Archaeologists and historians are rapidly coming to the conclusion that, for most people, the past is a sort of theme park--and they want the themes to be familiar ones. "Everybody already thinks they know the story of Jesus," says [Paula] Fredricksen. "A truly ancient Jesus is just too different for audiences to deal with."

Forgery is closely linked to looting and it operates by many of the same mechanisms: the true origins of the object are necessarily erased, and fakes, like looted artifacts, often come on the art market with a false provenance. In my view, the only effective way to stop forgery, like looting, is not to try to cut off production, but rather to starve it, that is to say, to change the behavior, the desire, of consumers. But unlike the damage done by looters, that done by forgers is not irrevocable. A lost archaeological context can never be recovered, but a false antiquity can be removed from the corpus of genuine material. The damage can be undone.

I thought the Passion was a powerful film -- but in a very disturbed and violent way.

Ironically, it's because of these grave robbers that the Antiquities Authority, together with the Jewish National Fund, is opening a newly excavated ancient village this weekend in the Judean hills south of Beit Shemesh.

The organizers have planned a carnival at the site, called Hurvat Itri, this Saturday and Sunday (March 6 and 7) to coincide with Purim and the annual "Rural Food Festival" of the Yoav and Judean foothill communities.

[...]

"But this is the hottest area in the country for plundering ancient sites," says Amir Ganor, 35, the country's chief archeological cop.

As head of the Antiquities Authority's Unit for Prevention of Theft, Ganor says his dozen armed agents face a daunting task, since there are an estimated 50,000 archeological sites ripe for plunder in the Holy Land.

"One of them is right here," Ganor says, leading the way to Hurvat Itri, today a magnificently restored village from the Second Temple period. A hilltop like many others, it seemed to be a major draw for the grave robbers. Night after night in the late 1990s they dug up its ancient stones in search of treasure. In 1999, at least three gangs from the West Bank just two kilometers away were caught and jailed, but the looting continued. Driving them was a desire to find rare coins from the Bar Kochba revolt. Known as a sela in Hebrew or bawabeh in Arabic, each silver coin could fetch anywhere between $40,000 and $350,000.

In 2000, the Antiquities Authority began excavating the site, which yielded a wealth of undisturbed finds as well as what archeologists call the "missing link" to Jewish life here 1,870 years ago.

[...]

In the heart of the 50,000-dunam Adullam Cavern Park, near Moshav Tzafririm, the site contains beautiful ruins, including numerous ritual baths, decorated burial caves, and an amazing network of subterranean tunnels.

Ganor and archeologist Dr. Boaz Zissu led excavations for two years with the aid of unemployed locals - and even reformed grave robbers. One, named Sayid el-Amneh, proved to be invaluable in helping discover a total of eight underground tunnel networks. Three of these had not been touched since the Bar Kochba rebels hid there.

"It was the first time I was able to see a sealed tunnel network," Ganor says. "Items were lying on the ground where the rebels had left them. We simply had to come and gather them up. It was all very exciting."

There are about 6,000 known coins from the Bar Kochba period, nearly all discovered by grave robbers. In 1986, the Antiquities Authority did not have even one discovered in situ. Zissu and Ganor were able to find 1,000 from various periods on this site, including three extremely rare silver sela coins.

As valuable a find as it was, the place did not even have a name. It was referred to as Khirbet Hoch, after a family from Tzurif. But the mystery was solved when an ostracon was unearthed with the name Atra. From this, archeologists deduced that it was Kfar Atra, or the Caphethra mentioned in Josephus Flavius's historical account.

Apparently, one day in the summer of 69 CE, Cerealius, one of Emperor Vespasian's officers, led a small force of cavalry and foot troops and ravaged the village of Caphethra. The event was such a minor affair in the midst of the great revolt that Josephus recalled Caphethra as a place "which calls itself a town," adding that Cerealius vanquished it "in his stride and set it on fire."

