Christianity Today's 2025 biblical-archaeology-stories list

ANNUAL ARCHAEOLOGY LIST WATCH: 10 Striking Biblical Archaeology Stories of 2025. Research and natural disaster uncovered exciting finds from the ancient world (Gordon Govier, Christianity Today).

Megiddo, site of the biblical Armageddon and home of the discovery that capped off our top 10 list last year, continued to yield noteworthy discoveries in 2025.

This year’s archaeology stories highlight discoveries that have helped us learn more about the biblical world and the context that gave us the Bible. Some are controversial. Some are serendipitous.

The most important biblical archaeology discoveries of this year may not be known until months or years from now, as archaeologists study their findings in the lab, research them, and publish their reports in scientific journals. This list is the stories we learned about this year.

Another good list, with relatively little overlap with earlier ones.

PaleoJudaica has posted on almost all the stories: on Egyptians at Josiah's Megiddo, see here; on Jerusalem's Hasmonean-era city wall, see here and here; on that new map of Roman-era roads, see here; on the somewhat controversial new excavation at Samaria/Sebastia, see here (cf. here) and on the Civil Administration's expropriation of land in the area, see here; on Egypt's also-controversial nationalization of St. Catherine's Monastery, see here (cf. here); on the cuneiform late notice from the Assyrian taxman excavated in Jerusalem, see, here; on the AI redating of 4QDaniel^c, see here, here, and here; on the wildfire at Tel Araj (Bethsaida?), see here (cf. here); and on Jerusalem's Siloam dam, see here.

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Ben-Yehuda's revival of Hebrew

LINGUISTIC RESURRECTION: Digging Up Hebrew. The revival of Hebrew as a spoken language has been given supernatural terms like ‘resurrection’ and ‘miracle,’ but how ‘scientific’ was it? (Ryan Malone, Armstrong Institute of Biblical Archaeology, from the November-December 2025 Let the Stones Speak Magazine Issue).

A 1952 English book by Robert St. John, now out of print, offers incredible detail on this process and the man called Eliezer Ben-Yehuda. In Tongue of the Prophets, St. John conveyed what he learned from a biography written in Hebrew by Eliezer’s widow.

Ben-Yehuda’s work not only benefited the establishment of “Israel,” it also served as a mighty support to the archaeological work that would come in the years to follow. Biblical archaeology without a nation of Hebrew speakers seems impossible to imagine.

Additionally, Eliezer Ben-Yehuda was himself an archaeologist—of a linguistic sort. The kind of rigorous work he did, the scientific standards to which he adhered, are relatable to anyone leading an excavation. And they make the product of his life’s devotion all the more worthy of the highest esteem.

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A chaos dragon rock carving in Iran

MYTHOLOGICAL ICONOGRAPHY: Hercules–Hydra Motif Identified in Rare Elymaean Rock Carving in Iran (Nisha Zahid, Greek Reporter).

Archaeologists in Iran have identified a rare motif in Elymaean rock carving that may depict a scene closely resembling the famous myth of Hercules battling the Hydra, a story widely known across the Greek world and featured on coins dating to around 325 BC. ...

The relief is carved on a trapezoid-shaped rock surface measuring about 70 by 81 centimeters (2.29 to 2.65 feet). Although erosion and deliberate defacement have damaged parts of it, three figures remain visible.

On the left, a powerful nude male figure appears in three-quarter profile, lifting a large round object that may represent a ritual mace while gripping the central creature by the throat. Researchers say the carved muscles and movement stress heroic strength.

The central figure is a three-headed serpent-like being, about 83 centimeters (2.7 feet) long. Such imagery is extremely rare in Elymaean art and is key to interpretation. On the right, a man in Parthian-style clothing stands in a frontal pose, resembling priestly figures seen in other Elymaean reliefs, possibly suggesting a ceremonial role.

The relief certainly has parallels to the Heracles/Hercules myth, but it need not depict the Greek hero. Given its location, that seems less than likely to me.

