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant met in Washington with Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin. Gallant says that he told the former that only “a decisive victory will bring this war to an end.” Shay Shabtai tries to outline what exactly this would entail, arguing that the IDF can and must attain a “strategic” victory, as opposed to merely a tactical or operational one. Yet even after a such a victory Israelis can’t expect to start beating their rifles into plowshares:

Strategic victory is the removal of the enemy’s ability to pose a military threat in the operational arena for many years to come. . . . This means the Israeli military will continue to fight guerrilla and terrorist operatives in the Strip alongside extensive activity by a local civilian government with an effective police force and international and regional economic and civil backing. This should lead in the coming years to the stabilization of the Gaza Strip without Hamas control over it.

In such a scenario, it will be possible to ensure relative quiet for a decade or more. However, it will not be possible to ensure quiet beyond that, since the absence of a fundamental change in the situation on the ground is likely to lead to a long-term erosion of security quiet and the re-creation of challenges to Israel. This is what happened in the West Bank after a decade of relative quiet, and in relatively stable Iraq after the withdrawal of the United States at the end of 2011.

Read more at BESA Center

More about: Gaza War 2023, Hamas, IDF