After destroying the Second Temple in Jerusalem and carting off some of the survivors to slavery, the Romans were content. They did not cleanse the villages of the Judean Hills - a strategic mistake that would come back to haunt them 70 years later, when Bar Kochba organized his revolt from there.

Survivors rebuilt the village on a smaller scale and farmed grapes and figs. The hillside is speckled with numerous vats where the grapes were pressed. But the community added something new: a synagogue. At least this is what archeologists believe to be the purpose of a large hall facing Jerusalem.

[...]

The first rumor flitting through the evangelical world is that the filmmaker intends to plow the profits from The Passion into a movie about the central characters of the holiday of Hanukkah, fighters called the Maccabees. Their story is told in sacred writings of the biblical period, although the two books of the same name are not officially a part of either testament.

Nearly 200 years before Jesus' birth, religious Jews in the land of Israel rose in violent rebellion against pagan occupiers and their Jewish allies.

[...]

The Maccabean uprising was sparked when a government official compelled a Jew to offer a pagan sacrifice. This sacrilegious act enraged a pious man named Mattathias, who killed the collaborator and the official with his sword, and then shouted to the crowd: "Whoever is for the Lord, follow me!"

Mattathias led his five sons and their followers into the hills, from which they launched a protracted guerrilla war, led by his son Judah, a brilliant military tactician. Bloody battles and torture ensued, as the outnumbered believers wore down their enemies, some of whom rode into the fray on armored elephants.

In the end, after Mattathias died and several of his sons were killed in battle, the orthodox Jewish believers triumphed and the temple in Jerusalem was cleansed and restored to holiness. According to tradition, a remnant of sanctified oil in the temple lamp miraculously burned for eight days, until more could be found.

Last week, the American-born Israeli educator Yossi Katz suggested that Gibson's next film should be a dramatization of the Bar Kochba Revolt of A.D. 132-135. This rebellion took place a century after Jesus' death, and 60 years after a failed uprising against the Roman occupation that led to half a million Jewish deaths and the destruction of the temple in Jerusalem.

Israeli scientist dazzles with archaeology (Deerfield Review)

BY RUTH SOLOMON
STAFF WRITER

Forty-five minutes south of Jerusalem, Israeli archaeologist Asher Afriat was among a group digging for artifacts 10 years ago with a group of North American tourists as assistants, when they stumbled across six clay pieces with Aramaic writing on them.

Called an ostracon, the clay pieces bore an inscription that was basically a marriage contract, quite similar to the one used by Jews to this day called a ketuba.

But the kicker is that the ostrocan discovered at this site, which is 2,180 years old, was from the time of the Edomites, who were not Jewish. The discovery may shed light on the origins of the present-day Jewish marriage contract, Afriat said.

[...]

For Afriat, continuing his life means making the trek from Jerusalem to Tel Maresha several times a week to see what other ancient wonders can be uncovered.

The dig, at Tel Maresha, dates back to the Hellenistic period and was the hometown of Herod the Great, at the time of the second Temple in Jerusalem, Ofriat said. The city of Maresha was built in the Iron Age, about 3000 years ago, and is mentioned several times in the Bible, starting in the book of Joshua. The city later became part of the Edomite kingdom.

The site is built on a mound or "tel," as dirt from one civilization was piled on top of dirt from the next. The site also has hundreds of caves, one with 31 rooms, created by the excavation of stone in ancient times.

"It's the wealthiest Hellenistic site in the world. Our labor force is a group of tourists. They dig with us. It is so addictive," he said.

Authenticated inscriptions frequently challenge our knowledge of Biblical Hebrew, containing syntax, vocabulary and orthography (spelling) that differ from Biblical usage. Of the very few inscriptions of any kind from this period, including those of neighboring nations, every one provides something novel and sometimes disturbingly surprising about a language we may think we know but don?t always fully grasp. And the surer we are, the more surprised we are likely to be by what comes out of the ground.