The myth of a foundational battle between a god and a multi-headed dragon is much older than our Greek sources. A third-millennium BCE stamp seal depiciting a similar scene with a seven-headed dragon was excavated at Hazor last year. See here and here.

The myth is found in the ancient Near East and repeatedly in the Bible. It may well have come to this Elymais relief via ancient Near Eastern religious traditions.

For PaleoJudaica posts on Elymais, a region in the ancient Parthian Empire, see here, here, and here.

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Haaretz: top-ten biblical archaeology stories 2025

ANNUAL ARCHAEOLOGY LIST WATCH: God's Chariot and Secrets in Stone: Top Biblical Archaeology Stories of 2025 (Ruth Schuster, Haaretz).

Archaeology isn't an exact science of unearthing the past. Only so much is uncovered, much more is assumed to be lost and a geat deal is down to interpretation. But 2025 was a great year for cracking some of the mysteries that had been bedeviling archaeologists for decades.

A good list.

PaleoJudaica has posted on some, not all, of these stories. For the proposed decipherment of Cryptic B script and the Mount Zion stone cup's Cryptic A script, see here. The Magdala Stone has been around for a while, but a couple of 2025 posts on it are here and here. It's currently on display at the Museum of the Bible in D.C. Live Science also has a recent article on it by Kristina Killgrove here. For the pottery evidence for Egyptians at Megiddo in Josiah's time, see here. For the inferred different naming patterns in Judah and Israel, see here.

I didn't post on the Neolithic massebah at e-Tell, There is another recent Neolithic archaeology story worth mentioning, but it deserves a post on its own.

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Dentistry in ancient Israel etc.

ODONTIC HISTORY:

Dentistry and dental care in antiquity: part 1 – prehistory, Mesopotamia, Israel, Etruria and the Far East

Roger Forshaw

British Dental Journal volume 239, pages 851–856 (2025)

Abstract

This paper – the first of two – explores the development of dentistry and dental care practices across diverse ancient civilisations. Evidence from prehistory, from a 13,000-year-old intervention at Riparo Fredian in northern Italy, to Neolithic findings in Pakistan and Slovenia, suggests that early populations attempted to alleviate pain and manage oral conditions. In Mesopotamia, cuneiform texts detail treatments for caries and periodontal disease, accompanied by recommendations and prescriptions for oral hygiene. Although these texts describe various therapeutic approaches, there is no mention of any operative procedures, and the sparse osteological record similarly offers no evidence of dental intervention. Biblical and Talmudic sources from ancient Israel emphasise the cultural significance of dental aesthetics, offering insights into remedies and practices intended to preserve the natural look of the teeth. Discoveries from Etruria and Phoenicia, dated to the first millennium BC, including dental bridges and gold-wire appliances, reveal intricate restorative and cosmetic techniques, particularly among elite women. In the Far East, ancient Chinese and Indian texts highlight preventive measures and herbal treatments, prioritising diagnostics and hygiene over operative procedures. Collectively, these findings illustrate a broad spectrum of early dental care strategies that evolved, alongside dietary shifts, cultural values, and technological innovations, providing fascinating insights into the origins and development of dentistry and dental care.

The article is open access. The section on ancient Israel is brief. It mostly has information from the Talmud.

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Augustine in the Cairo Genizah?

CAIRO GENIZA WATCH: Augustine in the Cairo Genizah (Brent Nongbri, Variant Readings).

Thinking about the letters of Augustine reminds me of one of the more interesting manuscripts I encountered this year. Among the many remarkable manuscripts in the Cairo Genizah is Cambridge University Library ADD.4320. It’s a collection of fragments of a palimpsest with an upper text containing masoretic notes on various texts from the Hebrew scriptures and a lower erased text that has been identified as a collection of Augustine’s sermons.

The hand of the Latin script is a clear uncial that has been assigned to the sixth century, making these folia some of the oldest surviving copies of Augustine’s writings.

[...]

For more Cairo Geniza stories, start here and follow the many links. And for a recent book on Augustine, see here and here.

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A contemporary drawing of King Hezekiah in Sennacherib’s palace?

