Elie Wiesel Center for Jewish Studies, Boston University<\/strong> Professors Berlin and Bethard discuss the infant burial discovered in the archive room of the 2 nd c. BCE Seleucid administrative building at Tel Kedesh, Israel, followed by a group discussion on the phenomenon of child sacrifice and the larger conclusions that might be drawn from this startling and unsettling discovery. Click here<\/a> for an illustrated summary.<\/p>\n Here are some musings of an archaeologist: 2. The infant burial. Pending the upcoming investigation of possibly mutilated bone ends, I\u2019d say that this is a simple burial of a dead infant. Had it not been definitely sealed under the mudbrick, then things would be simple. But even as things are, I don\u2019t think that the burial and burning are related; it does not make much sense in any scenario. Even with the tight chronology (relatively speaking), there would be ample time for someone (from the nearby village?) to bury an infant. Imagine that the fire left the building gutted but intact. The infant was buried in the derelict building, and the mudbrick superstructure collapsed much later. That still does not explain the flasks of course.<\/p>\n 3. The involvement of the Hasmoneans. I have no idea if child sacrifice by the Hasmoneans, or Jews for that matter, has been ever suggested by anyone apart from the biblical mentions of the Molech.\u00a0 At any rate, Maccabees and Josephus, whom I know reasonably well, do not suggest anything like that. Anyone knows otherwise? On practical grounds, even if the military presence of Yonatan at Qedesh was slightly more than what 1 Maccabees condenses into one day (no archaeological evidence of any sort, so the stay must have been very brief),\u00a0 I can hardly imagine him making a child sacrifice. And where did he find a convenient infant?<\/p>\n <\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n
\n Speakers: Andrea Berlin (Boston University) and Jonathan Bethard (Boston University)<\/strong><\/p>\nA Response from Danny Syon, Head of the Scientific Assessment Branch, Israel Antiquities Authority<\/h3>\n
\n1.\u00a0 The selective burning in the archive room bothers me. In figure 3, it appears that the cracking of the wall stones is on the outside, rather on the inside. Is this the case throughout the room, or it\u2019s just a chance in this photo? If the stones are not cracked on the inside, then maybe the fire started from the outside, maybe in the unexcavated rooms to the north or west? The burned mudbrick implies that much of the burning happened higher up than the stone walls. The burned seals and the non-burned flasks also seem to imply a fire above floor level, maybe wooden racks and shelves that held the sealed documents. If the flasks had been full, obviously they would have burned too, as soon as some burning piece fell down on them; but even when empty, I\u2019d expect them to have been at least charred by burning debris. Very strange.<\/p>\nRead more<\/h4>