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The 3,200-year-old find could prove Israelites were literate when they entered the land.

By Etgar Lefkovits, JNS

A lead tablet found at a site where millions of Jews and Christians believe the Israelite leader Joshua built an altar contains the oldest Hebrew text ever found in the Land of Israel as well as the name of God, an academic article published Friday concludes.

The peer review of the small 3,200-year-old curse tablet discovered at Mount Ebal in Samaria more than two years ago is expected to reignite the debate in the archaeological community over the find. It could prove the Israelites were literate at the time as well as shed light on the date of the Exodus from Egypt.

“The text … is the oldest Hebrew text found within the borders of ancient Israel … by at least two centuries,” the article published in Heritage Science states.

“The big point here is that we have evidence of Hebrew writing in Israel earlier than has previously been established, as well as mention of two of names of the Hebrew God, all from the site where the Bible said Joshua built an altar,” Scott Stripling, the provost at the Bible Seminary in Katy, Texas, who uncovered the tablet, said in a telephone interview with JNS.

The folded, 2×2-centimeter square lead tablet was found in December 2019, during an examination of discarded materials from an excavation at the site that had been led by University of Haifa Professor Adam Zertal (1936-2015) more than three decades earlier.

The curse tablet found on Mount Ebal. Photo by Jaroslav Valach.
Zertal carried out the dig where the ruins of ancient Shechem lie between 1982 and 1989, at the site of what he concluded were two altars dating to the Late Bronze Age II and Iron Age I.

The Book of Joshua relates that Moses’s successor as leader built an altar on Mount Ebal as part of a covenant renewal ceremony soon after the Israelites returned to Canaan from Egypt.

The site is known from the book of Deuteronomy as a place of curses.

The tablet emerged from a dump pile left behind from the original dig—common after excavations—in a process known as “wet sifting” whereby ancient stones covered in dirt are washed. The method, which was first used in Jerusalem for finds removed from the Temple Mount, is not considered as scientific as an actual dig, although in this case the item was found in situ.

Wet sifting

Stripling, who had previously participated in the Temple Mount Sifting Project in Jerusalem, said in the interview that when he began the sifting project at Mount Ebal, he only expected to write a “boring methodical paper” about embracing the new technology offered by wet sifting the rubble of excavations.

“The tablet would not have been found without wet sifting,” he said. “At first it looked like a piece of stone covered in dirt. Only when we washed it, it popped out.”

Line-drawing of the inscription on “Inner B” (left) and annotated line-drawing (right). Drawing and annotations by Gershon Galil.

The tablet, which the researchers date to 1400-1200 BCE, could not be opened without damaging it, so a team of experts performed X-ray tomography scanning in Prague as well as detailed photography, revealing an ancient curse written in a proto-alphabetic script, the article, titled “You are Cursed by the God YHW: An Early Hebrew Inscription from Mt. Ebal,” states.

The article includes images and scans of the inscriptions for other academics to weigh in on.

The inscription contains as many as 48 letters and the curse appears on the inside and outside of the tablet.

“You are cursed by the god, yhw, cursed. You will die cursed—cursed you will surely die. Cursed you are by yhw-cursed,” a translation of the inner inscription reads, according to the article.

“What we thought over a year ago, we now have substantiated through our research,” said Stripling.

The earliest Hebrew writing previously found—the Khirbet Qeiyafa ostracon found in the dig at the ancient fortress city near the central Israeli city of Beit Shemesh—was dated from 1000 BCE, making the inscription on this tablet 200 to 400 years older, Stripling said. Its use of the Hebrew word for God also predates the oldest previously found in Israel by 500 to 600 years, he added.

Scholars date the Exodus from Egypt to the 13th or 12th century BCE, said Stripling, although their dating on this tablet could suggest it was earlier.

“We have a Hebrew inscription of a curse found on the mountain of curses,” said Peter van der Veen, associate professor at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz in Germany and an epigrapher who reviewed the inscription for the study. “I think the conclusion we reached last year is now confirmed by more in-depth study,” he said.

