Free Republic

dated Mar 29, 2015 BOSTON – The FBI has positively identified the two robbers who in 1990 committed the largest art heist in history, stealing over $500 million worth of masterpieces from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum here. One of them is a local ex-con who was free only because his lawyer, now Secretary of State John Kerry, was able to get his first-degree murder conviction overturned in 1982. “We got justice,” Kerry told a reporter in 2009 of his work for the notorious hoodlum, “and I’ll go to my grave proud that we did.” Multiple law-enforcement sources here have...

Video at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F1pogU_5TYYSTORY: Israel is saving its main freshwater reservoir from the effects of climate change. The Sea of Galilee was being lost to droughts. So Israel built a chain of desalination plants along its Meditteranean coast. They turn seawater into freshwater, to refill the lake when water levels get low. “With this environment of climate changes, you don’t know what to expect next year and the year afterward. We are standing now in the late January and with very little rainfalls during this winter in Israel, arid winter basically with no rainfall. And we are no longer depending on...

Researchers discovered in their digging stone structures said to be made from basalt, plastered walls, water cisterns, and magnificent colorful ceramics and mosaic floors.The discovery will help to understand the area where the Caliph's palace of Khirbat al-Minya was said to be built on the Sea of Galilee.Moreover, the researchers performed hands-on digging and geomagnetic surface surveys. The geomagnetic scans assisted the excavation team in digging the exact spots. According to the study, the outcome of the excavation was the accurate result they hoped.Professor Hans-Peter Kuhnen said that the excavation team hit the jackpot, unveiling the recent insights into the...

Archaeologists in Israel have unearthed the 2,100-year-old remains of a farmstead whose owners likely abandoned it in a hurry, possibly to avoid an impending military invasion...The excavators discovered ancient, still-intact storage jars at the site, as well as weights for weaving looms on a shelf, suggesting that whoever lived there left them behind when they quickly departed...The archaeologists don’t know who lived there, but it’s possible they were subjects of the Seleucid Empire who left to escape an invasion of the area by the forces of the Hasmonean Kingdom — an independent Jewish kingdom based in Jerusalem to the south."We...

The Israeli site, known as Ohalo II, was occupied at the end of the last Ice Age ("Last Glacial Maximum"), between 23,500 and 22,500 years ago. Ohalo II is known for the excellent preservation of its brush huts and botanical remains. The study, led by HU doctoral student Tikvah Steiner, under the supervision of HU Professor Rivka Rabinovich and University of Haifa archaeologist Prof. Dani Nadel who excavated the site, examined the diet and extensive use of animal parts to determine the welfare and lifestyle of these ancient inhabitants.During the Last Glacial Maximum, ice sheets covered much of North America,...

Inland lake where Christians believe Jesus walked on water has reached its lowest level in a century The shrinking Sea of Galilee, the inland lake where Christians believe Jesus walked on water, is to be topped up with desalinated seawater. A plan given Israeli cabinet approval will pump 100 million cubic metres of water annually by 2022 into the lake in the Galilee region, said Yechezkel Lifshitz, from the country’s energy and water ministry. In 2017 Israel’s water authority said the sea, hit by years of drought, had reached its lowest level in a century. Situated 200 metres (656ft) below...

Israeli archaeologists discovered a 1,500-year-old slab of marble with Hebrew inscriptions (pictured) by Kursi near the Sea of Galilee in Israel’s north, reaffirming a Jewish presence at what Christians believe to be the location of Jesus’ “Miracle of the Swine.”

BEIT SHEMESH, Israel — The carved stone block is about the size of an occasional table. It has held its secrets for two millenniums. Whoever engraved its enigmatic symbols was apparently depicting the ancient Jewish temples. But what makes the stone such a rare find in biblical archaeology, according to scholars, is that when it was carved, the Second Temple still stood in Jerusalem for the carver to see. The stone is a kind of ancient snapshot. And it is upending some long-held scholarly assumptions about ancient synagogues and their relationship with the Temple, a center of Jewish pilgrimage and...

More than 3,200 years ago, life was abuzz in and around what is now this modern-day Israeli metropolis on the shimmering Mediterranean shore. To the north lay the mighty Hittite empire; to the south, Egypt was thriving under the reign of the great Pharaoh Ramses II. Cyprus was a copper emporium. Greece basked in the opulence of its elite Mycenaean culture, and Ugarit was a bustling port city on the Syrian coast. In the land of Canaan, city states like Hazor and Megiddo flourished under Egyptian hegemony. Vibrant trade along the coast of the eastern Mediterranean connected it all. Yet...

Over the last several seasons of excavation in a fifth-century C.E. synagogue in the Lower Galilee, archaeologists have uncovered stunning mosaics depicting two scenes from the Samson cycle, human and animal figures, a Hebrew dedicatory inscription and a meeting between what may be Alexander the Great and a Jewish high priest. Led by Jodi Magness, the Kenan Distinguished Professor for Teaching Excellence in Early Judaism at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the excavation at the ancient Jewish village in Huqoq, Israel, has continued to yield exciting finds that fascinate scholars and laypersons alike. During the 2015 field...

