Biblical Archaeology Review

See Albert Baumgarten, “Invented Traditions of the Maccabean Era,” in Peter Schäfer, ed., Geschichte—Tradition—Reflexion, Judentum, vol. 1 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1996), pp. 206–207; Yehudah B. Cohn, Tangled up in Text: Tefillin and the Ancient World, no. 351 (Providence, RI: Brown Judaic Studies, 2008), pp. 67–68; Colette Sirat, Les Papyrus en Caractères Hébraïques Trouvés en Egypte (Paris: Editions du Centre national de la recherche scientifique, 1985), p. 29, n.

For the bulk of these, see Nahman Avigad, Corpus of West Semitic Stamp Seals, revised and completed by Benjamin Sass (Jerusalem: Israel Exploration Society, 1997); Nahman Avigad, Michael Heltzer and André Lemaire, West Semitic Seals: Eighth–Sixth Centuries B.C.E. (Haifa: University of Haifa, 2000); Robert Deutsch and André Lemaire, Biblical Period Personal Seals in the Shlomo Moussaeiff Collection (Tel Aviv: Archaeological Center Publications, 2000).

See Guy Bloch et al., “Industrial Apiculture in the Jordan Valley During Biblical Times with Anatolian Honeybees,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 107, no. 125 (2010), pp. 11240–11244.

Lawrence E. Stager, “Chariot Fittings from Philistine Ashkelon,” in Seymour Gitin, J. Edward Wright and J.P. Dessel, eds, Confronting the Past: Archaeological and Historical Essays on Ancient Israel in Honor of William G. Dever (Winona Lake, IN:Eisenbrauns, 2006), pp. 169–176. See also Trude Dothan and Alexandra S. Drenka, “Linchpins Revisited,” in J. David Schloen, ed., Exploring the Longue Durée: Essays in Honor of Lawrence E. Stager (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2009), pp. 97–101.

Gideon Avni, “The Persian Conquest of Jerusalem (614 C.E.)—An Archaeological Assessment,” Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research 357 (2010), pp. 35–48.

Look at Marina Warner’s now-classic, Alone of All Her Sex (Knopf, 1976; Vintage, 1983) for an entire chapter on “The Milk of Paradise.”

Ephrem of Syria, For the Nativity Hymn 3.

Ephrem of Syria, For the Epiphany, Hymn 2.

Ignatius of Antioch, Letter to the Trallians, X.

The Nicene Creed (381 C.E.) to which all Christians adhere, regardless of denomination, includes the words “incarnate by the Holy Ghost of the Virgin Mary, and was made man, he was crucified for us under Pontius Pilate, and suffered, and was buried.”