Day four of Chanukah today and Israeli Archaeologists Find the First Whole Sentence Written in Canaanite. On a Lice Comb and Ornate golden belt unearthed by a Czech farmer and Cyprus, our friendly yet little-known neighbor, is rich in heritage and Most Of The World's Barley Comes From This Country
Yehuda Lave is an author, journalist, psychologist, rabbi, spiritual teacher, and coach, with degrees in business, psychology and Jewish Law. He works with people from all walks of life and helps them in their search for greater happiness, meaning, business advice on saving money, and spiritual engagement.
Chanukah, like Succoth, is a time of joyous Jewish celebration. Work can be done, phones can be used, and we bring to life events from over 2000 years ago that celebrate our Jewish heritage.
I have one word for you about Chanukah. Enjoy!
The Three Musketeers at the Kotel
The Three are Rabbi Yehuda Glick, famous temple mount activist, and former Israel Mk, and then Robert Weinger, the world's greatest shofar blower and seller of Shofars, and myself after we had gone to the 12 gates of the Temple Mount in 2020 to blow the shofar to ask G-d to heal the world from the Pandemic. It was a highlight to my experience in living in Israel and I put it on my blog each day to remember.
The articles that I include each day are those that I find interesting, so I feel you will find them interesting as well. I don't always agree with all the points of each article but found them interesting or important to share with you, my readers, and friends. It is cathartic for me to share my thoughts and frustrations with you about life in general and in Israel. As a Rabbi, I try to teach and share the Torah of the G-d of Israel as a modern Orthodox Rabbi. I never intend to offend anyone but sometimes people are offended and I apologize in advance for any mistakes. The most important psychological principle I have learned is that once someone's mind is made up, they don't want to be bothered with the facts, so, like Rabbi Akiva, I drip water (Torah is compared to water) on their made-up minds and hope that some of what I have share sinks in. Love Rabbi Yehuda Lave.
Cyprus, our friendly yet little-known neighbor, is rich in heritage
Roman, Crusader, Venetian, Ottoman, British, and even Jewish. Thickly forested mountains, quaint villages, vineyards, and pristine beaches offer a cool relief from the Mediterranean summer heat. Since 1974, the island is divided into the Republic of Cyprus and the North, occupied by Turkey. Diverse Greek, Turkish, British, and other communities add color to the visit.
In 1946, the British set up internment camps in Cyprus for illegal Jewish immigrants to Mandatory Palestine. Until February 1949 more than 52,000 ma'apilim passed through these camps. Many young couples soon stood under the chuppah and 2,200 babies were born on the island - a baby boom that continued after the aliyah.
Since 2016, the Cyprus Heritage Trips have been expertly organized by Yaron Amitai, author of popular guidebooks to Cyprus and Greece. This tour is led by Yochai Copenhagen, whose father came to Israel on board the Yagur, the first Hagana ship to be diverted to Cyprus.
These pictures were taken by the whole group and uploaded by me.
Most Of The World's Barley Comes From This Country
A farmer has unearthed an ornate belt made from gold near the city of Opava, located in the Moravian-Silesian Region of the Czech Republic.
Upon an initial inspection, it was proposed that the object is a diadem, a type of crown or headband worn as a symbol of authority by the ruling elite.
Measuring 49 centimetres in length, 9cm wide, and weighing 56.5 grams, researchers now propose that the object is an ornate belt dating from the Middle to Late Bronze Age.
The belt is made from a thin metal alloy, with a composition of more than 84% gold, less than 15% silver, and traces of other elements such as copper. Artisans decorated the surface with a series of five large concentric circles, surrounded by smaller concentric circles and an enclosed border decoration.
Determining whether the belt was crafted by local artisans or comes from the regions inhabited by the Carpathian or Balkan Culture requires further investigation, however, archaeologists propose that the artefact dates from the period of the Urnfield Culture around 1300 to 750 BC.
This is based on a preliminary examination of the object's decoration which is comparable with ornamentation found in prehistoric cultures from the Urnfield Culture period.