ROYAL RELIEF-REPRESENTATION? Revealed: A 2,700-Year-Old Depiction of Jerusalem and Hezekiah? Remarkably, the relief may picture not only Jerusalem but also King Hezekiah himself (Brent Nagtegaal, Armstrong Institute of Biblical Archaeology; from the November-December 2025 Let the Stones Speak Magazine Issue).

Finally, standing alone in the tallest tower was a single figure. He’s the only individual in the entire city. And he’s holding a standard, suggesting royal status. If Slab 28 depicts a scene from King Sennacherib’s invasion of Judah, and if the city depicted was Jerusalem, then this lone royal figure had to be King Hezekiah!

Compton's JNES article is behind the subscription wall, but Nagtegaal gives a detailed summary.

If the depicted figure is King Hezekiah, that's a significant discovery. Alas, the stylized figure leaves us little the wiser about what the king actually looked like.

For PaleoJudaica posts on Sennacherib's siege of Jerusalem, its archaeology, and what may have happened there, start with the links collected here.

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Review of Conybeare, Augustine the African

BOOK REVIEW: Augustine’s African roots. A new biography of Saint Augustine returns this towering figure of western philosophy to his North African origins, revealing the provincial schisms that shaped his thought (Daniel Skeffington, Engelsberg Ideas).

A naturally offensive stance earns him many critics, especially among the educated Romanised elites, each of them eager to turn his poor, provincial, Punic origins against him. Combined with his sexually liberal years as a Manichean cultist, there is no shortage of ammunition to use against him when he was ordained, in 391, as presbyter of Hippo. Allusions to his treacherous ‘Carthaginian’ nature punctuate the work of his opponents, from the biblical scholar Jerome to the excommunicated aristocrat, Bishop Julian, who readily derides him as a ‘Punic pamphleteer’ of oriental disposition.

The book under review is Catherine Conybeare, Augustine the African (Blackstone, 2025). I noted another review of it here.

Cross-file under (Neo-)Punic Watch.

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Raja & Seland (eds.), Palmyra, the Roman Empire, and the Third Century Crisis (Steiner)

BIBLIOGRAPHIA IRANICA: Palmyra, the Roman Empire, and the Third Century Crisis. Notice of a New Book:

Raja, Rubina & Eivind Heldaas Seland. eds. 2025. Palmyra, the Roman Empire, and the Third Century Crisis: Zooming in and Scaling up from the Evidence. Stuttgart: Steiner.

Cross-file under Palmyra Watch.

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Ackerman, Maturity, Marriage, Motherhood, Mortality (OUP)

NEW BOOK FROM OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS:

Maturity, Marriage, Motherhood, Mortality

Women's Life-Cycle Rituals in Ancient Israel

Susan Ackerman

£25.99
Hardback

Published: 29 October 2025
408 Pages | 13 b&w halftones
235x156mm
ISBN: 9780197809655

Also Available As:
E-book

Description

Maturity, Marriage, Motherhood, Mortality is a deft study of women's life-cycle rituals in ancient Israel. These include rituals that marked a young woman's coming of age (“maturity”) and her betrothal and wedding (“marriage”); rituals undertaken by women during pregnancy, parturition, and their first days and early years after giving birth (“motherhood”); and rituals that were enacted at the time of a woman's death and in the months and years that followed (“mortality”).

The book's aims are tripartite. The first is to sketch as fully as possible a picture of women's life-cycle events and rituals from preexilic and early postexilic Israel, using both evidence that can be gleaned from our primary source for the religious traditions of ancient Israel-the Bible-as well as extrabiblical data, including ancient Israelite archaeological data and archaeological, iconographic, and textual data that come from the many peoples of the ancient Near East and eastern Mediterranean by whom the Israelites were influenced or with whom they interacted.
The second is to highlight the several distinctive features that characterized women's life-cycle events and rituals: for example, the way women's life-cycle events can flow as a virtually uninterrupted ritual continuum, from, say, coming of age, to betrothal, to marriage, to motherhood, and also the ways in which Israelite women's experiences during life-cycle events and rituals differed from those of their male counterparts. The experience of a bride who is “given” to her prospective spouse during betrothal and wedding rituals is different, for example, than the experience of a groom who “takes” a woman in marriage. Finally, the book offers a six-part theoretical model that explains the distinctive features that appear within Israelite women's life-cycle rituals and that accounts for the differences between women's life-cycle rituals and men's.