Perhaps the most fought-over issue so far is the inscription's use of the word bedeq in line 10. In the Bible, bedeq means "crack" or "fissure." However, the inscription, because it combines bedeq with the verb 'asah ("to do," line 9) appears to mimic not the Hebrew of the Bible but rather the modern Hebrew phrase 'e'aseh 'et bedeq, which means "I made repairs." It therefore looks as if the inscription betrays a knowledge of modern Hebrew. However, it is unlikely that bedeq means "repair" in the inscription. The word is actually part of a construct chain that joins it together with the word habbayit ("the House," line 10), forming the expression "bedeq habbayit" or "the bedeq of the House." If we interpret bedeq as "the repair," then we would have to join it similarly to the other definite nouns ("walls," "ledge," "lattices," etc.) and read the text as "the repair of the walls," "the repair of the ledge" and so forth. But this is not possible. The appearance of the definite direct object marker 'et in line 11, though it does not appear before every noun, is an indication that all the nouns function as direct objects of the verb 'asah (i.e., "I did the walls," "I did the ledge" and "I did the lattices," etc.). It would seem that 'asah alone is the verb used in the inscription to mean "repair," not bedeq, which most likely carries its Biblical meaning "crack." Use of 'asah to mean "make new" or "remake" is unusual, but not unimaginable (see Deuteronomy 21;12; 2 Samuel 19:25).

More problematic is the word 'mw ("his people," line 15), which is indeed unusual for this time and appears to many to be a clear anachronism. The normal indication of a singular masculine possessive suffix attached to a singular masculine noun is by a he at the end, with the letter representing the sound -hu. The use of the waw, for the suffix, doesn't turn up in the archaeological record until the oldest Qumran manuscripts dating from the third-second century B.C.E, meaning that the shift from he to waw came sometime between the sixth and third centuries B.C.E. So how can we explain the waw in the Jehoash inscription? The Siloam Tunnel Inscription, from the eighth century B.C.E., contains a noun with the suffix waw�the word r'w ("his fellow"). This unusual form is explained as a contraction of the archaic r'hw with synacope loss of the he. Although there is no example of "his people" spelled with a he anywhere in the Bible or extrabiblical sources, there is little doubt that in early periods the word would actually have been pronounced with a -hu suffix, making it possible that the word 'mw in the Jehoash inscription, like r'w of the Siloam inscription, is a contraction of an archaic form 'mhw.

The only instance of a possible medial vowel letter in the inscription is the waw in the word lwlm ("staircase," in line 12). It is possible, however, that the original form had a diphthong. (lawlim) or simply a consonant (lewulim).

Charlesworth, James H. and Michael A. Daise, eds.
Light in a Spotless Mirror: Reflections on Wisdom Traditions in Judaism and Early Christianity
Reviewed by Tobias Nicklas

Lohfink, Norbert
Translated by Sean McEvenue
Qoheleth
Reviewed by Christo Lombaard

David M. Goldenberg, The Curse of Ham: Race and Slavery in Early Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Princeton: 2003. Pp. xv, 448. $35.00.. ISBN 0-691-11465-X.
Reviewed by Molly Myerowitz Levine.

The Victories of Merenptah, and the Nature of their Record 259
Kenneth Kitchen

The Babylonian Gap: The Archaeological Reality 273
Ephraim Stern

Reading 'Rape' in the Hebrew Bible: A Consideration of Language 279
Sandie Gravett

Body Images in the Psalms 301
Susanne Gillmayr-Bucher

Biblical Wasfs Beyond Song of Songs 327
David Bernat

Deutero-Isaiah of Jerusalem 351
Michael Goulder

Observations on the Marital Metaphor of YHWH and Israel in its Ancient Israelite Context: General Considerations and Particular Images in Hosea 1.2 363
Ehud Ben Zvi

Excavations begin to unearth Tiberias of the Talmudic era (Ha'aretz via Archaeologica News)

By Eli Ashkenazi

Excavations to uncover the ancient city of Tiberias began this week, as part of a project to reconstruct the old city and operate an archaeological park on the site.

