Eight centuries after Moses led the Children of Israel from Egypt, a Jewish community thrived on Elephantine Island, a small isle on the Nile in Southern Egypt near the present-day Aswan. Archaeologists date the origin of the Elephantine community to the dispersion and exile of the Jews from ancient Israel following the destruction of the…
The Talmud says that the town of Zippori, in the Lower Galilee northwest of Nazareth, was so named “because it is perched on the top of a mountain like a bird [zippor].” Also perched on this picturesque mountain, roughly 1,800 years ago, was the Sanhedrin, the grand rabbinic-judicial council of ancient Israel, whose head, Rabbi…
Fifty years after the Dead Sea Scrolls first came to light, biblical scholars around the world are preparing for a major conference on the scrolls that is set to roll — or unroll, as the case may be — July 20 to 25 (1997) at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem. While the scrolls have been…
The massive golden menorah from the Holy Temple of Jerusalem is the coveted object that fuels the modern-day action-adventure in Saskatchewan-born author David Gibbins’s second novel Crusader Gold, published this year by Headline Press of Britain and available under that imprint in Canada. Gibbins, who appeared at the International Festival of Authors in Toronto in…