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van der Schoor, Rewriting Generations of Truth (Brill)

NEW BOOK FROM BRILL:

Rewriting Generations of Truth: The Words of Qahat and Manuscript 4Q542* in Context

Series:
Studies on the Texts of the Desert of Judah, Volume: 155

Author: Hanneke van der Schoor

Rewriting Generations of Truth takes the text and manuscript evidence of Words of Qahat (4Q542*) as a vantage point to assess editorial methods and textual classification of the Dead Sea Scrolls. Van der Schoor argues for a different distribution of 4Q542 and 4Q547 fragments, employing the resulting manuscript to consider writing and correction practices in scribal communities behind the Scrolls. Based on terminological similarities, she correlates textual traditions beyond linguistic boundaries and alleged provenance. Contextualising Words of Qahat within the Second Temple Period, particularly 4QApocalypse of Weeks, 4QTime of Righteousness and 4QLevi Apocryphon, highlights sapiential and eschatological elements in Words of Qahat.

Copyright Year: 2026

E-Book (PDF)
Availability: Published
ISBN: 978-90-04-74548-3
Publication: 24 Nov 2025
EUR €129.00

Hardback
Availability: Published
ISBN: 978-90-04-74547-6
Publication: 27 Nov 2025
EUR €129.00

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Joseph, Egyptians, Herodotus, and cows

PROF. ALBERT I. BAUMGARTEN: Egyptians Would Not Dine with Hebrews... or Cow-Eating Greeks (TheTorah.com).

The Greek historian Herodotus, who visited Egypt in the 5th century B.C.E., reports that Egyptians would not kiss a Greek on the mouth or use any of their food implements—knife, fork, or pot—because Greeks ate cows, which Egyptians regarded as sacred. This background sheds light on the biblical account of Egyptians refusing to eat with Joseph’s brothers—or even with Joseph himself.

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The Coptic Magical Formularies Project: 2025 report

THE COPTIC MAGICAL PAPYRI BLOG: 2025 Review: The First Year of the Coptic Magical Formularies Project.

The Coptic Magical Formularies project finished its first full year in 2025, with some big changes. ...

I noted the 2024 inception of the project here and an interim report here. It arises out of the work of the earlier Coptic Magical Papyri Project.

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Review of Kelly, Philosophers, Jews, and Christians in the Roman empire

BYRN MAYR CLASSICAL REVIEW: Philosophers, Jews, and Christians in the Roman empire: authority, text, and tradition.

Leslie Kelly, Philosophers, Jews, and Christians in the Roman empire: authority, text, and tradition. Routledge focus on classical studies. London: Routledge, 2025. Pp. 114. ISBN 9781032904214.

Review by
Mark Letteney, University of Washington. letteney@uw.edu

This slim book by Leslie Kelly aims to offer an overview and comparison of three groups as they existed in the first and second centuries of the Common Era, attending to their respective interactions with texts and authorities in their “traditions.” It succeeds in part. ...

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Cracking the Qumran Cryptic B script?

DECIPHERMENT? Unknown Alphabet in Dead Sea Scrolls Has Been Cracked, Scholar Says. Cryptic B was considered impenetrable because there's so little material. Then, Emmanuel Oliveiro, a scholar in the Netherlands, noticed what looked like the word 'Yisrael' (Ruth Schuster, Haaretz).

The code had been considered to be impossible to decipher, mainly because of the sheer paucity of Cryptic B material. All we have are isolated fragments from two scrolls called 4Q362 and 4Q363, and a few spots in other scrolls where scribes briefly introduced Cryptic B in the middle of a Hebrew text, Oliveiro explains, in the journal Dead Sea Discoveries in December.