[...]

Professor Yizhar Hirschfeld, the archaeologist in charge, said that the excavations will focus on the bath house, the cardo and the marketplace of the ancient city. Later, the diggers will advance to the eastern part of the old city, toward the Kinneret. That is the site of the Basilica, where the Sanhedrin (the Supreme Court of the time) is believed to have sat.

[...]

Passion of Christ to hit theatres by mid-March (Khaleej Times)

[...]

Renowned Muslim scholar, Dr Ahmad Al Qubaisi, who saw the film Monday evening during a private screening, told Khaleej Times that the movie was "awful and depressing", two and a half hours of the worst torture imaginable poured on one man.

"As Muslims, we do not hold with the belief that Jesus Christ died on the cross. In the film Jesus suffers enough torture to die one hundred times over. When in the film he is shown to have died on the cross, the last words uttered by Jesus place the blame for his death on the Jews. Is it possible for God to torture and kill his own beloved prophet, when he saved Moses and Noah and the other prophets?" Dr Al Qubaisi wondered.

He said the film troubled him deeply and made him cry twice as he watched it. "The horror is that the people who witnessed the crucifixion in the film were happy with this torture, the Jewish religious leaders in the film were shown to be especially cruel and heartless. "I cried twice during the film even though I know it was not true, so how would a Christian, who believes in what was shown in the film, feel while watching it. I believe this film is evidence that the American people have grown to despise and hate the control that the Jews exert over their lives and over their political leaders. This film comes after the Pope officially absolved the Jews of the blood of Jesus Christ," Dr Al Qubaisi said.

He said he believes that the Western world are beginning to realise that the Jews are really aiming to destroy world peace and a strong anti-Jewish feeling is welling up in the West that could culminate in the Jewish people subjected to another wave of mass killings similar to what they suffered under Hitler.

"God said that the people of Israel will reach great heights before their fall. How can such a film be shown in America at a time when the Jews control America? The same thing happened in Germany, when Hitler started the holocaust the Jews had reached a pinnacle of power in Germany. This film is a turning point in the history of the Jews we will see unmatched hatred for the Jews culminating in their traditional end.

[...]

The ultra-nationalist Temple Mount Faithful group on Tuesday petitioned the High Court of Justice to halt "illegal" construction work by the Islamic Wakf on the Temple Mount.

The petition states that archaeologists from the Antiquities Authority are not supervising the goings-on at the Jerusalem holy site as stipulated by law, and that Wakf officials are doing "as they please" at the disputed compound.

Papyrus scrolls detail ancient Jewish life in Egypt at Norton exhibit (Palm Beach Daily News)
By JAN SJOSTROM, Daily News Arts Editor

Tuesday, March 2, 2004 � On July 3, 449 B.C., Ananiah and Tamut were married in Khnum, a town on Elephantine Island in the Nile River near present-day Aswan.

Actually, their relationship was well-established by then. Ananiah, a Jewish temple official, and his wife, Tamut, an Egyptian slave, already had a young son, Palti. But in Egypt 2,500 years ago, formal marriage was superfluous until children were born, and the future disposition of property became an issue.

Ananiah's and Tamut's marriage is documented in the first of eight papyrus scrolls recording important legal transactions in their and their children's lives over 47 years.

The scrolls form the foundation of Jewish Life in Ancient Egypt: A Family Archive from the Nile Valley at the Norton Museum of Art. The exhibition was organized by the Brooklyn Museum of Art from its 8,000-piece Egyptian collection.

Charles Edwin Wilbour, an avid amateur Egyptologist and one-time Tammany Hall printer and publisher, bought the scrolls in 1893 while cruising the Nile River on his houseboat.