A second peer review of the outer inscription is expected to come out next year, followed by an international conference on the find.

The post Scholars expound on Mount Ebal curse tablet with oldest Hebrew text appeared first on World Israel News.

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The IDF targeted several Palestinian Islamic Jihad sites, including the headquarters of a senior terror chief, in the Gaza Strip overnight on Friday.

In addition to rocket and mortar launching sites, the operational headquarters of senior leader Muhammed Abu al-Ata was destroyed. Abu al-Ata had fled the site ahead of the strike and had taken shelter at a hospital, using patients as human shields. Abu al-Ata is the brother of Bahaa Abu al-Ata, who was killed by the IDF in November 2019.

The headquarters of Islamic Jihad operative Khaled Azzam, a rockets expert for the terror group, was also destroyed in the overnight strike.

The post WATCH: IDF targets Gaza headquarters of senior Islamic Jihad terrorists appeared first on World Israel News.

“The first successful operation of David’s Sling underscores the importance of US-Israel air and missile defense technology as a co-produced system.”

By Andrew Bernard, Algemeiner

The Israeli Ministry of Defense on Wednesday confirmed the first operational interception of the David’s Sling missile system, a development that experts say is an “important milestone” in US-Israeli defense cooperation and for Israel’s defense capabilities.

Ari Cicurel, Assistant Director of Foreign Policy at the the Jewish Institute for National Security of America (JINSA), told The Algemeiner that while Iron Dome is the most frequently used and talked about Israeli air defense system, it’s part of a wider network of systems protecting the country.

“The first successful operation of David’s Sling underscores the importance of US-Israel air and missile defense technology as a co-produced system,” Cicurel said. “With threats continuing to grow from Iran-backed groups in the region to US service members, to regional partners including Israel, US-Israel defense cooperation will will only become more important going forward.”

David’s Sling is Israel’s “middle tier” air defense system, capable of shooting down larger projectiles than Iron Dome, including cruise missiles and short-range ballistic missiles.

While the Israeli Ministry of Defense said that they did not have have any additional information about the circumstances of the interception, Cicurel said that its first use would reverberate beyond the current conflict between Israel and Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ).

“The use of David’s Sling sends a signal to not only PIJ and Hamas, but also Hezbollah to Israel’s north, other Iran-backed groups, and certainly Iran as well, that Israel has the capabilities to defend itself at the short-, medium- and long-range,” he said. “So that use, if not the reason that Israel chose to use David’s Sling, certainly is the consequence of successful use.”

David’s Sling, which fires missile interceptors to take down its targets, is jointly designed by the Israeli defense contractor Rafael and the US-based Raytheon. The project is supported by an annual $500 million in aid that was included in the ten-year memorandum of understanding (MOU) between the US and Israel signed during the Obama administration in 2016.

Daniel Shapiro, former US ambassador to Israel and a distinguished fellow at the Atlantic Council who was one of the negotiators of that MOU, told The Algemeiner that that steady stream of missile defense funding remains a “sound investment” for the US and Israel.

“The first operational interception by the David’s Sling system is an important milestone,” he said. “The IDF is constantly refining and adjusting the capabilities of its missile defense systems, improving their range and versatility to provide multilayered protection against the evolving missile capabilities of Israel’s enemies.”

According to Cicurel, that investment is also starting to pay dividends in the wider region, as Israel and its defense systems have significant appeal for Arab countries that also face potential rocket and missile threats from Iran.

“[Israel] has also provided to its growing number of friends in the region through the Abraham Accords,” he said. “Israel sold the UAE both its SPYDER counter-drone platform, as well as the Barak short-range air defense system for missiles and drones. Similarly, Bahrain has signed an MOU with Israel on defense cooperation and is reportedly in discussions to purchase Israeli counter-drone defenses.”

Since Operation Shield and Arrow began on 9 May, PIJ have launched nearly 900 rockets, 260 of which have been intercepted by Iron Dome with a 91% success rate. While that rate of fire has demonstrated PIJ’s ability to mount an intensive rocket and mortar campaign against Israel, there are concerns that Israel’s current defenses could be overwhelmed in a fight against the much more heavily armed and entrenched Hezbollah, particularly given how slowly the US government responds to Israel’s needs.

