During the week covered by this review, we received 3 articles on the following subjects:
Archaeology
Christian Organisations
Jewish/Christian Relations
Archaeology
Haaretz, August 22, 2022
Archaeologists Achim Lichtenberger (University of Münster, Germany) and Oren Tal (Tel Aviv University) and colleagues believe that they have pinpointed not only the year in which Hasmonean forces conquered the city of Beit She’an from the Seleucids, leaving behind ruins, but also the season. This discovery was achieved partly with the help of Flavius Josephus, whose writings pointed to the years 108 or 107 B.C., but the real clue was found in organic evidence unearthed in the layers from the ruins. Chicken leg bones were found containing medullary deposits that indicate that these are legs from a hen in the laying season – summer. From this they’ve concluded that Beit She’an was destroyed by John Hyrcanus and the Hasmoneans in the summer (or possibly late spring) of the year 107 B.C.
Christian Organisations
Haaretz, August 25, 2022
The HaYovel non-profit organization, which brings Christian volunteers from all over the world to serve Jewish farmers in Israel, is hoping to plant 3,000 trees in the West Bank by the end of the year, and is already nearly halfway to achieving its initial goal. Yet, according to the article, the land being forested appears to belong mainly to Palestinian farmers. Tommy Waller, president and founder of HaYovel and a devoted Southern Baptist, who defined the goal of his organization “to bring Christians from all over the world to Judea and Samaria, Israel’s biblical heartland … to serve the land and people, enabling them to connect to the land of their faith, restore Christian Jewish relations, and confirm Israel’s right to their ancestral homeland,” stated that: “As far as we are concerned, [the Palestinians] have no jurisdiction over this land.”
Jewish/Christian Relations
Haaretz, August 26, 2022
This article reported on what it referred to as a “plot twist” with regard to another article, reported on in a previous review, that exclaimed: “Jews who kidnap Christian children, torture them and drink their blood? A little hard to believe, but this is still the narrative in Western European Festivals in the 21st century.” The Guardian reported that as a result of that article, which revealed that towns and villages in Spain still continued to commemorate the “blood libel” falsity that Jews use the blood of Christian children in religious rituals, Spain’s Catholic Church has announced that it will investigate anti-Semitic rituals. Sources close to the Archbishop of Madrid told El Confidencial news site that “the declaration ‘Nostra Aetate’ of the Second Vatican Council is absolutely explicit when determining that there is no discrimination whatsoever in relation to the Jewish community,” and that the church was revising “cults and rituals … that refer to the legend that Jews killed Christian children in order to celebrate Passover.”