WChezib, also known as Achziv of Judah, is a biblical place-name associated with the birth of Judah's son, Shelah (Genesis 38:5), corresponding to the Achziv of the Book of Joshua (15:44), a town located in the low-lying hills of the plain of Judah, known as the Shefela. In I Chronicles 4:22, the town is rendered as Chozeba. The place is now a ruin.
WThe Al-Yahudu tablets are a collection of about 200 clay tablets from the sixth and fifth centuries BCE on the exiled Judean community in Babylonia following the destruction of the First Temple. They contain information on the physical condition of the exiles from Judah and their financial condition in Babylon. The tablets are named after the central settlement mentioned in the documents, al-Yahudu.
WJewish holidays, also known as Jewish festivals or Yamim Tovim, are holidays observed in Judaism and by Jews throughout the Hebrew calendar. They include religious, cultural and national elements, derived from three sources: biblical mitzvot ("commandments"); rabbinic mandates; Jewish history and the history of the State of Israel.
WBeit She'arim, also, Kh. Sheikh Abreiḳ, is a Roman-era Jewish village that thrived from the 1st-century BCE until its demise in the early 20th century. The name of site is occasionally rendered as Bet She'arāyim. It is first mentioned by Josephus as Besara, a place then serving as the administrative center of the estates of Queen Berenice in the Jezreel Valley. The village seemed to have been of agricultural importance, as it was being used to store the harvested grain of the neighboring towns and villages. By the mid-2nd century, the village had become the seat of the rabbinic synod under Rabbi Judah ha-Nasi. The site is situated on the spur of a hill about half a kilometer long and 200 meters wide, and lies in the southern extremity of the Lower Galilee mountains, facing the western end of the Jezreel Valley, east of Daliat el-Carmel, south of Kiryat Tivon, and west of Ramat Yishai. It rises 138 metres (453 ft) above sea level at its highest point.
WBersabe ;(Greek: Βηρσαβέ, Βηρσουβαί), or Beer Sheba of the Galilee, was a Second Temple period Jewish village located near the town of Kefar Hananya which marked the boundary between the Upper Galilee and the Lower Galilee, as described by Josephus, with Upper Galilee stretching from Bersabe in the Beit HaKerem Valley to Baca (Peki'in) in the north. Bersabe was one of several towns and villages of Galilee fortified by Josephus during the First Jewish–Roman War, being one of the most defensible positions and where insurgents from across Galilee had taken up refuge against the Imperial Roman army when the surrounding countryside was plundered.
WCarmel was an ancient Israelite town in Judea, lying about 11.2 kilometres (7.0 mi) from Hebron, on the southeastern frontier of Mount Hebron.
WHistory of the Jews in Carthage refers to the history and presence of people of Jewish ancestry in ancient Carthage.
WThe Dead Sea Scrolls are ancient Jewish religious manuscripts that were found in the Qumran Caves in the Judaean Desert, near Ein Feshkha on the northern shore of the Dead Sea in the West Bank. Scholarly consensus dates these scrolls from the last three centuries BCE and the first century CE. The texts have great historical, religious, and linguistic significance because they include the second-oldest known surviving manuscripts of works later included in the Hebrew Bible canon, along with deuterocanonical and extra-biblical manuscripts which preserve evidence of the diversity of religious thought in late Second Temple Judaism. Almost all of the Dead Sea Scrolls are held by the state of Israel in the Shrine of the Book on the grounds of the Israel Museum, but ownership of the scrolls is disputed by Jordan and Palestine.
WThe En-Gedi Scroll is an ancient and fragile Hebrew parchment found in 1970 at Ein Gedi, Israel. Radiocarbon testing dates the scroll to the third or fourth century CE, although paleographical considerations suggest that the scrolls may date back to the first or second century CE. This scroll was discovered to contain a portion of the biblical Book of Leviticus, making it the earliest copy of a Pentateuchal book ever found in a Holy Ark. The deciphered text fragment is identical to what was to become during the Middle Ages the standard text of the Hebrew Bible, known as the Masoretic Text, which it precedes by several centuries, and constitutes the earliest evidence of this authoritative text version. Damaged by a fire in approximately 600 CE, the scroll is badly charred and fragmented and required noninvasive scientific and computational techniques to virtually unwrap and read, which was completed in 2015 by a team led by Prof. Seales of the University of Kentucky.
