According to the Hebrew Bible, the Israelites set up the Tabernacle—a portable sanctuary they had constructed at the foot of Mount Sinai—in the city of Shiloh, about 20 miles north of Jerusalem, not long after entering the Promised Land. Shiloh remained the main center of Jewish worship for most of the period preceding King David, who relocated the Tabernacle to Jerusalem, where it would later be replaced by the Temple. In the 20th century, archaeologists identified the ancient city’s remains, which dated back to the second millennium BCE. Hanan Greenwood reports on more recent discoveries:

A century after the first archaeological excavations at the site of ancient Shiloh, . . . a new dig has unearthed a number of rare finds, including five intact jugs that date back some 2,000 years to the time of the Talmud. The jugs were in a row, underneath a floor, most likely to keep their contents cool. Their location is also likely what kept the vessels intact.

The Mateh Binyamin Regional Council, which operates the Shiloh antiquities site, said that the dig was attempting to determine the location of the ancient wall and the entrance to the city. Workers dug a trench on the edge of the southern tel (mound) and exposed layers from all the periods of history when the site was active, from the Bronze Age to the Ottoman Empire. The Canaanite wall itself was first uncovered by a group of Danish archaeologists 100 years ago.

The excavation also turned up a number of coins, a key apparently used to unlock a chest, and even wooden dice identical in shape to dice used today.

In a recent episode of 60 Minutes, a former State Department official tells the interviewer that U.S. support for Israel following October 7 has “put a target on America’s back” in the Arab world “and beyond the Arab world.” The complaint is a familiar one: Middle Easterners hate the United States because of its closeness to the Jewish state. But this gets things exactly backward. Just look at the rhetoric of the Islamic Republic of Iran and its various Arab proxies: America is the “Great Satan” and Israel is but the “Little Satan.”

Why, then, does Iran see the U.S. as the world’s primary source of evil? The usual answer invokes the shah’s 1953 ouster of his prime minister, but the truth is that this wasn’t the subversion of democracy it’s usually made out to be, and the CIA’s role has been greatly exaggerated. Moreover, Ladan Boroumand points out,

the 1953 coup was welcomed by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, [the architect of the 1979 Islamic Revolution], and would not have succeeded without the active complicity of proponents of political Islam. And . . . the United States not only refrained from opposing the Islamic Revolution but inadvertently supported its emergence and empowered its agents. How then could . . . Ayatollah Khomeini’s virulent enmity toward the United States be explained or excused?

Khomeini’s animosity toward the shah and the United States traces back to 1963–64, when the shah initiated sweeping social reforms that included granting women the right to vote and to run for office and extending religious minorities’ political rights. These reforms prompted the pro-shah cleric of 1953 to become his vocal critic. It wasn’t the shah’s autocratic rule that incited Khomeini’s opposition, but rather the liberal nature of his autocratically implemented social reforms.

There is no need for particular interpretive skill to comprehend the substance of Khomeini’s message: as Satan, America embodies the temptation that seduces Iranian citizens into sin and falsehood. “Human rights” and “democracy” are America’s tools for luring sinful and deviant citizens into conspiring against the government of God established by the ayatollah.

Or, as George W. Bush put it, jihadists hate America because “they hate our freedoms.”