What is Karaism and Are There Still Karaites?
august 2024 | Vol. 12.8 By Daniel J. Lasker Anyone familiar with a typical synagogue would be surprised by this photograph. Men are wearing skullcaps and prayer shawls. The ark is
The Relationship Between “Jews” and “Israelites” After the Babylonian Exile
july 2022 | Vol. 10.7 By Jason Staples In his review of Karl Georg Kuhn’s Achtzehngebet und Vaterunser und der Reim, the Dutch Biblical scholar M.A. Beek fondly recalls
Who’s Afraid of the Goddess of Ancient Israel?
june 2022 | Vol. 10.6 By Dvora Lederman Daniely Archaeological and literary-biblical studies have long shown that the worship of a Mother-Goddess was an early integral part of the
Portraits of People and Society From Palmyra
june 2022 | Vol. 10.6 By Maura Heyn The funerary portraiture from the city of Palmyra, in the eastern Roman Empire, is a rich and heterogenous display of identity dating to the fir
Goddesses of Myth and Cultural Memory
may 2022 | Vol. 10.5 By Emilie Kutash Goddesses, it seems, are still among us today. The contemporary goddess movement reflects a quest for an antidote to male divinity and a means
What’s in a Name? Warriors and Warrior Burials in the Near East
MAY 2022 | Vol. 10.5 By Chris Stantis The dead, much like the living, don’t fit easily into convenient labels. In the 1980s, the term “warrior graves” was coined to describe
The Shavei Zion Figurine Assemblage. A Cultic Site at Sea
An underwater discovery off the coast of Israel revealed terracotta figurines. But there was no shipwreck and the finds dated across hundreds of years of the Iron Age. Was this an
Cognitive Science and the Ancient Near Eastern Religious Imagination
Ancient religions imagined all sorts of animals and demons. Cognitive science suggests how humans understood these hybrids, and when they became too much to comprehend.
Temples and Cult Places in Iron Age Transjordan
Many temples and cult places are known from Iron Age Israel but what about in Transjordan? What does a look at these sites reveal about cult and religion in Moab, Ammon, and Edom?
The Symbolic Representation of the Cosmos in the Hittite Rock Sanctuary of Yazılıkaya
The Hittite sanctuary at Yazılıkaya functioned as a calendar. But the carefully carved galleries of gods and goddesses depicted much more, a representation of the cosmos moving t