WA four-room house, also known as an "Israelite house" or a "pillared house" is the name given to the mud and stone houses characteristic of the Iron Age of Levant.
WThe historicity of the Bible is the question of the Bible's relationship to history—covering not just the Bible's acceptability as history but also the ability to understand the literary forms of biblical narrative. One can extend biblical historicity to the evaluation of whether or not the Christian New Testament is an accurate record of the historical Jesus and of the Apostolic Age. This tends to vary depending upon the opinion of the scholar.
WThe Kingdom of Israel and the Kingdom of Judah were two related Israelite kingdoms from the Iron Age period of the ancient Southern Levant. After an emergent and large polity was suddenly formed based on the Gibeon-Gibeah plateau and destroyed by Shoshenq I in the first half of 10th century BCE, a return to small city states was prevalent in the Southern Levant, but between 950 and 900 BCE another large polity emerged in the northern highlands with its capital eventually at Tirzah, that can be considered the precursor of the Kingdom of Israel, which was consolidated as an important regional power by the first half of the 9th century BCE, before falling to the Neo-Assyrian Empire in 722 BCE. Israel's southern neighbor, the Kingdom of Judah, emerged in the second half of 9th century BCE, and later became a client state of first the Neo-Assyrian Empire and then the Neo-Babylonian Empire before a revolt against the latter led to its destruction in 586 BCE. Following the fall of Babylon to the Achaemenid Empire under Cyrus the Great in 539 BCE, some Judean exiles returned to Jerusalem, inaugurating the formative period in the development of a distinctive Judahite identity in the province of Yehud Medinata.
WKnowledge of the biblical period is mostly from literary references in the Bible and post-biblical sources. Religion and music historian Herbert Lockyer, Jr. writes that "music, both vocal and instrumental, was well cultivated among the Hebrews, the New Testament Christians, and the Christian church through the centuries." He adds that "a look at the Old Testament reveals how God's ancient people were devoted to the study and practice of music, which holds a unique place in the historical and prophetic books, as well as the Psalter."
WThe Israelites were a confederation of Iron Age Semitic-speaking tribes of the ancient Near East, who inhabited a part of Canaan during the tribal and monarchic periods. According to the religious narrative of the Hebrew Bible, the Israelites' origin is traced back to the biblical patriarchs and matriarchs Abraham and his wife Sarah, through their son Isaac and his wife Rebecca, and their son Jacob with his wives Leah and Rachel and the handmaids Zilpa and Bilhah.
WKeilah, meaning Citadel, was a city in the lowlands of Judah. It is now a ruin, known as Kh. Qeila, near the modern village of Qila, 7 miles (11 km) east of Beit Gubrin, and about 3 kilometres (1.9 mi) west of Kharas.
WKhirbet Jurish is an archaeological ruin 30 kilometres (19 mi) southwest of Jerusalem. The site is protected by the Israel Nature and Parks Authority. The ruins of the site stand on a hill to the west of Tzur Hadassa, on a mountain now called Har Kitron, along regional highway 375.
WThe Mosaic of Reḥob, also known as the Tel Rehov inscription and Baraita of the Boundaries, is a late 3rd–6th century CE mosaic discovered in 1973, inlaid in the floor of the foyer or narthex of an ancient synagogue near Tel Rehov, 4.5 kilometers (2.8 mi) south of Beit She'an and about 6.5 kilometres (4.0 mi) west of the Jordan River, containing the longest written text hitherto discovered in any mosaic in the Land of Israel, and also the oldest known Talmudic text.