Speaking to Czech Radio, Silesia Jiřà Juchelka said: "The belt must have belonged to someone in high society, as this type of production was not common. Its owner therefore had to be someone esteemed."
The belt has been sent to the Museum in Bruntál for conservation, where it will be added to the museum's collection and placed on public display.
Israeli Archaeologists Find First Whole Sentence Written in Canaanite. On a Lice Comb
"All the dust of the land became lice throughout all the land of Egypt" Exodus 8:16.
How much truth there is in the Exodus story is unclear; after all, in some translations of the Bible, the lice are flies. But we can be confident that lice were a perennial plague in biblical times, as they are to this day. We can know this because Israeli archaeologists have found a Canaanite lice comb made of elephant ivory around 3,700 years ago.
Found in 2017 in the biblical city of Lachish, the artifact joins the pantheon of ancient combs assumed to be for lice that have been found up and down the Holy Land. But this one is different.
This one bears the earliest sentence ever found in Israel, seven words in the world's first alphabet, archaic proto-Canaanite: "May this tusk root out the lice of the hair and the beard."
And we almost never knew. Almost four millennia after an elephant in Africa died and its tusk was fashioned into a tiny comb, the writing had become almost invisible.
The comb was unearthed and studied by researchers from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, as well as from Southern Adventist University and Lipscomb University, both in Tennessee. The project was directed by professors Yosef Garfinkel, Michael Hasel and Martin Klingbeil, and the comb was cleaned and preserved by Miriam Lavi.
But the exhortation was noticed only this year by research associate Madeleine Mumcuoglu at Hebrew University. The writing was deciphered by semitic epigraphist Daniel Vainstub of Ben-Gurion University in Be'er Sheva. Their findings were published in the Jerusalem Journal of Archaeology.
"The whole thing is just 3 centimeters [1.2 inches] long and each letter is about 2 to 3 millimeters in size, and they were very shallowly incised," Garfinkel says. "Under ordinary light the inscription wasn't visible. But after six years it was examined again, maybe thanks to light from the side – and suddenly the inscription was observed."
The inscribed comb has six big teeth on one side, to untangle hair or a beard, and 14 finer teeth on the other side that could snag the parasites and their eggs, aka nits, Mumcuoglu reported in 2008. All the teeth were broken in antiquity and the middle of the comb became eroded, maybe because it had been gripped tightly while being dragged through the offending locks.
The source material, tusk, was determined through analysis by Prof. Rivka Rabinovich of Hebrew University and Prof. Yuval Goren of Ben-Gurion University. Who might have owned an artifact like that in the Bronze Age?
The ivory for the comb was likely imported from Egypt, suggesting that the infested owner was wealthy, Garfinkel says. "It would have been like a diamond today, a crème de la crème luxury item. Others likely had lice combs too, but made of wood that would have decayed," he says, adding that the ivory, being bone, weathered the ages.
Other lice combs have been found at Lachish and throughout Canaan. Twenty were found in a just one Middle Bronze Age cemetery in Jericho, made of wood. Another such site is ancient Jerusalem, including in a Second Temple-period house on Mount Zion, Prof. Shimon Gibson says. None until the current one bore exhortations to divine powers against parasitic affliction, but given the belated nature of the inscription's discovery, Garfinkel suggests that other combs deserve reexamination.
And yes, the scientists found a dead Canaanite louse in the comb, on the second tooth, they report, though they qualify: "The climatic conditions of Lachish, however, did not allow preservation of whole head lice but only of the outer chitin membrane of a first or second nymph stage head louse." They even tried to extract DNA from the corpse for genomic analysis, but it didn't work, Garfinkel says.
To be clear, this is far from the first proto-Canaanite inscription found in Israel: 10 have been found just at Lachish, a major Canaanite city-state from the second millennium B.C.E., the Bronze Age, to the early Hellenistic period. Writing at Lachish is "nicely attested" from various periods, notes the renowned epigrapher Christopher Rollston of George Washington University in Washington, D.C., (who was not involved in this research). But this is the first actual Canaanite sentence, says Vainstub.