“Israel reportedly has ten Iron Dome systems, the US should certainly look to provide funding so that it could have more of those systems,” Cicurel said. “As this conflict continues to escalate, it’s important that Congressional leaders on both sides of the aisle, in both the House and the Senate, as well as President Biden, ensure that they rapidly replenish [Iron Dome’s] interceptors, as well as look to provide more funding, more cooperation, for air defense.”

The post ‘Important Milestone’: Israel uses new air defense system in fight against Palestinian Islamic Jihad appeared first on World Israel News.

The Palestinian was in Israel on a work permit.  

By World Israel News Staff

A Palestinian from Gaza who was in Israel on a work permit was killed his brother was injured after a rocket launched by the Palesitnian Islamic Jihad fell in southern Israel on Saturday afternoon

The rocket, which fell in Shokeda, also injured a third man from Israel.

The men were transferred to Soroka Medical Center in Beersheba to receive medical treatment.

The two brothers from Gaza, Abdullah and Khamed Abu Gaba ,both in their thirties, were rushed to emergency surgery at the hospital. Abdullah, a father of six, died from his wounds. His brother is in critical condition.

The Gaza-based Palestinian Center for Human Rights (PCHR) confirmed that some of the Palestinians killed and injured in Gaza in the latest round of fighting between Israel and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) organization were hit by rockets fired by Palestinian terror groups that fell short.

Hamas, in response, accused PCHR of a “lack of patriotism,” Khaled Abu Toameh of the Jerusalem Post reported.

According to a report published last Friday, PCHR, which was founded in the mid 1990s by a group of Palestinian lawyers and human rights activists,found that three civilians, including two children, were killed by misfired rockets while another 26 were injured, including seven children and five women.

The Hamas-controlled Media Office denounced the center and its report, saying it was not authorized to reach such conclusions.

“We deplore the fact that a local institution issued a report claiming there had been civilian casualties as a result of local rockets fired by the resistance factions,” the Hamas office said in a statement. “The occupation took advantage of this to evade responsibility for is documented crimes.”

Such institutions are “not authorized to determine the nature of an event.” It added: “The principle is to rely on what is issued by explosive experts and the forensic laboratory. Therefore, what is stated in this report contradicts the simplest principles of professionalism and lacks the opinion of experts.”

The post Gaza Palestinian killed by terror rocket fire in southern Israel appeared first on World Israel News.

The actions of Marion Luise Stade, a 61-year-old mother from Texas, have shocked citizens across the United States. On May 2, deputies with the Archer County Sheriff’s Office received a call from someone who reported witnessing Stade dragging her juvenile son with a seatbelt tied around him while they were in a vehicle on the side of Highway 79 South. Thinking it was a misunderstanding, the deputy cleared the call to the sheriff’s office after the woman’s son apologized.

But the story didn’t end there. A short while later, Archer County Sheriff Jack Curd received a text message with horrifying footage of the incident. The video apparently showed Stade driving as her son was forced to run alongside the car, where he clung to the side of the vehicle with his feet lifted up off the ground as the car continued to move. Despite her vehement denial earlier, Stade later admitted to the deputy that she “had to do something to control him” said the court documents.

Although Stade was released the next day, her misdemeanor charge of child endangerment sends a clear message that such reckless behavior is intolerable. The incident stands as a stern warning that parents should never resort to such extreme measures to discipline a child. It displays the danger of negligence and highlights the need to exercise caution in such matters.

During the late 1990s and early 2000s, Chilean economists Sergio de Castro and Ernesto Fontaine traveled the world explaining how their neoliberal economic policies helped write what’s often described as one the biggest success stories in South American politics. That story goes as follows. After the start of the Cold War, the US government facilitated […]

It’s complicated.

