Israeli archaeologists from the Israel Antiquities Authority recently found a small ceramic stamp dating back to the 6th century B.C. in Acre, north of Israel, during excavations at Horbat Uza prior to the construction of the Acre-Carmiel railroad track by the Israel National Roads company. The tiny “bread stamp” is the first of its kind to be found in a controlled archeological excavation, in which its origin and date of manufacture can be precisely determined. Researchers believe the menorah-emblazoned ceramic seal was used by a 6th-century village baker to certify his bread as kosher and say the find is important because it proves a Jewish community existed in the primarily Christian region at that time.

Dr. Danny Syon, director of the excavation, said the stamp is important because it proves that a Jewish community existed in the settlement of Uza in the Christian- Byzantine period, and that the presence of a Jewish settlement so close to the Akko Christian region constitutes an innovation in archaeological research. Prior excavations at Uza have uncovered other artifacts testifying to Jewish life in the village including candles and water pitchers inscribed with menorah motifs. The archaeologists said that the seal bearing a menorah indicates the seal belonged to Jews, in contrast to Christian bread seals featuring crosses, which were very common in the Byzantine era.

The seal is marked with a seven-branched menorah as used in the Temple in Jerusalem, and the handle features Greek lettering which the researchers believe to be the name of the baker, Launtius. Launtius was a common Jewish name at the time and the researchers said this type of bread stamp carried a dual message because the menorah is a general Jewish symbol used by Jewish bakers, and the private name of the baker also guaranteed the bakery’s kashrut, or kosher status.

The Yissum Research Development Company Ltd., which serves as the technology transfer department of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, announced that it has signed a research collaboration agreement with General Motors. According to the terms of the unique agreement, General Motors will fund various research projects led by Hebrew University researchers, and in return the university will be given the right of first offer for procuring an exclusive license to use any invention or product that results from the research. The first project the team will collaborate on focuses on forecasting future automobile sales. The team eventually hopes to be able to forecast future auto sales including the proportion of people who do not make an auto purchase as well as those who do. The ultimate goal of the project is the ability to forecast actual market potential and fluctuations over time.

Toward that effort, the team of researchers from the Hebrew University will develop mathematical models that will account for sales data, as well as data on people who have decided against buying. The research will provide an in depth analysis on the rate of automobile purchasing as well as on the various factors involved in the decision process. The Hebrew University group has developed a diffusion model that incorporates potential consumers’ decisions to decline in response to negative forces acting upon them. The model has already been tested using data collected from the Internet on the adoption of open-source software, and was found to be able to estimate and predict the total number of decliners in a given market.

Yaacov Michlin, the CEO of Yissum, said “We are proud to collaborate with General Motors, a world leader in vehicle manufacturing. Our researchers combine excellence and creativity and offer a unique outlook on consumer decision making that could have a significant impact on market understanding and sales in many fields and help with long-term company business planning. We’re looking forward to a collaborating with General Motors on a variety of research fields.”

According to a list of the top 500 universities in the world compiled in China and published annually by Jiao Tong University in Shanghai, the Hebrew University in Jerusalem is the 57th best university in the world. Tel Aviv University, Weizmann Institute and Haifa’s Technion also placed on list within the top 150. The 57th spot makes the Hebrew University the only Israeli university to make it into the top 100 of the list and is the highest ranking the Hebrew University has received since 2003. The 57th spot is an improvement of 15 spots over last year’s rankings from the Jiao Tong University researchers.

Tel Aviv University, Weizmann Institute of Science and Haifa’s Institute of Technology made it on the list in the 102nd and 150th spots, while Bar-Ilan University and Ben-Gurion University made the list in the 301st and 400th spots, as both schools have done in previous years. Along with the general rankings, universities across the globe were also graded on the fields of study offered and in the natural sciences field; the Hebrew University came in 35th, while the Weizmann Institute and the Technion were listed in the 51st and 75th spots. The Hebrew University also ranked 22nd overall in mathematics and 26th in computer science. The Weizmann Institute placed in the 11th spot for computer science.

The President of Hebrew University, Professor Menahem Ben-Sasson, issued a statement saying “I am thrilled that the Hebrew University continues to be featured in the list of the world’s top 100 universities. The fact that we’ve reached such a high ranking is a testament to the phenomenal work the university’s researchers do, and for that I am grateful and proud.” Professor Rivka Carmi, chairperson of the Committee of University Heads in Israel, concurred when she said “Despite a few difficult years for the higher education’s budget, we’ve accomplished impressive achievements due to our excellent researchers and scientists.

