TEMPLE MOUNT WATCH: As a number of people have noted, Ha'aretz has an article ("Gems in the dirt") on the Waqf's Temple Mount debris and the controversy between archaeologists Gabriel Barkay (who is leading the project to sift the material) and Meir Ben-Dov on whether the material is worth analyzing. Be-Dov thinks that the inscribed bulla fragment may not be from the Temple Mount debris. I can't let one of his comments pass:

Ben-Dov: "Let's say that there is a bulla and it has three letters on it. Yigal Shiloh [excavator of the City of David] had 70 intact bullas. This bulla says nothing. There is no discovery, so why blow things up like this?"

Well, it has more than three letters (see the article for details) but that's not the point. Genuine ancient Hebrew inscriptions -- even poorly preserved ones -- are very hard to come by and each one adds a bit to the corpus and is of cumulative importance. As I've noted before (see second link above), for an archaeologist Dr. Ben Dov (if he's been quoted correctly) expresses a suprisingly casual attitude toward the recovery of ancient artifacts.