He sealed them in a biscuit tin, tucked the tin in the bottom of a trunk, and forgot about it. The scrolls remained undisturbed for 54 years, when Wilbour's daughter discovered the trunk in her attic, and donated its contents to the Brooklyn Museum.

[...]

In a television interview with Diane Sawyer this week, Mel Gibson accused the Times of taking advantage of his father, and he warned Sawyer against broaching the subject again.

"He's my father. Gotta leave it alone Diane. Gotta leave it alone," Gibson said, while offering his own perspective on the Holocaust.

"Do I believe that there were concentration camps where defenceless and innocent Jews died cruelly under the Nazi regime? Of course I do; absolutely," he said. "It was an atrocity of monumental proportion."

DIANE SAWYER: Gibson's father, Hutton Gibson, age 85, who has written books and a newsletter with some decidedly provocative terms of phrase. He has called the Pope "Garrulous Karolus, the Koran kisser". And in that New York Times magazine interview, he seemed to be questioning the scope of the holocaust, sceptical that six million Jews had died. What does Gibson think?

MEL GIBSON: Do I believe that there were concentration camps where defenceless and innocent Jews died cruelly under the Nazi regime? Of course I do, absolutely. It was an atrocity of monumental proportion.

DIANE SAWYER: And you believe there were millions, six million, millions?

MEL GIBSON: Sure.

DIANE SAWYER: I think people wondered if your father's views were your views on this.

MEL GIBSON: Their whole agenda here, my detractors, is to drive a wedge between me and my father and it's not going to happen. I love him. He's my father.

DIANE SAWYER: And you will not speak publicly about him beyond that.

MEL GIBSON: I am tight with him. He's my father. Got to leave it alone, Diane. Got to leave it alone.

On the other hand, I have to say I was very disturbed by something Gibson said in his interview with Peggy Noonan in Reader's Digest.

Gibson's father is of course a notorious Holocaust denier and trafficker in anti-Semitic conspiracy theories. Noonan offered Mel Gibson an opportunity to separate himself from his father's views. Here is Gibson's reply:

"I have friends and parents of friends who have numbers on their arms. The guy who taught me Spanish was a Holocaust survivor. He worked in a concentration camp in France.

"Yes, of course. Atrocities happened. War is horrible. The Second World War killed tens of millions of people. Some of them were Jews in concentration camps. Many people lost their lives. In the Ukraine, several million starved to death between 1932 and 1933. During the last century 20 million people died in the Soviet Union."

Sounds unambiguous, right? Now listen again. Note that Gibson did not say, "Don't be absurd, Peggy. Obviously it is a matter of historical record that Adolph Hitler and the Nazis deliberately murdered millions of Jews." Note that Gibson did not cite the universally accepted casualty count of between 5 and 6 million Jewish fatalities. Nor did he acknowledge that Jews were special targets of Hitler's hatred or that anti-Semitism occupied a central place in Hitler's ideology.

Note next that Gibson did not use the word "murder." Instead, he used the generic term "atrocities," which could cover anything from mass murder to assault and arson. And whatever was the point of that strange formulation, "Some of them were Jews..."?

Notice finally how Gibson goes on to speak of Stalin's massacres. Gibson speaks of Stalin's crimes in plain, direct language. For them, he invokes commonly accepted casualty counts. What prevented him from speaking that way of the Jewish Holocaust?

Gibson used equally stilted language when asked a similar question by Diane Sawyer on ABC: "Do I believe that there were concentration camps where defenceless and innocent Jews died cruelly under the Nazi regime? Of course I do; absolutely. It was an atrocity of monumental proportion." Here again, Gibson seems to bypass the issues of (1) the numbers killed; (2) whether those people were deliberately murdered; and (3) whether that murder proceeded from Nazi ideology.

I am not parsing these words so closely to be pedantic. The trouble is that Gibson's words, whether carefully considered or not, bear an uncomfortably close resemblance to those deployed by genuine Holocaust deniers.