WPaleo-Hebrew script, also Palæo-Hebrew, Proto-Hebrew or Old Hebrew, is the name used by modern scholars to describe the script found in Canaanite inscriptions from the region of Biblical Israel and Judah. It is considered to be the script used to record the original Ancient Hebrew language, including the texts of the Hebrew Bible in its original script. Old Hebrew, like the Phoenician alphabet, is a slight regional variant and an immediate continuation of the Proto-Canaanite script, which was used throughout Canaan in the Late Bronze Age. Hebrew is attested epigraphically from about the 10th century BCE, and no extant "Phoenician" inscription is older than 1000 BCE. The Phoenician language, Hebrew language, and all of their sister Canaanite languages were largely indistinguishable dialects before that time. The Paleo-Hebrew alphabet is an abjad of 22 consonantal letters. Use of the term "Paleo-Hebrew alphabet" is due to a 1954 suggestion by Solomon Birnbaum, who argued that "[t]o apply the term Phoenician to the script of the Hebrews is hardly suitable".
WQubur Bene Isra'in or Qubur Bani Isra'il, are four, formerly five, huge stone structures dated to the Middle Bronze Age, which rise from a rocky plateau overlooking Wadi Qelt in the West Bank, about 3.5 miles northeast of Jerusalem, between Hizma and Geva Binyamin along Highway 437.
WSelamin (Greek: Σελάμην), also known as Tzalmon, Selame, Salamis / Salamin, Zalmon, and Khurbet es Salâmeh, was a Jewish village in Lower Galilee during the Second Temple period, formerly fortified by Josephus, and which was captured by the Roman Imperial army in circa 64 CE. Today, the ruin is designated as a historical site and lies directly south of the Wadi Zalmon National Park in Israel's Northern District.
WSolomon's Pools are three ancient reservoirs located in the south-central West Bank, immediately to the south of al-Khader, about 3.5 kilometres (2.2 mi) southwest of Bethlehem, near the road to Hebron. Although the site was traditionally associated with King Solomon, scholars today believe the pools to be much younger, with the oldest part dating to the 2nd century BCE.
WTell Maon was a biblical town in the Hebron Hills, formerly known simply as Maon, rising 863 metres (2,831 ft) above sea level. The town, now a ruin, is mentioned in Joshua 15:55 and in 1 Samuel 25:2, and is located about 6 kilometres (3.7 mi) southeast of Yatta.
WThe Tomb of the Prophets Haggai, Zechariah and Malachi is an ancient burial site located on the upper western slope of the Mount of Olives, Jerusalem. According to a medieval Jewish tradition also adopted by Christians, the catacomb is believed to be the burial place of Haggai, Zechariah and Malachi, the last three Hebrew Bible prophets who are believed to have lived during the 6th-5th centuries BC. Archaeologists have dated the three earliest burial chambers to the 1st century BC, thus contradicting the tradition.
WTur Shimon or Horvat Tura, the Hebraized form of Khirbet et-Tantura, so-called after the shape of the hill, is an archaeological site in Nahal Sorek. Ancient Tur Shimon, mentioned twice in classical Hebrew literature, has been tentatively identified by archaeologist Boaz Zissu with Khirbet Sammunieh, based on a comparison of the name Tur Shimon with two given Arabic names. In maps of the British Mandate period, the ruin is also named Khirbet et-Tantura. Archaeologists have proposed that this name embodies the Aramaic concept of "mountain" = Tur. In older PEF maps of Conder and Kitchener, the name of the ruin is given as Sammunieh, a name reminiscent of the Hebrew name Shimon. A riverine brook that flows immediately beneath the mountain has also the appellation of Wadi Ismaʻin, thought too to be a corruption of the name Shimon.
WUsha was a city in the Western part of Galilee. The old site occupied the place of the Arab village Hawsha.
WYahwism was the religion of the ancient kingdoms of Judah and Israel (Samaria). Yahweh was one of the many gods and goddesses of the pantheon of gods of the Land of Canaan, the southern portion of which would later come to be called the Land of Israel. Yahwism thus evolved from Canaanite polytheism, which in turn makes Yahwism the monolatristic primitive predecessor stage of Judaism in Judaism‘s evolution into a monotheistic religion.