Oliveiro's process was based on analysis and intuition, similar to the methodology the scholar Józef Milik used when deciphering Cryptic A in 1955. Both began with assuming that they were dealing with a mono-alphabetic substitution system– where each of the 22 letters of Hebrew or Aramaic is consistently replaced with a specific cryptic sign (as in – say A is always be replaced by $).

A simple alphabetic substituion code is easy to decipher—if you have a reasonable-sized corpus. But the tiny size of the surviving corpus written in the Cryptic B script presented a huge challenge. Epigrapher Christopher Rollston says that the proposed decipherment is plausible, but hard to confirm, since the corpus is so small. That sound about right to me.

The abovementioned advance-published DSD article is open-access, so you can decide for yourself.

Cracking Another Code of the Dead Sea Scrolls

Deciphering Cryptic B (4Q362 and 4Q363) through Analysis and Intuition

In: Dead Sea Discoveries

Author: Emmanuel Oliveiro

Online Publication Date: 01 Dec 2025

Abstract

Among the Qumran manuscripts, several enigmatic scripts, including Cryptic A and Cryptic B, have been discovered. While Cryptic A was deciphered in 1955, Cryptic B has until now remained undeciphered. This study offers the first decipherment, transcription and translation of two Cryptic B manuscripts, 4Q362 and 4Q363. Their content appears to reflect familiar biblical idioms and eschatological themes, and the findings provide a foundation for future inquiry into the variation within Cryptic B letterforms, its relationship to Cryptic A, its role within Qumran scribal practices, and the development of cryptic scripts.

We can only hope for the discovery of more texts in Cryptic B, so that this decipherment can be tested.

That's a more realistic hope than you might think. Cryptic A was known only in some Qumran texts, and Milik had a go at deciphering it from them. But then in 2009 an inscribed stone cup was recovered by the Mount Zion excavation. The inscription was written in, among other things, the Cryptic A script. It's decipherment remains in progress, but our previous knowledge of Cryptic A seems to have helped.

Whether the cup's inscription will in turn help with understanding the Cryptic A scrolls remains to be seen.

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On the Rockefeller Museum in East Jerusalem

CURATORIAL ARCHAEOLOGY: Jerusalem’s ‘cursed’ antiquity museum reopens its doors amid rumors it may become a hotel. The Rockefeller Archaeological Museum stores some 60,000 artifacts spanning millennia, including unique decorations from the Al-Aqsa Mosque and the Church of the Holy Sepulcher (Rossella Tercatin, Times of Israel).

Meanwhile, although the interministerial committee still has to formulate its recommendation regarding the future of the Rockefeller, the IAA told The Times of Israel that it has requested to be reassigned the responsibility for the facility.

“For the Israel Antiquities Authority, the Rockefeller Museum is the historic and symbolic home of the archaeology of the Land of Israel,” read a statement shared by an IAA spokesperson.

“The Authority has formally requested that the museum’s operation be returned to its hands, in order to promote its reopening,” the statement added, pledging that the IAA “will do everything possible to ensure that the Rockefeller Museum once again becomes a living museum, full of content, as it deserves to be.”

The title of the article is unfortunate, if attention grabbing. But it gives a good overview of the history of the museum, some of its key holdings, and the issues around its coming fate.

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ANE Today's 2025 top archaeological discoveries list

ANNUAL ARCHAEOLOGY LIST WATCH: Top Archaeological Discoveries of 2025 (Jessica Nitschke, The Ancient Near East Today).

From a previously unknown royal tomb to DNA revelations to a newly deciphered alphabet, here are our picks for some of the most interesting breakthroughs and discoveries in the archaeology of the Middle East and North Africa in 2025. ...

And so the 2025 listing begins. Most of the discoveries in this one are outside PaleoJudaica's interests. But a few have come up.

For "3. Evidence of the Egyptian Army at Megiddo in the Time of King Josiah," see here. For "4. DNA Evidence Suggesting Levantine Phoenician Contributions to Punic Settlements Were More Cultural Than Genetic," see here and here. And for "8. First Iron Age Shipwrecks from the Southern Levant Excavated," see here.

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