More in ‘Bible’

As Judith Miller reports in Tablet Magazine, Prime Minister Netanyahu’s speech yesterday at the Herzliya Conference was seen by most as underwhelming, even bizarre: the conference is generally devoted to talk of national security, yet Netanyahu spent most of his speech lecturing about Jewish heritage in Israel; maybe the most substantive initiative he announced was ...

We were once slaves in the land of Egypt, until the Lord with His outstretched hand did His thing. But, while in Egypt, whatever we were doing, we probably weren’t building the pyramids. Mud-brick tombs discovered last week purportedly demonstrate that the builders of the famous pyramids at Giza were paid laborers, probably drawn from ...

• A supporter of a beloved ultra-Orthodox rabbi in Israel, who has been hospitalized for over a month, implored his fellows to “donate” a year of their lives toward the leader’s recovery, having relied on Talmudic interpretations to determine, somehow, “that the idea is in fact possible.” [Haaretz]
• Negotiations between Iran and the International Atomic ...

Conservapedia, the right-wing version of Wikipedia, has launched a project to eliminate what it considers liberal bias in modern versions of the Bible. Part of the problem is translators who throw around words like “comrade” and “labor,” according to Andrew Schlafly, the website’s founder (and son of anti-feminist crusader Phyllis Schlafly), and part of the ...

• The results of an online poll have been tallied, and the National Museum of American Jewish History in Philadelphia has the top 18 American Jews for its “Only in America Gallery”; honorees include Sandy Koufax, Emma Lazarus, and Estee Lauder. [JTA]
• Technology may have marred a once placid holiday in Israel, but pictures show ...

• Christians and Jews alike have found a reason to love the Hebrew Bible—not just as a record of God’s laws, but as a treasure map detailing where to drill for oil in Israel. [Examiner]
• Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen makes an over-simplified, by-the-books argument against the necessity of “hate crime” laws, but ends with ...

Jon Stewart is like a Hebrew prophet, the Reverend Jim Wallis suggests in interviewing the Daily Show star for Sojourners Magazine. Wallis cites Stewart’s combination of humor and truth-telling to make a point (a tactic also used by “Borscht Belt social directors,” Stewart points out), and he likens Stewart’s evisceration of CNBC’s Jim Cramer to ...

Summer is here! How do I know? Because anthropomorphic animals are upon us.
This week, Fox Studios are releasing the third installment in the popular “Ice Age” franchise, this one titled Dawn of the Dinosaurs. So desperate were the besuited dudes at Fox to squeeze a few more sizable piles of cash out of the adventures ...

Kings, which returned to NBC two weeks ago, is a modern re-imagining of the life of David, making it the only show on television to use the Old Testament as source material. Set in the modern city-kingdom of Shiloh, and awash in biblical allusions, Kings is also a political drama relevant to our time, where ...

• A proposed animal-welfare law in Israel would outlaw the import of products made from the fur of dogs, cats, or rabbits. Apparently, this would encompass shtreimels, hats worn by Hasidic Jews on special occasions. Knesset Member Menachem Eliezer Moses calls a ban “inconceivable,” despite the fact that synthetic shtreimels are perfectly kosher. [Arutz Sheva]
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