Destruction in Tel Aviv after retaliatory Iranian strikes
Sunday 22 June 2025 07:15, UK
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Daily Mail
9 hours ago
- Daily Mail
Ark of the Covenant mystery blown wide open as 'biblical relic' is discovered
Archaeologists have uncovered ruins in Israel they believe once housed the Ark of the Covenant, a sacred, gold-covered chest described in the Bible. According to scripture, Moses placed the Ten Commandments inside the Ark, which was kept in the Tabernacle, a portable sanctuary built shortly after the Israelites' Exodus from Egypt, traditionally dated by some scholars to around 1445 BC. While the fate of the Ark remains a mystery, it vanishes from the biblical record before the Babylonian sack of Jerusalem in 586 BC. Now, a team working at the ancient biblical site of Shiloh has unearthed a stone structure that appears to match the dimensions and orientation of the Tabernacle described in the Bible. Dr Scott Stripling, director of the Tel Shiloh dig, said: 'We've uncovered a monumental building from the Iron I period that matches the biblical dimensions of the Tabernacle. The structure is oriented east-west and divided in a 2:1 ratio, just as described in scripture.' Adding to the discovery, excavators have found over 100,000 animal bones, mostly from sheep, goats, and cattle, and predominantly from the right side of the animals, aligning with Leviticus 7, which states that the right side was reserved for priestly offerings. 'This isn't a coincidence,' Dr Stripling told The Christian Broadcasting Network. 'The evidence of sacrificial rituals here is overwhelming, and it matches the biblical account to a degree that's hard to ignore.' Pottery found among the bones dates back to the same period, reinforcing the site's connection to the Tabernacle era, which the Bible says lasted nearly 400 years before the Temple was built in Jerusalem. Shiloh, located in the hill country of Ephraim, is described in the Bible as Israel's first major religious center. It was here, according to the Bible, that Eli the high priest presided over the Tabernacle during a critical moment in Israel's history. In 1 Samuel 4, the Israelites, locked in war with the Philistines, bring the Ark to the battlefield in hopes of securing divine favor. The plan disastrously backfires when the Philistines capture the Ark, and Eli's sons, Hophni and Phinehas, are killed. When a messenger brings word of the defeat back to Shiloh, he finds Eli, 98 years old and nearly blind, anxiously waiting by the city gate. Upon hearing the Ark has been taken, Eli falls backward from his seat, breaks his neck and dies. Scripture emphasizes the significance of the moment, noting, 'He had judged Israel for forty years.' Dr Stripling now believes his team may have uncovered the very gate where Eli died, CBN reported. According to scripture, Moses placed the Ten Commandments inside the Ark , which was kept in the Tabernacle, a portable sanctuary built shortly after the Israelites' Exodus from Egypt , traditionally dated by some scholars to around 1445 BC The newly uncovered building at the site also features a massive interior wall, dividing the space into two areas. According to Exodus 26, the Tabernacle's inner sanctuary, the Most Holy Place, or Holy of Holies, was separated from the outer room by a veil. This inner room housed the Ark of the Covenant, and was believed to be the earthly dwelling place of God's presence. Leviticus 16:2 warns of the sanctity of the space, stating:'The Lord said to Moses, 'Tell Aaron your brother not to come at any time into the Holy Place inside the veil, before the mercy seat that is on the ark, so that he may not die.' This aligns with later references in 2 Samuel 6, which describe the Ark as so holy that touching it, or even looking inside, could result in death. Mishandling the Ark was seen as a direct offense to God's presence.
The Guardian
a day ago
- The Guardian
‘A cipher for crazy self-projection': why are architects so obsessed with Solomon's Temple?
