As I noted previously, today (Thursday, January 22, 2026) the annual Young Scholars’ Conference of the Martin (Szusz) Department of Land of Israel Studies and Archaeology  at BIU is being held.

A nice crowd gathered for the meeting, and Noam Bar-David, from the Safi lab kicked off the day, with a great paper on a portion of his PhD (on which I serve as a co-advisor), on a computational analysis of Greek inscriptions from the Eastern Roman Empire, with particular focus on the inscriptions from Caesarea.

Here are some pictures:

On Thursday, Feb. 22, 2026, the 9th annual Young Scholars’ Conference of the Martin (Szusz) Department of Land of Israel Studies and Archaeology at BIU will take place. In the meeting, advanced students from the department will present the results of their research. In addition, at the end of the day, prizes and stipends will be awarded to students who have excelled in their studies!

You are all invited to hear some very interesting papers!

In mid-February (16-18.2.2026), I’ll be participating in the fascinating conference “Maritime Connections: Jews Across the Indian Ocean,” which will be held at O.P. Jindal Global University, Delhi NCR, India.

This exceptionally interesting conference, with participants from Israel, India and many other countries, will deal with a broad range of issues relating to connections between Jews and the Land of Israel on the one hand, and the Indian subcontinent on the other, from antiquity to modern times.

I’ll be presenting a paper “The Early ‘Maritime Silk Road’: Bronze, Iron Age, and Classical Period Connectivity between the Land of Israel, the Indian Subcontinent and Beyond,” in which I’ll discuss evidence for long-range connectivity between the Land of Israel and the Levant, with the Indian Subconinent and other regions in SE Asia.

I’m very much looking forward to hearing the other papers and participating in what appears will be some very interesting discussions.

Today, Dr. Shira Faigenbaum-Golovin, who just joined the Math Department at BIU, gave a great workshop in the Safi lab, on her research that combines math and archaeology.

Among other things, Shira told us about her research (along with colleagues) on handwriting analyses of Iron Age ostraca and dating of biblical texts (see, e.g., here and here), and other very interesting topics.

Now that Shira is at BIU, I hope we will be able to develop various projects combining mathematical and archaeological perspectives!

Cool!

Just received notice that the Annual Assyriological conference which I posted about yesterday, and was supposed to be held next Thursday at TAU, has been put off to a future date, which will be announced at a later time.

So, don’t go to TAU next week for the conference!

Just a reminder (as noted previusly) on the conference next week “Temple Life in the Persian Empire” that will be held at Bar-Ilan University on January 26-29, 2026.

Should be very interesting (and I’m giving a paper as well…)

See the schedule below:

The 27th Annual Conference of the Israeli Society for Assyriology and Ancient Near Eastern Studies will be held at TAU on Jan. 29th, 2026.

The topic of the meeting will be: “Slaves, Professionals, and Social Status in the Ancient Near East”

Check out the schedule below – should be very interesting!

From Samaria, we drove in the (armoured) bus to the Mt. Ebal site. This very interesting, but highly controversial, site, is an important early Iron Age site, mostly probably with some cultic function (but definitely not “Joshua’s Altar”!

Last time I visited the sitter was in the late 80′, when Adam Zertal was still conducting excavations, along with the late Prof. Benjamin Mazar, and my PhD advisor, Prof. Amihai Mazar.

Here are some pictures from the visit, and a clip of me shouting “ארור, ארור, ארור”

Today we went out for a field trip with the participants of the “Samaria and Jerusalem” conference.

The first stop was at the site of Samaria/Sebastia, capital of the Israelite Kingdom.

Last time I visited the site was in the early it’s, so it was super interesting and exciting to be back at the site.

Here are some pictures that I took on site:

Interested in an intense academic summer course on Jewish civilization from antiquity to modern times?

Do you have students who would benefit from a hands on course on Jewish Civilization?

If so, applications are open for an intense, two week credited course at Bar-Ilan University (May 31 – June 11, 2026).

The course, “Jewish Civilization: From Then to Now”, will include classes and field trips relating to a brand range of historical and cultural facets of Jewish Civilization over the ages.

Places are limited!

See details and links below!