NOTICING EVIL: David Frum parses Mel Gibson's verbal non-committal on whether the Holocaust really took place as we know it did.

"It was, historically, Pontius Pilate, a rather gutless Roman administrator, of some personal charm, who passed sentence and then washed his hands of the sentence he had passed. He could believe a man innocent yet send him to torture for reasons of state, which included his own personal convenience. In the proto-modernism of the ancient world, it is Pilate who asks with such droll urbanity, 'What is truth?'

About Pilate a great deal is known. All the first-century sources other than the Gospels depict him as a harsh, insensitive and cruel figure, guilty of bribery, and responsible for numerous executions without trial. He was dismissed and banished by the emperor Tiberius. The portrait in the New Testament of a vacillating weakling, troubled by his conscience but eventually yielding to the bloodthirsty Jewish mob, is quite at odds with what we know of the real Pilate.

The Seminar on the Jewish Roots of Eastern Christian Mysticism

(www.mu.edu/maqom)

The Department of Theology of Marquette University

are pleased to invite you to a series of lectures by

JARL FOSSUM

Friday, April 23, 2004 3 pm, Olin Hall (EN 120)
MEDIATOR NOMEN DEI:
Assumptionist and Pre-Existent Christology: The Exalted Servant of the Christ Hymn in Philippians 2 and the Eternal Son of the Logos Hymn in the Johannine Prologue


Saturday, April 24, 2004 10 am, Olin Hall (EN 120)
WOMAN IN THE GOSPEL OF THOMAS (LOGIA 22 AND 114)


Saturday, April 24, 2004 3 pm, Olin Hall (EN 120)
PAYING TAXES TO CAESAR (MARK 12:13-17) AND JEWISH MYSTICISM

Professor Fossum is a major representative of what is sometimes referred to as "the new History of Religions School." He is the author of a classic study on The Name of God and the Angel of the Lord: Samaritan and Jewish Mediation Concepts and the Origin of Gnosticism. Other contributions to the study of traditions that shaped Second Temple Judaism and early Christianity are collected in the volume The Image of the Invisible God: Essays on the Influence of Jewish Mysticism on Early Christology.

All sessions are open to the public and will take place on the campus of Marquette University. For the directions to the campus see: http://www.marquette.edu/pages/home/about/visit/directions

For further information contact Dr. Andrei Orlov, Marquette University Theology Department,
P.O. Box 1881 Milwaukee, WI USA 52201-1881, andrei.orlov@mu.edu

B-kheeruut re'yaaneyh laa kaaley tsuuraathaa khteepaathaa, ellaa Zaynaa Mqatlaanaa Trayaanaa laytaw!
It may be uncompromising in its liberal use of graphic violence, but Lethal Weapon II it ain't.

Aykaa beyt tadkeetha? Zaadeq lee d-asheeg eeday men perdey devshaanaayey haaleyn!
Where is the loo? I need to wash my hands of this popcorn.

Ktaabaa taab hwaa meneyh.
It's not as good as the book.

Etheeth l-khubeh 'almeenaayaa d-Maaran Yeshu Msheekhaa, ella faasheth metool Moneeqaa Belluushee!
I came for the everlasting love of our Lord Jesus Christ, but I stayed for Monica Bellucci.

D-tetbuun deyn men yameen u-men semaal, la hwaat deel l-metal, ellaa l-ayleyn da-mtaybaa.
To sit at my right or my left is not for me to grant; it is for those to whom it has already been assigned.

Tev attuun men qdaamaa!
Down in front!

Peletaa kuullaah da-Qraabay Kawkbey.
It's all an allegory of Star Wars.

Television Broadcast Was No More Than �Rumor�

��� For many months, individuals related to the IAA (The Israel Antiquities Authority) have leaked false information to the media and press on five continents and to thousands of websites on the Internet.