No legendary building has ever inspired more conjecture about what it might have looked like than Solomon's Temple in Jerusalem. It is said to have been built in c.950BC, on the mound where God created Adam, and was destroyed 400 years later by marauding Babylonians. But, beyond some inconsistent descriptions in the Bible written centuries after the temple was razed, there is no archaeological evidence that this palatial edifice ever existed. And yet, for more than two millennia, generations of architects, archaeologists and ideologues have bickered over the building's appearance. They have debated its exact height and width, speculated on the design of its columns, and battled over the precise nature of its porch. The mythic building, also known as the First Temple, has inspired everything from a Renaissance royal palace in Spain to a recent megachurch in Brazil, to the interiors of masonic lodges around the world – all built on a fantasy. 'It really draws out the batshit crazy,' says Argentinian artist Pablo Bronstein, standing in front of his monumental new drawings of what Solomon's Temple, and its contents, might have looked like. 'It has been used as a cipher for pretty much every crazy projection of power and self-delusion for 2,500 years. I find it totally fascinating – particularly as the whole thing is entirely fabricated.' Bronstein's work has long played with the provocative power of architectural image-making. He has poked fun at Britain's pseudo-Georgian housing and given us orgiastic depictions of hell, which he imagined as a showcase city strewn with garish monuments worthy of the most tasteless dictator. But the subject matter, location and (incidental) timing of his latest mischievous outing couldn't be more charged. Bronstein's speculative drawings of the holiest site in Judaism are now on display in Waddesdon Manor, an inflated French chateau built in Buckinghamshire in the 1890s as the weekend party pad of the Rothschilds – an immensely wealthy Jewish banking family who were instrumental in the creation of Israel. Baron Edmond de Rothschild – the French cousin of Baron Ferdinand, who built Waddesdon – financed a number of early settlements in Palestine and founded the Palestine Jewish Colonisation Association in 1924, run by his son James, who inherited the manor. When the Balfour Declaration was written in 1917, declaring the British government's support for a national home for the Jewish people in Palestine, it was addressed to Ferdinand's nephew, Walter Rothschild, an eccentric zoologist who liked to pose astride giant tortoises, ride a carriage drawn by zebras andwho was also a prominent Zionist leader. A permanent exhibition at Waddesdon, in a room preceding Bronstein's show, celebrates the Rothschilds' connection with Israel. It recounts the family's funding of the construction of the Knesset building, seat of the Israeli parliament, the Supreme Court building and, most recently, the National Library, designed by Swiss architects Herzog & de Meuron in the shape of a swooping stone ski jump. Architectural models of these trophy buildings gleam in Perspex vitrines, like the priceless antique treasures displayed elsewhere around the house. To this lavish display of patronage in the Holy Land, Bronstein's florid drawings add an imaginary additional commission. In a brazen act of architectural cosplay, the artist has inserted himself into the minds of two contestants for a fictitious version of the Prix de Rome, a prominent prize for students of architecture in 19th-century Paris, as they compete to recreate Solomon's Temple in their own image. 'I became fascinated by the construction of Jewish identity in the 19th century,' says Bronstein, who was born in Argentina, grew up in London, and describes himself as a 'diehard atheist Jew'. Several years in the making, his new work was commissioned alongside a wider research project about Jewish country houses, and it seems to have triggered a deep curiosity and scepticism in the artist about his own cultural heritage. 'As nationalisms develop in the 19th century, particularly in Germany, Judaism begins to develop its idea of a body of people that are somehow genetically connected to the ancient Middle East,' he says. 