People who want a better understanding of the Bible and the biblical text of the Old Testament can now learn to read the Bible in its original language, ancient Hebrew. Anyone with a computer and high-speed internet access can learn to read the Bible in the original Hebrew thanks to a new on-line language program accredited by Hebrew University in Israel and available on the eTeacher groups’ website.

The eTeacher Biblical program’s curriculum consists of five divisions ranging from beginners with no prior experience with Hebrew, to highly advanced students. The students gather online for weekly meetings in small groups of just 7 or 8 students where they focus on reading the Hebrew Bible in its original language. The goal is to help the students get a better understanding of the language, including grammar, syntax and vocabulary. As the course progress to more advanced levels, students also learn to deal with different textual and diachronic perspectives across a wide range of biblical texts, including poetry, prophecy and wisdom literature.

Many students enjoy reading the Bible in the language it was written in because Hebrew is an ancient and fascinating language with meanings that go beyond translation into any other language. The eTeacher course gives students a number of advantages including education on the Jewish roots of the Christian faith and the original Hebrew mindset in which Christianity first began. The course also explains the cultural and historical settings of Biblical texts and allows students to get a handle on biblical wordplays, double-meanings and the meaning of unique names.

The eTeacher Group headquartered in Israel has become a leading international online language academy specializing in programs delivered live through video conference technology with certified native teachers. The biblical Hebrew online program has been a part of Hebrew University’s accredited courses since January 2010 and eTeacher is the only company providing the university with live on-line courses.

Amud Anan is a very popular smart phone useable application based on “Hamadrich hashitufi le’yediat haaretz,” otherwise known as the communal encyclopedia of available hiking trails in Israel. So popular in fact, that the Amud Anan application has been downloaded 25,000 times on iTunes alone. The app is basically a topographical map on a scale of 1:50,000 where users have uploaded over 11,000 hiking and trail spots that are most often applied by Israeli trekkers directly in the field. The compilation of trails includes all the old familiar favorites as well as a slew of little-known wonders that were once only known to a select group of dedicated hiking insiders but are now accessible to anyone who decides to use the new application.

Yoav Rofe of Jerusalem, the man behind the Amud Anan navigation tool, said of the program “I opened a map site for the benefit of all residents of the country, for free. The philosophy behind the project is making the terrain accessible to the hiker so that he will know what he is seeing during the course of his outing. Thanks to this project, today anyone can go on a hike in Israel with an up to date and reliable map.”

Currently the site features 2,000 kilometers of marked trails with more being added all the time. Rofe says the project started with old Soviet maps because they were only maps of Israel he could employ for free. In time, the project began to attract a new group of techno-savvy Israelis who like to hike and the site started to register tens of thousands of hits per month. Rofe is still developing the site and hopes to adapt the application to Android and also upload any existing old maps so that users can learn about the early development of Israel and the many boundary changes that have taken place since its founding.

Although the financial side of the program is not what Rofe says he considers the most important aspect, most of his income comes from programs for handheld computers, phones and navigational devices. iPad and iPhone applications are free, but downloading a topographical map of Israel costs about $100. Trail maps are about $25.

Rofe admits that monitoring boundaries in the Middle East is not simple because geography is often a political subject there. He added that he has plans to review all new hiking spots and trails as well as personally embark on field trips of his own to verify the accuracy of new reports. While Rofe notes that there are other communal maps available online such as Wikimapia, TrailBehind and OpenStreetMap, he feels they often contain a political dimension he is not comfortable with. Rofe said he has no interest in causing provocations or presenting inaccurate trail reports and pointed out that “The basis for my political outlook is humaneness, and my political views don’t negate the right of any person to travel the country.” Unlike the dry tone of sites like Wikipedia, Rofe want his site users to express aesthetic opinions and not revert to political issues. Toward that effort he is currently developing a set of formal rules and regulations for users at http://amudanan.co.il/.

