At the Pushkin Museum in Moscow there is a large collection of ancient Egyptian artifacts, including several from the isle of Elephantine in the Upper Nile, which from the 7th to the 5th centuries BCE was home to a Persian garrison defending the southern frontier of the empire. A sizeable number of Jewish soldiers of the shah were stationed there, along with their families. Matti Friedman describes a prenuptial agreement in the museum’s collections, not so different from a Jewish k’tubah or marriage contract, found on Elephantine and drawn up between a Jewish Temple employee and his Egyptian wife. (Video, nine minutes.)

Israel will likely respond directly against Iran after yesterday’s attack, and has made known that it will calibrate its retaliation based not on the extent of the damage, but on the scale of the attack. The specifics are anyone’s guess, but Edward Luttwak has a suggestion, put forth in an article published just hours before the missile barrage: cut off Tehran’s ability to send money and arms to Shiite Arab militias.

In practice, most of this cash comes from a single source: oil. . . . In other words, the flow of dollars that sustains Israel’s enemies, and which has caused so much trouble to Western interests from the Syrian desert to the Red Sea, emanates almost entirely from the oil loaded onto tankers at the export terminal on Khark Island, a speck of land about 25 kilometers off Iran’s southern coast. Benjamin Netanyahu warned in his recent speech to the UN General Assembly that Israel’s “long arm” can reach them too. Indeed, Khark’s location in the Persian Gulf is relatively close. At 1,516 kilometers from Israel’s main airbase, it’s far closer than the Houthis’ main oil import terminal at Hodeida in Yemen—a place that was destroyed by Israeli jets in July, and attacked again [on Sunday].