By Oded Golan
March 2004

��� At this stage, I wish only to mention two important facts which may assist the reader in analyzing the recent �media circus�:


1. The number of times that I have sold or mediated in a sale of antiquities in my entire life is smaller than the number of fingers on my hands, and this in itself is much smaller than the number of sales or exchanges performed by any serious antiquities collector I know in the world.

2. In all my 42 years of collecting antiquities, I have never sold a single item to any individual or institution outside Israel (I reiterate � not even a single item in the entire 42-year period was sold by me outside Israel!).


��� For many months, individuals related to the IAA (The Israel Antiquities Authority) have leaked false information to the media and press on five continents and to thousands of websites on the Internet.

[...]

��� Without going into the legal issues in depth, the violation of civil rights and privacy, personal property, libel, direct damage to personal property, publication of information without rights (including scientific information), were all blatantly clear to anyone viewing the program. Equally obvious was the absolutely improper conduct. On one hand, as the object of investigation, I am prevented from responding freely to the media and restrictions of discussing information at this stage apply to me. On the other hand, IAA and police officials repeatedly stated to the courts that the information concerning the investigation is classified, yet the Israel Police had no trouble in approaching the media and providing the information to the public during the legal proceedings.

[...]

Given the "Return of the King" juggernaut, the greatest suspense in the ceremony may have come from anticipating how [master of ceremonies Billy] Crystal might acknowledge "The Passion of the Christ," the highly controversial Mel Gibson film that upstaged the Oscars when it opened on Ash Wednesday last week.

Crystal obliged by announcing, "For the very, very first time, we're being simulcast in Aramaic."

Centre professor of religion connects past to present

By EMILY TOADVINE
Staff Writer

Beth Glazier-McDonald has an engaging way to characterize one of the interesting aspects of her job as professor of religion at Centre College.

"I speak many, many dead languages," she says with a grin.

She studied Syriac, Aramaic, Ugaritic, which is a Canaanite dialect, and Akkadian, as well as Hebrew, Greek and Arabic during graduate school at the University of Chicago.

[...]

Glazier-McDonald's lifelong interest in languages led her to want to work with primary sources, she says. When fellow religion professor C. Thomas McCollough came back from an archaeological dig in summer 1994, he asked her to translate an amulet found in Sepphoris. "It was a dream come true," Glazier-McDonald notes.

Their first collaborative effort was a bronze fever amulet that measured 3.5 centimeters in width by 8.2 centimeters in height. It is partially broken at the bottom. Its language is Aramaic and it dates to the early fifth century Common Era (C.E.) Glazier-McDonald says it is an "amulet for protracted fever." In ancient times, amulets were written, rolled up and put in a case.

[...]

They've also collaborated on three other amulets, including a silver amulet that is written primarily in Hebrew with occasional "Aramaicisms." Its message is social rather than protective, and it dates from the same period as the bronze amulet. It was found in its silver case, and measures 11.2 centimeters long by 3.1 centimeters wide.

Glazier-McDonald spent a lot of time working on the silver amulet during a recent sabbatical. She says it "looks like silver foil." Because the amulets do not leave the country where they are found, Glazier-McDonald works from photographs.

[...]

For Glazier-McDonald's most recent work, there were almost 56 lines of text in a space less than 2 inches wide. It was written in Hebrew, with words that "flowed into one another," Glazier-McDonald says.

[...]

"The more I work on an amulet, the more I see," she explains. "This silver amulet is an analysis between Biblical literature and amulet literature. And the line drawing is painstaking."

[...]

McCollough says he is trying to correlate the amulet with a recently excavated synagogue that has a Zodiac mosaic.

"Which is not too unusual, but it is unexpected," he says of the mosaic.

Glazier-McDonald says the amulet makes reference to Zodiac signs. Some of the language of the amulet leads them to believe there could be a connection between the amulet and the mosaic.

A fourth amulet is out of a collection and measures 8 centimeters by 3 centimeters. Glazier-McDonald says she is beginning to work on it.
[...]