Wikimedia Israel is an independent, non-profit organizational group that promotes the goals of the Wikimedia Foundation to encourage the growth, development and distribution of free, multilingual content input by way of a wiki, a piece of server software that allows users to freely create and edit web page content. It is estimated that about 370 million people read Wikipedia entries worldwide every month. Wikipedia entries currently number over 18 million, making it the largest encyclopedia ever produced, online or off.

The English-language version of Wikipedia contains over 3.5 million articles and is the fifth most viewed site online among English-speakers around the world. Although millions of people know about the English version Wikipedia, far fewer are aware that the Hebrew version of Wikipedia contains over 120,000 articles submitted by a wide spectrum of Israeli experts. About a quarter of the Hebrew Wiki material concerns Israel and does not exist anywhere else or in any other language. It is estimated that the Hebrew version of Wikipedia is the fifth most viewed site in Israel, ranking right behind the major news sites and search engines.

Hebrew Wikipedia encourages broad entries followed by subcategories. This set-up means one article naturally leads to other related articles and an article about Israel would naturally lead to several other articles about Jerusalem. Those in turn, would be followed by articles on each neighborhood, specific streets and buildings, and finally, all the way down to articles describing what is inside the featured buildings. The Hebrew Wikimedia in Israel is also developing a Pikiwiki free image collection project in cooperation with the Israel Internet Association and the Center for Educational Technology. The plan includes hosting images depicting Israeli history, geography and society that will be contributed by the general public and shared freely on the Internet.

At present, the Hebrew Wikipedia’s 39 categories under “Israel” encompass 1,224 articles about villages and cities, 33 articles concerning the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), 39 articles on transportation, 22 more on UNESCO World Heritage Sites in Israel and hundreds of different articles on Israeli culture.

Because only half of the world is currently connected to the Internet, the Hebrew Wikimedia group is now developing new programs to send computers with a hard copy of Wikipedia to those places that do not have the Internet, and in many cases do not have textbooks. The parent organization, the Wikimedia Foundation, has plans to take small villages around the world from the 17th to the 21st century in one big leap as it spreads knowledge to remote places in India, South America and Africa.

More than 80 leading thinkers and scholars from North America, Europe, Australia, and Israel recently gathered in Jerusalem to determine what happens when Hebrew Scripture meets philosophy. The assembled physicists and philosophers, classicists and literature professors met from June 26 to June 30 to discuss what they see as the illegitimate boundaries of “fields” and “disciplines” as they relate to this emerging school of thought.

Under the auspices of The Shalem Center’s second annual Bible and philosophy conference on the “Philosophical Investigation of the Hebrew Bible, Talmud and Midrash,” the Bible was discussed and debated as one of the great classical works. The second conference signals the emergence of a new Jewish school of thought where some thinkers believe that Jewish texts can be read as philosophy. The also believe the Bible was never intended to be approached solely as a vehicle for an out-of-this world revelation, but also as a human investigative project not so different from that of Plato and thus transforming the understanding of what the stories of Abel, Abraham, Jacob, Joseph, Moses, Solomon, and Jeremiah actually meant.

The project has won a $1.1 million grant from the John Templeton Foundation that will support three years of ongoing international conferences, workshops and fellowships. Shalem Center Provost Yoram Hazony said “This is a revolutionary idea. Right now, no student in any academic philosophy course has to lose sleep over the possibility that a question on the ideas of the Bible will show up on his or her final exam. Even students studying Bible and religion in the universities know they won’t be tested on the ideas of the Bible—just on how the book of Genesis was written or its quality as a literary work. And for at least some religious Christians and Jews, this will be radical to the point of heresy—allowing a reading of Hebrew Scripture that isn’t really about faith in God, so much as it is about ethics, political philosophy, and metaphysics. For non-believers, it means a whole new way of approaching what has until now been the closed Book of Books.”

An Israeli team recently announced at the annual conference of the Association for Computational Linguistics in Portland, Oregon that they have been able to recapitulate several centuries of painstaking manual labor with a method using automated computerized software that is now revealing new information about the different authors of the Bible.

The new Israeli software compares and analyzes both style and word choices to distinguish different parts of a single text that may be written by several different authors. The algorithm program is part of a sub-field of artificial intelligence studies known as authorship attribution that have potential applications ranging from helping law enforcement to developing new computer programs for writers. However, as a test case, the algorithm’s creators chose the Bible.

