According to the book of Kings, the Phoenician monarch Hiram of Tyre was an ally of Kings David and Solomon and provided cedarwood and skilled craftsman for the construction of the First Temple. Outside of the Bible itself, there is little historical information about these 10th-century kings, or evidence of trade with cities like Tyre, in what is now Lebanon. An earring pendant from this era—discovered a decade ago in the ancient Jerusalem neighborhood known as the Ophel, but only recently studied by experts—proves a rare exception. Brent Nagtegaal writes:

The basket pendant’s box is completely solid, measuring 4 x 4 x 2 millimeters. Two tubular parabolic handles, measuring just 0.5 mm in diameter, are attached to the corners of the basket and rise 6 mm above the top of the basket. An even narrower gold wire is tightly wrapped around the base of each parabolic handle, making a knop—perhaps an ancient artistic embellishment to hide the joint of the bars to the base. The top of the parabolic bars are joined together by golden wire wrapped three times around and then extending upward where it is snapped. The wire was probably originally connected to a suspension loop.

I took the artifact to Professor Naama Yahalom-Mack, excavator of the northern Israel site of Abel Beth Maacah and head of the metallurgy lab at the Institute of Archaeology at Hebrew University, to discover the metal composition of the pendant. She ran three composition tests using the xlr machine, confirming that the pendant was electrum—an alloy of gold and silver. This test confirmed the Ophel basket pendant to be the earliest “gold” artifact ever discovered in an archaeological excavation in Jerusalem to date.

Calling the proposal to depopulate Gaza completely (if temporarily) “unworkable,” Peter Berkowitz makes the case for a similar, but more feasible, plan:

The United States along with Saudi Arabia and the UAE should persuade Egypt by means of generous financial inducements to open the sparsely populated ten-to-fifteen miles of Sinai adjacent to Gaza to Palestinians seeking a fresh start and better life. Egypt would not absorb Gazans and make them citizens but rather move Gaza’s border . . . westward into Sinai. Fences would be erected along the new border. The Israel Defense Force would maintain border security on the Gaza-extension side, Egyptian forces on the other. Egypt might lease the land to the Palestinians for 75 years.

The Sinai option does not involve forced transfer of civilian populations, which the international laws of war bar. As the United States, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and other partners build temporary dwellings and then apartment buildings and towns, they would provide bus service to the Gaza-extension. Palestinian families that choose to make the short trip would receive a key to a new residence and, say, $10,000.

The Sinai option is flawed. . . . Then again, all conventional options for rehabilitating and governing Gaza are terrible.