The inscription also contains the earliest known representation of the letter "sin", which in hebrew today is pronounced the same as "samekh", or the letter "s" but then had a different sound, Vainstub explains. Today the ancient sin persists only among some peoples in southern Arabia, he adds.
How did he interpret the words for louse, hair and beard? Canaanite has significant similarities with the most ancient stratum of biblical-era Hebrew, for one thing. "The first word is the root natash which serves like in Hebrew – to root out," he explains. The Canaanite word for hair is se'ar, the same as in all semitic languages. Beard is zakat, similar to the Hebrew zakan. Though at about 3,700 years old, the Canaanite comb predates the Israelites' arrival by centuries.
Rollston confirms that in his opinion, the writing is indeed early Canaanite script, adding: "This is a wonderful inscription, both because of the content of the inscription as well as the object upon which it is written: a comb. And it also reminds us yet again that pesky little insects such as gnats and flies (mentioned as the third and fourth plagues in Exodus 8) and lice (mentioned in this new inscription) have been problems since time immemorial."
Proto-Canaanite is not the earliest form of writing. Proto-writing emerged in Mesopotamia and/or ancient Egypt at the dawn of the Bronze Age; also perhaps in Harappa in the Indian subcontinent. Small clay tokens were incised with an image, for instance a cow, and marks that may have denoted value, name, owner – we really don't know. Then cuneiform emerged in Mesopotamia and hieroglyphics in Egypt, which involved scribes learning thousands of symbols, Garfinkel notes.
The thinking is, that's why Canaanites working for, or in, Egypt invented the first alphabet. The earliest examples of alphabetic writing were found at Wadi el-Hol in Egypt's Western Desert, and at Serabit el-Khadim in southern Sinai. There the writing is called proto-Sinaitic, dating to about 3,900 years ago. Proto-Canaanite is believed to be the same system, devised to represent sounds by Canaanites who couldn't or chose not to learn hieroglyphics.
To be clear, several inscriptions in proto-Canaanite have been found to date, including 10 in Lachish itself, but all had only isolated letters or two or three words. One vessel, the "Lachish ewer" (found in 1934), bears drawings of animals and trees, and some writing; it seems to date to the late 13th century B.C.E. A shard with letters found at Lachish came from of a pot imported from Cyprus about 3,500 years ago and inked in Canaan.
Unlike the exhortation to the god against parasites, it's too incomplete to hazard a guess at what it said. Other examples of proto-Canaanite writing were found at Gezer and Shechem.
Asked if the comb could cast light on literacy in the Bronze Age, Garfinkel surmises that at first, probably only elites could read and write. But in time, the simplicity of the alphabet compared with, say, hieroglyphics and cuneiform, made reading and writing accessible to all, he says.
"Today we all use alphabets, in Hebrew and Arabic and Arabic and French – the whole world. Intellectually it's the most important contribution of the Canaanite culture to human history," Garfinkel says.
Rollston adds that in the ancient Near East, powerful and wealthy elites would commission scribes to write on prestige objects, noting the Kefar Veradim Bronze Bowl from the Galilee, and an inscribed bronze dagger from Lachish also from the Canaanite period. But that doesn't mean the comb inscription demonstrates widespread literacy among ordinary folk.
"In other words, it would be a real stretch for someone to use this inscription to try to suggest that farmers, blacksmiths and potters were literate. They weren't," he says.
It seems the working class would remain unlearned a while longer. Rollston notes the writing of Second Temple Jewish teacher Ben Sira (around. 180 B.C.E.): "The scribe's wisdom increases wisdom; whoever is free from toil can become wise" – Ben Sira 38:24-29:11. The sage goes on to extol workers' vital role in society while stressing that they had no role in government.
Later, proto-Canaanite would inspire the emergence of other alphabets, including this one. Yes, our letters stem from lice-infested peoples of the Levant
