While discoveries from the Second Temple era (516 BCE–70 CE) and the later Roman period are quite in common in Israel, findings from the First Temple period (destroyed in 587 BCE) are much rarer. Archaeologists recently identified such an item, dating to the 7th or 8th century BCE. Israel Hayom reports:

The clay seal contains ancient Hebrew writing indicating it belonged to the “governor of the city” of Jerusalem, the highest municipal position during that time. “This is the first time such a sealing has been found in proper archaeological excavations,” Shlomit Weksler-Bdolah, the lead excavator said, “it supports the biblical record of there being a governor of Jerusalem during the First Temple period.”

Experts say the seal, which depicts two figures facing each other below the inscription, was likely attached to an important letter or document. . . . The area where it was found near the Western Wall is believed to have been inhabited by high-ranking officials based on this seal and other artifacts found previously.

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].