Ruins Found in ... Parking Lot?

I'd like to give a hat tip to The Muqata for bringing this story about a newly found Roman mansion that was destroyed during an earthquake in the 4th century.

A "magnificent" two-story Roman mansion of more than 1,000 square meters has been discovered by archeologists in the City of David Archeological Park outside the capital's Old City, the Antiquities Authority announced on Monday.

Previously, archeologist believed 3rd century Roman ruins extended only to the edge of the Ottoman Old City walls. The discovery of the mansion within the Givati parking lot, outside the walls and adjacent to the City of David, however, suggests Roman construction may have stretched to the bottom of the Silwan Valley, Dr. Doron Ben-Ami, the excavation's director, told The Jerusalem Post on Monday.

"This discovery was very surprising," Ben-Ami said. "We didn't expect to find any Roman building remains within the City of David. We were astonished at how huge the structure is. So far we uncovered 1,000 square meters and the structure still extends beyond the limits of the excavation area."

The find has already revolutionized historians' understanding of Roman settlement in Jerusalem, he said.

For more, read the whole megillah.

A Bit of the Old, A Bit of the New!

During lunch yesterday I was graced by the presence of the New York Times at my table, so I picked it up and browsed (something I haven't done since I worked at a newspaper), and was lucky enough to happen upon a pretty exciting and possibly groundbreakingly awesome news story: "Find of Ancient City Could Alter Notions of Biblical David." The find?

"Overlooking the verdant Valley of Elah, where the Bible says David toppled Goliath, archeologists are unearthing a 3,000-year-old fortified city ..."

The site is five acres, and only a tiny portion of the area has been unearthed, meaning that there's still boatloads of research and digging to do. So far, there are some olive pits that have been found that have been carbon dated to between 1050 and 970 BCE -- a very controversial period in history during the supposed reign of David. Likewise, the writing on pottery appears in "so-called proto-Canaanite script and appears to be a letter or document in Hebrew." But we can't get too excited, I suppose. There's still a lot of the area that needs to be uncovered, and I'm tempted to book a ticket to go hop on that dig. The fascinating things about these digs is that they're used to sort of "validate" the "historical" evidence that we see in the Hebrew Bible. Can you imagine the potential for history-making finds in this dig?

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On a completely and entirely unrelated note, I just wanted to mention that my favorite new artist -- Shoshannah Brombacher -- has a show opening at The Tea Lounge of her work, and it will run through the month of November. Her work has appeared on A Simple Jew 's blog, Chabad.org, and so many other places on the web. She has a flavor of Chagall, with a very ethereal, dreamy quality to her paintings ranging from music to the great Chassidic masters to modern Jewish celebrations. Can you guess what this painting is alluding to? I'll give you a hint: It's a classic parable involving Hillel and Shammai!

It is with that that I wish all a Shabbat Shalom -- may you have rest, peace, and good times with Torah, friends, family and G-d!