Signs advertise VAT exemption at Pingo Doce Telheiras supermarket on April 18, 2023 in Lisbon, Portugal. (Horacio Villalobos#Corbis / Corbis via Getty Images)

Consumption taxes are not a major topic in US politics because they are rarely proposed, especially on the federal level. When consumption taxes are brought up, the discussion tends to devolve into a debate about whether they are regressive or not. As with most progressivity or regressivity debates, this one tends to be muddled and confused because we don’t actually use those two words consistently across different policy topics.

In the context of tax policy, the way you determine whether a tax is progressive or regressive is by adding up how much tax each person is being charged and then dividing that amount by their income. If the resulting percentages go up as incomes go up, then that is considered a progressive tax. If the percentages go down as incomes go up, then that is considered a regressive tax. If the percentages are the same across the income distribution, then that is considered a flat tax.

In the context of spending policy, the way you determine whether a spending program is progressive or regressive is by adding up how much money each person gets from the program. You do not divide that amount by income. Instead, you just look directly at the dollar amounts. If those amounts go up as incomes go up, then that is considered a regressive program. If those amounts go down as incomes go up, then that is considered a progressive program. If the amounts are the same across the income distribution, then that is considered a flat benefit.

The fact that the same words have different meanings in different contexts is an unfortunate feature of the way language works, but it is especially unfortunate in this context because “taxes” and “spending” are fungible categories and it really would be better if we could talk about them with a common set of word meanings.

When it comes to consumption taxes, there are two facts that are pertinent to understanding whether they are progressive or regressive:

Richer people consume more than poorer people.
Poorer people spend a larger share of their income on consumption than richer people.

Because richer people consume more than poorer people, taxing consumption results in richer people paying more consumption tax than poorer people pay. But because poorer people spend a larger share of their income on consumption than richer people, taxing consumption results in poorer people paying a higher percentage of their income toward consumption tax than richer people pay.

So if you divide the dollar amounts involved by income, as is typical in tax policy, consumption taxes are regressive. If you do not divide the dollar amounts involved by income, as is typical in spending policy, consumption taxes are progressive. Because a consumption tax is a tax, under common usage, it is correctly described as “regressive.”

But there is actually an exception to the way we use these words in the context of tax policy that is worth dwelling upon a bit. When we are talking about raising taxes, we use “regressive” and “progressive” in the tax policy way already discussed. But when we are talking about cutting taxes, we actually use the words the same way that we use them when talking about spending policies. This is presumably because cutting taxes kind of feels like spending money because, relative to the baseline where we don’t cut taxes, it kind of is.

This came up recently in a Finnish debate about the application of the country’s 24 percent value-added tax (VAT) to electricity. After Russia invaded Ukraine, electricity prices across Europe skyrocketed, including in Finland. This naturally led lawmakers to consider various ways of providing consumers relief from the energy price shock. One such proposal was to temporarily reduce the VAT on electricity from 24 percent to 10 percent.

Is reducing the VAT on electricity by 14 percentage points progressive or regressive? As always, the question turns on whether you divide the tax savings by each person’s income or not.

If you look only at electricity consumption, you find that rich households in Finland consume five times as much electricity as poor households do. But, if you divide that electricity consumption by income, you find that poor people spend about four times as much on electricity as rich households do as a share of their respective incomes.

If we apply the spending-policy meanings of the words, we would say that cutting the VAT on electricity is very regressive: it gives five euros to the rich for every one euro it gives to the poor. But if we apply the tax-policy meanings of the words, we would say that it is very progressive: the tax savings for the poor are four times what they are for the rich after dividing by income.

Because this is a tax cut and not a tax increase, and is specifically a tax cut aimed at achieving a spending-program type goal (providing electricity subsidies), it appears to have been analyzed by at least some Finnish commentators using the spending-policy word meanings and was thus criticized as horribly regressive.

When the words are used this way, and they often are, you can wind up in a somewhat hilarious linguistic quagmire where it is “regressive” to implement a consumption tax and “regressive” to repeal it. Thus, in Finland, the 24 percent VAT is “regressive” because the poor spend more of their income on consumption than the rich. But also repealing the 24 percent VAT is “regressive” because the rich receive far more euros from such a repeal than the poor do.