Most modern academic researchers believe the Bible was written by a number of different authors whose work can be identified by different ideological agendas and linguistic styles and the different names they used for God. Bible scholars usually split the text into two main groups. One group is believed to have been written by a figure or group known as the “priestly” author, because of apparent connections to the temple priests in Jerusalem. The second group is considered “non-priestly.” Scholars have spent several centuries combing the Bible manually in order to determine which parts belong to the “priestly” and “non-priestly” groups.

Now, with the new computerized software, the researchers at Bar Ilan University near Tel Aviv found that their analysis of the text contained the same “priestly” and “non-priestly” matches and effectively recreating years of work by multiple scholars in just a few minutes. The Israeli team proudly announced “We have thus been able to largely recapitulate several centuries of painstaking manual labor with our automated method.” The resulting differences in those places where the program disagreed with the accepted scholarship may provide some interesting new leads for Bible scholars.

An independent researcher, Michael Segal of Hebrew University’s Bible Department, said “Over the past decade, computer programs have increasingly been assisting Bible scholars in searching and comparing texts, but the novelty of the new software seems to be in its ability to take criteria developed by scholars and apply them through a technological tool more powerful in many respects than the human mind.”

One question the new algorithm cannot answer is the question of whether the Bible is human or divine. Some academic scholars believe the different stylistic threads in the Bible indicate human authorship. Those for whom it is a matter of faith say there’s no reason why God could not write a book in many different voices.

Scholars have been working over 100 years to unlock the keys to an ancient language that has not been spoken for over 2,000 years, and now researchers at the University of Chicago believe they have finally completed the first definitive dictionary of that tongue. Ancient Akkadian is a Semitic language related to modern-day Hebrew and thought to be the oldest of the eastern languages. Akkadian was spoken in ancient Mesopotamia when civilization first began to develop and the Chicago Assyrian Dictionary project began in 1921 when University of Chicago scholars first tried to compile all the known translations of the ancient language into a single resource.

It was previously thought that the language of the first civilizations was Assyrian, but in time researchers found that Assyrian had actually developed from the more ancient language called Akkadian. Analysis of the modern languages that evolved from Akkadian show it is a Semitic language related to modern-day languages in the Middle East like Arabic and Hebrew and it was the most commonly used language throughout the Near East for thousands of years. Most Akkadian documents that have been discovered to date have been in the form of clay tablets found in various Middle Eastern archaeological sites centered in what is now Iraq.

Although the latest research does unlock many of the oldest known human writings, they still have no way of knowing how the Akkadian language actually sounded. Gil Stein, Director of the University of Chicago’s Oriental Institute said “”With the vowels, you know that some were long and short, but you do not know exactly how various people in various times would have pronounced a long and short vowel.”

The husband and wife team of Adina Hoffman and Peter Cole have authored a new book about the Cairo Geniza, which was a huge stash of old sacred texts that had miraculously survived for centuries. In their latest book, “Sacred Trash: The Lost and Found World of the Cairo Geniza,” Hoffman and Cole shed new light on many incredulous tales about the Cairo Geniza, a treasure trove of Hebrew manuscripts that were discovered more than 100 years ago.

Hoffman’s husband Cole is a prominent translator of Hebrew poetry, and this new work allows him to explore the relationships between Jews and Arabs in a period of history when the relationship between the two groups was not so acrimonious and puts new light on 900 years of Mediterranean Judaism.

The Geniza documents are a diverse collection of important documents including religious texts, letters, poems, prescriptions, prayers, money orders and rabbinic responses written on vellum or rag paper, with ancient inks made of gallnut and soot and gum. Because the original authors of the documents came from women, children, students, scribes and rabbis, they were written in a wide range of languages including Hebrew, Aramaic, Greek, Persian, Latin, and Yiddish using Hebrew characters. Using this vast resource, Hoffman and Cole were able to paint a picture of a world of Arabic Jews in Old Cairo who lived in a socially integrated society alongside Arabs before the year 1200 after the Muslim conquest under the rule of Islam. Because the documents span 10 centuries of Middle Eastern middle class Jewish community life, Hoffman and Cole were able to reconstruct an accurate social and economic history of the period spanning between 850 and 1250.

Sacred Trash is a fascinating peek into the Middle East of past centuries that any student of Hebrew history will appreciate. Hoffman and Cole have succeeded in showing that there was a very different reality in the way Jews and Arabs lived in the past as compared to today.