There’s a common denominator among the five specific events that happened on this date.

By Pesach Benson, World Israel News

The 17th day of the Hebrew month of Tammuz is a sad day of fasting because of five specific events that happened on this date.

1. Moses broke the original tablets given to him by God after seeing the Jewish people worshipping the Golden Calf at the foot of Mt. Sinai. The nation wasn’t worthy of having tablets carved by the finger of God.

2. King Menashe placed an idol in the Temple. Although Scripture describes the tribes of Israel being enticed by idolatry for centuries, nobody had ever dared to place an idol in the Temple itself.

3. During the Babylonian siege of Jerusalem, the daily sacrificial service was interrupted. From the time of the very first daily communal sacrifices offered in the Tabernacle in the wilderness, the sacrificial order had never been disrupted.

4. It was on the 17th of Tammuz that a Torah scroll was burned for the first time. It’s unclear if the man — identified as Apostomos — was Greek or Roman. Regardless, it marked the end of a certain awe that the nations of the world had for the Torah and its scholars.

5. On this date, both the Babylonians and Romans besieging Jerusalem made the first breaches in the city’s walls. Although the First and Second Temples would be destroyed three weeks later, the enemies succeeded in taking the fight into Jerusalem.

The Jewish people lost a certain closeness with God, sullied the Temple and set in motion its destruction, and lost its exalted stature among the nations of the world.

On this date, Jews who are healthy enough to do so fast during the daylight hours, and extra penitential prayers are part of the prayer service.

There is a direct line between the events of the 17th of Tammuz and the 9th of Av, which is why the three weeks are known in Hebrew as “Bein HaMetzarim” (literally, narrow or dire straits).

Reflecting on this difficult time, rejoicing is curtailed. Starting from the 17th of Tammuz, Jews refrain from listening to music, holding weddings, wearing new clothes or cutting hair. Later, as the 9th of Av gets closer, other restrictions, such as abstaining from meat and wine or bathing for pleasure will begin.

However, on a more optimistic note, Jewish tradition also teaches that “Whoever mourns for Jerusalem will merit seeing its joy.”

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Clay tablet depicting earliest recorded ghost discovered in British Museum vault.

By David Hellerman, World Israel News

It is the oldest depiction of a ghost, and it appears on a clay tablet with instructions on how to get rid of unwanted spooks. And it was sitting in a vault in the British Museum since sometime in the 19th century.

The 3,500 year-old tablet caught the eye of Dr. Irving Finkel, the curator of the museum’s Middle Eastern department. Finkel, who is Jewish, is an international authority on cuneiform, the ancient writing system of the Middle East.

He told The Observer the tablet was an “absolutely spectacular object from antiquity” that had been overlooked until now, likely because it was incorrectly deciphered.

“You’d probably never give it a second thought because the area where the drawings are looks like it’s got no writing,” he Irving told The Observer. “But when you examine it and hold it under a lamp, those figures leap out at you across time in the most startling way. It is a Guinness Book of Records object because how could anybody have a drawing of a ghost which was older?”

About half the tablet is missing, but Irving was clear enough about the surviving half’s features.

“It’s obviously a male ghost and he’s miserable. You can imagine a tall, thin, bearded ghost hanging about the house did get on people’s nerves. The final analysis was that what this ghost needed was a lover,” he said.

“You can’t help but imagine what happened before. ‘Oh God, Uncle Henry’s back.’ Maybe Uncle Henry’s lost three wives. Something that everybody knew was that the way to get rid of the old bugger was to marry him off. It’s not fanciful to read this into it. It’s a kind of explicit message. There’s very high-quality writing there and immaculate draughtsmanship.

“That somebody thinks they can get rid of a ghost by giving them a bedfellow is quite comic.”

The back of the tablet, Finkel said, provided directions for dealing with the ghost. Male and female figurines were prepared, dressed and equipped to specifications. They were then arranged in a prescribed manner along with beer and juniper incense and then the person would make a declaration to Shamash, the Babylonian god of both the sun and the underworld.

Finkel told The Observer the tablet was presumably part of a library belonging to a temple or exorcist.

The 70-year-old Finkel made some waves in 2014 when he published The Ark Before Noah. The book argued that a cuneiform tablet describing the Biblical flood in remarkable detail from a Babylonian point of view predated the Bible.

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Dr. Daniel Mansfield has revealed that an ancient clay tablet could be the world’s oldest and most complete example of applied geometry.

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“The current find is one of the oldest and perhaps the most prominent in its historical significance,” say the American and Israeli archaeologists.  

By World Israel News Staff  

“Researchers digging at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte’s ongoing archaeological excavation on Mount Zion in Jerusalem have announced a second significant discovery from the 2019 season – clear evidence of the Babylonian conquest of the city from 587/586 B.C.E,” according to a statement issued through EurekAlert!, an online science news service.

“The discovery is of a deposit including layers of ash, arrowheads dating from the period, as well as Iron Age potsherds, lamps and a significant piece of period jewelry – a gold and silver tassel or earring,” says the statement.

Earring or tassel ornament made of gold and silver from the destruction layer of 587/586 B.C.E. (Mt Zion Archaeological Expedition/Rafi Lewis)

The Mount Zion Archaeological Project is a joint U.S.-Israeli effort, co-directed by UNC Charlotte professor of history Shimon Gibson, Rafi Lewis, a senior lecturer at Ashkelon Academic College and a fellow of Haifa University, and James Tabor, UNC Charlotte professor of religious studies, says the project’s statement.

It has been in operation for over a decade and has made “numerous significant finds relating to the ancient city’s many historical periods, including the announcement made in July 2019 on evidence concerning the sack of the city during the First Crusade,” say the excavators.

“The current find is one of the oldest and perhaps the most prominent in its historical significance, as the Babylonian conquest of Jerusalem is a major moment in Jewish history,” says the statement, which was released on Tisha B’Av, the saddest day on the Jewish calendar marking the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem twice, the first time by the Babylonians in 586 B.C.E.

“The team believes that the newly found deposit can be dated to the specific event of the conquest because of the unique mix of artifacts and materials found – pottery and lamps, side-by-side with evidence of the Babylonian siege represented by burnt wood and ashes, and a number of Scythian-type bronze and iron arrowheads which are typical of that period,” the archaeologists said in the statement.

A building that is apparently part of the layer remains unexcavated.

“One might ask why haven’t we excavated the whole building?” Gibson said. “The reason is that we are slowly taking the site down, level by level, period by period, and at the end of this last digging season two meters of domestic structures from later Byzantine and Roman periods have still to be dug above the Iron Age level below. We plan to get down to it in the 2020 season,” he says.

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