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.

To Peter Berkowitz, the rot in American institutions of higher learning exposed by Tuesday’s hearings resembles a disease that in its early stages was easy to cure but difficult to diagnose, and now is so advanced that it is easy to diagnose but difficult to cure. Recent analyses of these problems have now at last made it to the pages of the New York Times but are, he writes, “tardy by several decades,” and their suggested remedies woefully inadequate:

They fail to identify the chief problem. They ignore the principal obstacles to reform. They propose reforms that provide the equivalent of band-aids for gaping wounds and shattered limbs. And they overlook the mainstream media’s complicity in largely ignoring, downplaying, or dismissing repeated warnings extending back a quarter century and more—largely, but not exclusively, from conservatives—that our universities undermine the public interest by attacking free speech, eviscerating due process, and hollowing out and politicizing the curriculum.

The remedy, Berkowitz argues, would be turning universities into places that cultivate, encourage, and teach freedom of thought and speech. But doing so seems unlikely:

Having undermined respect for others and the art of listening by presiding over—or silently acquiescing in—the curtailment of dissenting speech for more than a generation, the current crop of administrators and professors seems ill-suited to fashion and implement free-speech training. Moreover, free speech is best learned not by didactic lectures and seminars but by practicing it in the reasoned consideration of competing ideas with those capable of challenging one’s assumptions and arguments. But where are the professors who can lead such conversations? Which faculty members remain capable of understanding their side of the argument because they understand the other side?