'They start to see Jerusalem not as an abstract idea, the way that Muslims look at Mecca, but as a reconstructible place of belonging, tied to a kind of orientalist architectural fantasy.' Bronstein's mesmerising drawings depict what, if taken to extremes, this fantasy might have looked like. Painstakingly drawn in pen and ink, and beautifully coloured with layers of acrylic wash (with the help of two recent architecture graduate assistants), the images are magnificently grandiose projections of that exoticised 19th-century longing. They depict two rival designs, in precisely detailed elevations, cross-sections and facade studies, for reconstructing the temple. Both are wild mashups of architectural motifs, sampling from the richly embellished catalogue of Asian antiquity, medieval and gothic revival, baroque and art deco with promiscuous relish. On one wall is a version of the temple that Bronstein describes as 'vaudeville beaux arts', its interior glowing with the gilded razzle-dazzle of a New Orleans casino. Marvel at the spiralling Solomonic columns at the entrance, sampled from Bernini's baldacchino at St Peter's in Rome, and the illusionistic domes that hover above the Ark, influenced by Alessandro Antonelli's Mole Antonelliana in Turin, which was originally conceived as a synagogue. 'It's the temple as a sort of gin palace,' says Bronstein – an architecturally virtuosic one, nonetheless. Sign up to Art Weekly Your weekly art world round-up, sketching out all the biggest stories, scandals and exhibitions after newsletter promotion On the opposite wall is a more restrained version of the temple, with interior wooden panelling that recalls the kind of synagogue you might find in Golders Green, north London – not far from where Bronstein grew up in Neasden. There are also notes of Henri Labrouste's Bibliothèque de Saint Geneviève in Paris, as well as dazzling blue lapis lazuli walls, representing the celestial realm in a medieval manner, along the lines of Eugène Viollet-le-Duc, the 'arch-reconstructor of historic architecture', a caption tells us. It's a heady cocktail, made no less so by the fruity facade, which depicts the heads of Moses, David and Solomon as blue-bearded gargoyles above the entrance, and a relief of God, flanked by sphinxes. 'There's a good amount of scholarship about what a temple would have actually looked like if it was built in the 10th century BC,' says Bronstein. 'And it's got nothing to do with monotheism.' He thinks it's much more likely that, had the temple been built at the time the Bible alleges, it is highly likely that it would have been a pantheistic riot, full of different representations of the divine – as is the case with a comparable structure that has survived in Ain Dara in Syria, built in 1300BC, 'which is just full of goblins, basically.' If all this wasn't enough, Bronstein has also drawn the Ark of the Covenant – depicted as a gilded medieval reliquary casket, topped with a cushion, where God is said to have rested his feet – and the temple's menorah, imagined as a twirly rococo candelabrum, whose branches emerge from a chinoiserie-style grotto. Drawings from the Waddesdon archive in a following room help to set the project in context, and show that Bronstein's flamboyant fantasies aren't so far from what was being designed by the 19th-century architects from whom he took inspiration. Alarmingly, nor are they too far off what some people are still hoping to see built in Jerusalem. The Third Temple movement continues to campaign to rebuild the original temple on Temple Mount, one of the most contested sites on the planet – known as the Haram al-Sharif in the Muslim world, site of the Dome of the Rock and the Al-Aqsa mosque, two of the holiest sites in Islam. We can only hope the Third Temple fanatics don't misconstrue Bronstein's drawings as a blueprint. He began these drawings long before war erupted in the region after Hamas's attack on 7 October 2023. Has Israel's merciless bombardment of Gaza altered his position? 'The work hasn't changed,' he says. 'But the war has changed my relationship to Judaism. It made me really question the fact that we all get instinctively bullied into the idea that we have a genetic, cosmic link to the Holy Land. It's genuinely a 19th-century construct and it's total rubbish.' Pablo Bronstein: The Temple of Solomon and Its Contents is at Waddeston Manor, Buckinghamshire, until 2 November
The Guardian
a day ago
- The Guardian
The mathematics of starvation: how Israel caused a famine in Gaza
The mathematics of famine are simple in Gaza. Palestinians cannot leave, war has ended farming and Israel has banned fishing, so practically every calorie its population eats must be brought in from outside. Israel knows how much food is needed. It has been calibrating hunger in Gaza for decades, initially calculating shipments to exert pressure while avoiding starvation. 