A Second Temple-Era Ledger Found in Jerusalem

Sifting through dirt and debris discarded during a 19th-century excavation, a team of archaeologists have discovered a brief 2,000-year-old inscription, which is significant because of its very ordinariness. Amanda Borschel-Dan writes:

A broken chalkstone inscribed with seven rows of mundane text . . . appears to be a merchant’s accounting record that lists names, measures, and numbers. “The more we find inscriptions from daily life—versus monumental, state-sponsored texts—the more I think that there were many who knew to read and write during this period, especially simple instructions such as found in this inscription,” [the Bar Ilan University epigrapher] Esther Eshel told the Times of Israel on Wednesday.

The few words were carved in a simple cursive script using a sharp tool such as a nail into a flat chalkstone slab that was likely taken from an ossuary lid. It is written in a recognized formulaic pattern for similar ledgers. For example, one of the more complete lines includes the final letters of the name “Shimon”—a popular Second Temple name—followed by the Hebrew letter mem, which stands for a measure or economic value.

Although the stone is broken, it joins other examples of inscribed ossuary lids that were discovered dating to the same time range to which Eshel dates the letters based on their shape—from the 1st century BCE to the 1st century CE. It is, however, the first of its kind that was discovered within the confines of ancient Jerusalem.

Read more at Times of Israel

More about: Ancient Israel, Archaeology, Jerusalem

It’s Time for Haredi Jews to Become Part of Israel’s Story

Unless the Supreme Court grants an extension from a recent ruling, on Monday the Israeli government will be required to withhold state funds from all yeshivas whose students don’t enlist in the IDF. The issue of draft exemptions for Haredim was already becoming more contentious than ever last year; it grew even more urgent after the beginning of the war, as the army for the first time in decades found itself suffering from a manpower crunch. Yehoshua Pfeffer, a haredi rabbi and writer, argues that haredi opposition to army service has become entirely disconnected from its original rationale:

The old imperative of “those outside of full-time Torah study must go to the army” was all but forgotten. . . . The fact that we do not enlist, all of us, regardless of how deeply we might be immersed in the sea of Torah, brings the wrath of Israeli society upon us, gives a bad name to all of haredi society, and desecrates the Name of Heaven. It might still bring harsh decrees upon the yeshiva world. It is time for us to engage in damage limitation.

In Pfeffer’s analysis, today’s haredi leaders, by declaring that they will fight the draft tooth and nail, are violating the explicit teachings of the very rabbis who created and supported the exemptions. He finds the current attempts by haredi publications to justify the status quo not only unconvincing but insincere. At the heart of the matter, according to Pfeffer, is a lack of haredi identification with Israel as a whole, a lack of feeling that the Israeli story is also the haredi story:

Today, it is high time we changed our tune. The new response to the demand for enlistment needs to state, first and foremost to ourselves, that this is our story. On the one hand, it is crucial to maintain and even strengthen our isolation from secular values and culture. . . . On the other hand, this cultural isolationism must not create alienation from our shared story with our fellow brethren living in the Holy Land. Participation in the army is one crucial element of this belonging.

Read more at Tzarich Iyun

More about: Haredim, IDF, Israeli society