Even in the ancient kingdom of Judah, during the First Temple period (approximately 900 to 586 BCE), taxes had to be collected. Daniel Shani explains an artifact that is one of the main sources of archaeological information about these taxes:

This item, approximately seven-by-seven millimeters in size, is a bulla—a piece of clay, which, while still wet and soft, was affixed to a string used to tie up a rolled papyrus document. . . . [A]ncient Hebrew letters stamped into the sealing, which, despite two broken letters, can be read as saying “Gibeon [belonging to the] king.” The shape of the letters and comparison to similar artifacts date it to the 7th century BCE.

This [artifact] belongs to a rare group known as “fiscal bullae.” Less than 60 of them were ever published, and until recently all were unprovenanced artifacts from the antiquities market. This changed in the past few years with the discovery of this bulla, which was also the first to mention the Canaanite town of Gibeon [that figures prominently in the book of Joshua]. Since then, excavations at the City of David in Jerusalem have yielded two more bullae (bearing the names of Bethlehem and Eltekon, a city in the hills of Hebron). Another bulla, unearthed southeast of the Temple Mount, has yet to be published. . . .

Most taxes mentioned in the Bible were the kind paid by the sweat of your brow—a period of forced labor [on] governmental infrastructure projects. But it also fell upon the residents of the kingdom to provide for the monarch. This was likely done via . . . local administrators, whose names appear on some of the fiscal bullae and on [specially designated] jars for collecting agricultural produce. . . . Some of the so-called fiscal bullae, such as ours, were attached to documents such as receipts or bills of lading and still retain the impression of papyrus fibers, while others were attached to nothing at all and served as a token of debts paid.

While it is commendable that administrators of several universities finally called upon police to crack down on violent and disruptive anti-Israel protests, the actions they have taken may be insufficient. At Columbia, demonstrators reestablished their encampment on the main quad after it had been cleared by the police, and the university seems reluctant to use force again. The school also decided to hold classes remotely until the end of the semester. Such moves, whatever their merits, do nothing to fix the factors that allowed campuses to become hotbeds of pro-Hamas activism in the first place. The editors of National Review examine how things go to this point:

Since the 10/7 massacre, Columbia’s Jewish students have been forced to endure routine calls for their execution. It shouldn’t have taken the slaughter, rape, and brutalization of Israeli Jews to expose chants like “Globalize the intifada” and “Death to the Zionist state” as calls for violence, but the university refused to intervene on behalf of its besieged students. When an Israeli student was beaten with a stick outside Columbia’s library, it occasioned little soul-searching from faculty. Indeed, it served only as the impetus to establish an “Anti-Semitism Task Force,” which subsequently expressed “serious concerns” about the university’s commitment to enforcing its codes of conduct against anti-Semitic violators.

But little was done. Indeed, as late as last month the school served as host to speakers who praised the 10/7 attacks and even “hijacking airplanes” as “important tactics that the Palestinian resistance have engaged in.”

The school’s lackadaisical approach created a permission structure to menace and harass Jewish students, and that’s what happened. . . . Now is the time finally to do something about this kind of harassment and associated acts of trespass and disorder. Yale did the right thing when police cleared out an encampment [on Monday]. But Columbia remains a daily reminder of what happens when freaks and haters are allowed to impose their will on campus.