(CNN) -- Archaeologists are reveling in the discovery of an ancient synagogue in northern Israel, a "monumental" structure with a mosaic floor depicting the biblical figure of Samson and a Hebrew inscription. The synagogue -- dating to the fourth and fifth centuries in both the Talmudic and late Roman periods -- is in Huqoq, an ancient Jewish village in the country's Galilee region, the Israeli Antiquities Authority said. Jodi Magness, a professor of early Judaism in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, said the building was found in a recent excavation. She...

Israeli archaeologists have uncovered dramatic evidence of what they believe are the earliest known attempts at agriculture, 11,000 years before the generally recognised advent of organised cultivation. The study examined more than 150,000 examples of plant remains recovered from an unusually well preserved hunter-gatherer settlement on the shores of the Sea of Galilee in northern Israel. Previously, scientists had believed that organised agriculture in the Middle East, including animal husbandry and crop cultivation, had begun in the late Holocene period – around 12,000 BC – and later spread west through Europe.

In a place called Magdala, along the sea of Galilee, something amazing has been going on for the past nine years.  The story begins in 2004 when Rev. Juan M. Solana, director of the Pontifical Institute Notre Dame of Jerusalem Center, a guest house for Christian pilgrims, was inspired to build a retreat center in the Galilee region where much of Jesus’ ministry took place.   Four plots of land were acquired on the northwest shore of the Sea of Galilee near the small Israeli town of Migdal and the destroyed Arab village of Al-Majdal—both named for the ancient town...

A structure once believed to form part of an ancient town is identified as a 5,000 year old monument believed to have been used to honour the Mesopotamian moon god 'Sin' A stone monument in the shape of a crescent moon found in northern Israel is more than 5,000 years old, archaeologists have said. The structure, known as Rujum en-Nabi Shua'ayb or Jethro Cairn, is located near the Sea of Galilee and predates the construction of Stonehenge, the Great Pyramid in Egypt, as well as the writing of the Bible. It was initially discovered in the early part of the...

The megalithic complex of Rogem Hiri (Rujm al-Hiri in Arabic, meaning stone heap of the wild cat) is located in the central Golan, some 16 km. east of the Sea of Galilee, on a desolate plateau of basalt boulders. Since its discovery in a survey of the Golan in the late 1960s, this mysterious site has aroused the curiosity of archeologists. Between 1988 and 1991, archeological excavations and research were conducted in order to establish facts and determine the time of its construction and its function. Rogem Hiri is a monumental construction of local basalt fieldstones of various sizes. It...

A town dating back more than 2,000 years has been discovered on the northwest coast of the Sea of Galilee, in Israel's Ginosar valley. The ancient town may be Dalmanutha (also spelled Dalmanoutha), described in the Gospel of Mark as the place Jesus sailed to after miraculously feeding 4,000 people by multiplying a few fish and loaves of bread, said Ken Dark, of the University of Reading in the U.K., whose team discovered the town during a field survey.

This circular structure, detected in a sonar survey of the Sea of Galilee, has archeologists baffled. The cone-shaped structure sits on the seafloor just south of the old city of Tiberias and was first discovered in the summer of 2003.

The massive circular structure appears to be an archaeologist's dream: a recently discovered antiquity that could reveal secrets of ancient life in the Middle East and is just waiting to be excavated. It's thousands of years old -- a conical, manmade behemoth weighing hundreds of tons, practically begging to be explored. The problem is -- it's at the bottom of the biblical Sea of Galilee. For now, at least, Israeli researchers are left stranded on dry land, wondering what finds lurk below. The monumental structure, made of boulders and stones with a diameter of 230 feet, emerged from a routine...

Rising nearly 32 feet (10 meters) high, it has a diameter of about 230 feet (70 meters). To put that in perspective, the outer stone circle of Stonehenge has a diameter just half that with its tallest stones not reaching that height. It appears to be a giant cairn, rocks piled on top of each other. Structures like this are known from elsewhere in the world and are sometimes used to mark burials. Researchers do not know if the newly discovered structure was used for this purpose. They say it is definitely human-made and probably was built on land, only...

"Scientists probe puzzle at site made famous by Jesus, Peter"Some 2,000 years ago, the Sea of Galilee in Israel became famous as the Bible says Jesus and His apostle Peter walked on top of the water in a spectacular miracle. Now, a mysterious find from beneath the surface is bringing new attention to the ancient body of water. Scientists have discovered a massive, “monumental” structure on the sea’s floor, leaving experts puzzled as to what it actually is and how and when it became located there.The structure is basically a cone-shaped pile of boulders with an estimated weight of 60,000...