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Idol-quickening instructions, Babylonia, 6th century BCE. The “mouth-washing” ritual was a ceremony for transforming a newly manufactured idol into a living deity. The instructions include these…
On the day of my abundant joy
illness suddenly overcame me
Birth pangs and rupture
overwhelmed me
I gave birth and died, like a blossom
I turned away
And the fruit of my womb was
brought with me to…
Neḥama wife of Shalom Uri
Buried on Sunday, the 11th of Tevet 5337
This stone is a witness between us:
That death has climbed up into our window:
And eclipsed the…
I besieged and captured Samaria. I took as spoil 27,290 people who live there; I organized (a contingent of) fifty of their chariots and I instructed the rest of them in correct conduct. I appointed…
In the eponymate of Dayan-Ashur, on the 14th of Aiaru (Iyyar), I set out from Nineveh . . .
I set out from the Euphrates and approached Aleppo. They (i.e., the inhabitants of Aleppo) were afraid of…
Year 7. The month Kislev. The king of Akkad mobilized his troops and marched to Hatti.
He encamped against the city of Judah and in the month Adar, day 2, he captured the city; he seized the king. He…
Lot (puru), Assyria, 8th century BCE. The inscription identifies this as a lot (puru—the Akkadian form of Hebrew pur, the word used in Esther 3:7) that belonged to an Assyrian official named Yahalu…
May my lord, the governor/commander, listen to the word of his servant! As for your servant, your servant was harvesting in Hatsar-asam. And your servant harvested and finished/measured and stored it…
This tombstone of Isaac ben Ḥayim, who died in 1728, includes (at the top) a pair of deer and a pair of lions, animal carvings that often appeared on Jewish tombstones in Eastern Europe. They…
The Jewish cemetery of Altona is made up of two separate cemeteries, one Sephardic (established in 1611 and later expanded several times) and one Ashkenazic (1616, also later expanded). In the…
