From 516 BCE until 70 CE, the rebuilt Temple in Jerusalem was the center of worship for Jews in both the Land of Israel and the Diaspora. The beginning of this era saw the composition of the Hebrew Bible’s latest books; its end saw such early talmudic rabbis as Hillel and Rabban Gamliel, as well as the beginning of Christianity. The interim period, however, is little remembered or understood outside of academic circles. In conversation with Matt Lynch, Malka Simkovich explains what both Jews and Christians get wrong about this pivotal period of Jewish history, how the rabbis built on its intellectual and interpretive legacy, and the dangers of paying excessive attention to the Dead Sea Scrolls. (Audio, 56 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].