If we put the imprecision of language aside — and stop putting so much weight on what label can be applied to what policy — the actual distributive stakes of a consumption tax are fairly straightforward. Because consumption taxes take more dollars from the rich than the poor, they are generally good, especially since the public programs they help finance tend to provide at least as much benefit to the poor as the rich. But insofar as other kinds of taxes — like income and wealth taxes — take even more dollars from the rich than the poor, those taxes are better than consumption taxes, holding all else equal.

Of course, ultimately, it is not really possible to analyze one piece of an overall distributive system and decide whether it is itself good or bad. What matters is whether the system as a whole achieves your overall distributive goals. Put differently: distributive justice can only really be coherently evaluated at the level of the overall system, not at the level of each particular institution in that system.

So try not to get yourself too worked up about each and every fiscal policy measure and whether, and under what meanings, that measure is progressive or regressive. Such debates are equivocal at best, irrelevant at worst.

Thursday brought a somber but expected verdict as Judge Caroline H. Lennon found Alexis Saborit, 44, guilty of First Degree Premeditated Murder by Judge Caroline H. Lennon. Saborit had waived his right to a jury trial in the July 2021 killing of America Thayer, 55, in Minnesota, and the review hearing is now scheduled for June 1. The County Attorney, Ron Hocerav, believes this verdict will lead to a life sentence without the possibility of parole for Saborit.

Eyewitness accounts state that around 2:00 p.m. on the day of the killing, Saborit and Thayer were seen together in her Chrysler 300 at Memorial Park. Approximately 30 minutes later, multiple people saw a man attacking a woman in the same car at the intersection of Spencer Street and Fourth Avenue in Shakopee, roughly a mile from the park. Witnesses reported seeing the man pulling a decapitated body and a severed head out of the vehicle after striking the victim with a hand weight and chopping at the front seat passenger seat with a large knife.

In court records, Judge Lennon stated that the “aggressive and horrible nature of the attack adequately displays the defendant’s intention to kill Thayer” and noted that Saborit and Thayer had a “difficult relationship, marked by fights and verbal assaults as well as mutual threats.” It was clear that Thayer had wanted to end the relationship, and Saborit was aware of that because of knowledge of their bad relationship.

The tragedy of Thayer’s death has severely impacted her friends and colleagues. Her friend of five years, Nicky Kendrick, says Thayer was an incredibly wonderful person who was “always kind, so funny and had great stories to tell.” Her coworkers at MyPillow shared similar sentiments and descriptive, with Jamie Worley saying, “We all went there today, dropped off a rose and a teddy bear at her desk. Everyone was simply in tears as it’s such an emotional time.”

The unfair act of violence that ended America Thayer’s life has left a lasting mark of grief on her loved ones, who will continue to remember her kindness and stories. Meanwhile, Alexis Saborit will now face the consequences of his behavior and will likely serve a lifetime in prison.

Since the beginning of his administration, Eric Adams has publicly demonized homeless people in New York City while cutting social services and public institutions like schools and libraries. These attacks helped pave the way for the killing of Jordan Neely.

Protesters march to demand justice for Jordan Neely on May 6 in New York. (Andrew Lichtenstein / Corbis via Getty Images)

Even during his first months as mayor, Eric Adams was intent on dehumanizing the homeless. On February 17, 2022, the mayor declared that he gave New York Police Department (NYPD) officers a clear mandate to enforce Metropolitan Transit Authority (MTA) rules on the subway against drug use, littering, lying down on seats, and “using the subway for any purpose other than transportation” — measures designed to harass homeless people and force them out of the subway. Shockingly, Adams then said about homeless people: “You can’t put a Band-Aid on a cancerous sore. That’s not how you solve the problem. You must remove the cancer to start the healing process.”

By comparing the homeless to a cancerous tumor, Adams was publicly dehumanizing the homeless — and questioning their right to exist.

