New Archaeological Data from The Great Revolt in Jerusalem Raise New Questions on JosephusThis essay flags the questions, and advertises for financial backing, rather than attempting to answer them. But they are important questions.
The last decades yielded many new findings from the First Jewish Revolt in Jerusalem: rebels’ coins of “year 4”, water systems installed by the defenders, broken flagstones that testify for Romans hunting Jewish refugees, and even a battle scene that recorded the use of ballistae. Today we know much more than we did thirty years ago. It is the time to raise new questions on the correlation between Josephus and archaeology.
By Dr. David Gurevich
Post-Doctoral Fellow, Institute of Archaeology, Hebrew University of Jerusalem;
Post-Doctoral Fellow, Department of Land of Israel Studies and Archaeology, Bar-Ilan University
Research Fellow, The Nelson Glueck School of Biblical Archaeology, Hebrew Union College Jerusalem
May 2018
For more on those bronze coins from the Great revolt which were found recently in Jerusalem, see here. For the excavation that possibly involves Jerusalem's ancient "third wall," see here. For the excavation of that Jerusalem drainage canal used at the end of the revolt as a hiding place, see here. And for some additional thoughts on Josephus and archaeology, see here and links.
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