Ancient Jewelry Provides a Glimpse at a De-Judaized Jerusalem

As part of a project to publicize previously unpublished discoveries, the Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA) recently detailed the 1971 excavation of an 1,800-year-old Roman-era tomb holding the bodies of a group of young girls, filled with gold objects. JNS reports:

The remains of a lead coffin were found on Mount Scopus in Jerusalem containing jewels including gold earrings, a hairpin, a gold pendant, and gold beads, carnelian beads, and a glass bead. . . . Ayelet Dayan, Ayelet Gruber, and Yuval Baruch of the Israel Antiquities Authority, who carried out the research on the jewelry, believe that the very valuable items that bear the symbols of Luna, the Roman moon goddess, accompanied the girls in their lifetime, and were buried with them to continue to protect them in the afterlife.

Late Roman Jerusalem—renamed Aelia Capitolina—had a mixed population that reached the city after the destruction of the Second Temple and the evacuation of the Jewish residents. People from different parts of the Roman Empire settled in the city, bringing with them a different set of values, beliefs, and rituals. The pagan cult of the city’s new population was rich and varied, including gods and goddesses, among them the cult of Luna.

Read more at JNS

More about: Ancient Israel, Ancient Rome, Archaeology, Jerusalem

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