'The idea is to put the Palestinians on a diet, but not to make them die of hunger,' a senior adviser to the then prime minister, Ehud Olmert, said in 2006. An Israeli court ordered the release of documents showing the details of those macabre sums two years later. Cogat, the Israeli agency that still controls aid shipments to Gaza, calculated then that Palestinians needed an average minimum 2,279 calories per person per day, which could be provided through 1.836kg of food. Today, humanitarian organisations are asking for an even smaller minimum ration: 62,000 metric tonnes of dry and canned food to meet basic needs for 2.1 million people each month, or around 1kg of food per person per day. As Gaza has slid into famine this summer, Israeli officials have variously denied the existence of mass starvation, claimed without evidence that Hamas steals and hoards aid, or blamed hunger on UN distribution failures, sharing pictures of aid pallets awaiting collection inside the border. They pointed to deadly and chaotic food distributions by the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, a US and Israeli-backed logistics startup, as proof that Palestinians had access to food. Yet data compiled and published by Israel's own government makes clear that it has been starving Gaza. Between March and June, Israel allowed just 56,000 tonnes of food to enter the territory, Cogat records show, less than a quarter of Gaza's minimum needs for that period. Even if every bag of UN flour had been collected and handed out, and the GHF had developed safe systems for equitable distribution, starvation was inevitable. Palestinians did not have enough to eat. A 'worst-case scenario' famine is now unfolding in Gaza, UN-backed food security experts said this week. Food deliveries are 'at a scale far below what is needed', amid 'drastic restrictions on the entry of supplies', the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) said in a report citing Israeli figures on aid. The Famine Review Committee, an independent group of experts that scrutinises IPC alerts, said food shipments 'have been highly inadequate', and singled out the GHF. 'Our analysis of the food packages supplied by the GHF shows that their distribution plan would lead to mass starvation, even if it was able to function without the appalling levels of violence that have been reported,' the FRC said. In March and April Gaza was under total siege, with no food entering. In mid-May Netanyahu said shipments would restart because of international pressure over a 'starvation crisis'. Just a few weeks of extra aid shipments during the ceasefire in January and February this year provided enough calories to bring Gaza back from the brink of famine, UN data shows. However, in May only a trickle of food returned, in quantities that served only to slow Gaza's descent into starvation, not stop it. Two months on, the scale of suffering has now spurred another round of international outrage, including demands from Donald Trump to get 'every ounce of food' to starving children. In response Netanyahu has promised only 'minimal' extra aid. The number of food trucks entering the territory has risen, but is still well below the minimum needed to feed Palestinians there, much less reverse a famine. Airdrops, used intermittently throughout the war, have also restarted, with France, Germany, the UK, Egypt, Jordan and the UAE among the countries announcing flights even though parachuting in food is expensive, inefficient and occasionally deadly. Last year at least 12 people drowned trying to recover food that landed in the sea, and at least five were killed when pallets fell on them. In the first 21 months of war, 104 flights supplied the equivalent of just four days of food for Gaza, Israeli data shows, for a cost running to tens of millions of dollars. Spent on trucks, the same budget would deliver much more food, but the price of these flights is not only a monetary one. They allow Israel and its allies to frame starvation as a catastrophe caused by logistics, not a crisis created by state policy. Airdrops would usually be ordered as a last resort to feed people in emergency situations where hostile armed forces or geography make road deliveries impossible. In Gaza the only obstacles to driving aid across the border are restrictions imposed by Israel, an ally of many western nations including Britain, and armed with British and US weapons. Two Israeli-based rights groups this week declared that Israel was committing genocide in Gaza, with reports citing evidence including the weaponisation of hunger. B'tselem described an 'official and openly declared policy' of mass starvation. Israel's government knows how much food Gaza's people need to survive, and how much food goes into the territory, and in the past used that data to calculate how much food was needed to avoid starvation. The vast gap between the calories Gaza needs, and the food that has entered since March makes clear that Israeli officials are doing different maths today. They cannot pass responsibility for this human-made famine to anyone else, and nor can their allies.