Adams’s words that day should be kept in mind when considering the heinous murder of Jordan Neely on May 1 on the F train at the Broadway-Lafayette stop by Daniel Penny, a twenty-four-year-old former marine. That murder is not an isolated incident; it comes in the context of an escalation in the criminalization of the homeless that has been a hallmark of Adams’s tenure. Just in September, when large numbers of migrants in need of humanitarian aid arrived in the city, many of whom were bused here by Republican governors in other states, Adams tried to “reassess” the city’s right-to-shelter law, which guarantees a bed to anyone who needs it. This week, he weakened the law in anticipation of more migrants. Adams has been willing to relocate and devalue the homeless of this city, treating them as an annoyance that he wishes would just go away.

To Adams and the defenders of this brutal killing, Jordan Neely was less than human. Never mind that Neely was agitated because he had no home, had no occupation, and had not eaten in days, a condition that could make anyone nervous. That he was highly emotional and erratic in public — behavior you can witness in any number of the city’s bars — doesn’t mean that he did not ultimately deserve protection and empathy from his fellow citizens and the City of New York.

In New York, homelessness tragically isn’t strange. Seventy thousand people are homeless in the city. Despite the fact that we live in the wealthiest country in history, many people have been conditioned to view ending homelessness as unattainable and hopelessly idealistic. So homelessness has become mundane. No one who lives in New York City is surprised to find themselves engaging with homeless people in public spaces. Money will be asked for; some will be given out of empathy and charity. Some homeless people will get closer to you than you’d like; others you may find charming. This is what happens in a city that has chosen to live with homelessness rather than end it.

On May 3, two days after Neely was left lifeless by a fellow citizen, Mayor Adams issued a statement of ambiguity toward the murder: “We cannot just blanketly say what a passenger should or should not do in a situation like that.” A human being was murdered, and Adams effectively said we can’t know if the murder was justified.

This is what happens in a city that has chosen to live with homelessness rather than end it.

Despite later statements arguing that Penny should not have killed Neely, this quote is troublesome. The initial reaction of New York City’s top executive expressed callous indifference to the murder of a human being. That indifference is reflected in his policymaking.

For all of Mayor Adams’s posturing about how much he loves this city, he is in fact cutting desperately needed social services and public institutions such as libraries and schools while increasing the police budget, at the same time he pops up at the swanky club Zero Bond and mentors shady businessmen. He doesn’t love working-class New York. By cutting social services that could keep people like Jordan Neely safe, Adams is hanging the homeless out for deadly chokeholds.

In the days after Neely’s murder, numerous publications ran articles about who Jordan Neely was. People deserve to know that Neely was a Michael Jackson impersonator who made people smile and laugh while doing the infamous crotch grab and moonwalk, and that he tragically started having mental health issues after his mother was murdered by her partner in 2007.

But that tragic backstory doesn’t justify what happened on that subway car. Neely’s life mattered. He was a human being, like any of us. When he declared that he was ready to die, it was a testament to his dire situation. A fifteen-minute lethal chokehold should not have been his fate. New York’s power brokers have decided that, just because they sleep on our city streets or trains, people like Neely are less than human.

Those who take the subway every day know how the conditions can cause annoyance and discomfort. But if we deserve to be safe, so do the homeless. Neely’s mental health issues exacerbated his dozen or so run-ins with police; his aunt, Carolyn Neely, says that “the system just failed him. He fell through the cracks of the system.” This was someone who needed help, not a death sentence. Just last April, the mayor carried out sweeps of encampments. The message was clear: the homeless were under attack by the city.

Earlier this week, the mayor changed his tune. “One of our own is dead, a black man, black like me, a man named Jordan, a name I gave my son,” Adams said. “One thing we know for sure, Jordan Neely did not deserve to die.” The mayor also said people who struggle with mental illness are “caught up in a cycle of violence, sometimes as the perpetrator, but more often as the victim.”

This statement is way too late. The mayor’s trite swagger, amid his closure of libraries and cuts to public goods like schools and social services, is paving the way for more Jordan Neely’s to become victims, jailed, or, worse, killed like Neely was that afternoon — in a city that claims to love him while viewing him as a cancer.