Human-Ram Deity from Sidon. With human features as well as the eyebrows, nose and horns of a ram, this painted limestone figurine represents a deity and dates to c. 1650 B.C.E. (the Middle Bronze Age). Photo: Courtesy of Claude Doumet-Serhal. Who were the Sidonians, and what do we know about their religion? The Sidonians were the inhabitants of ancient Sidon, a seaport on the Mediterranean Sea in modern Lebanon. Those familiar with the Biblical text will

A new artificial intelligence (AI) model has helped researchers determine the age of the Dead Sea Scrolls, revealing that some of these manuscripts are considerably older than previously thought. Most significantly, it now appears that a few of the ancient documents may even have been written by the very people who composed the Bible. Discovered in the mid-20th century in a series of caves in the West Bank, the Dead Sea Scrolls are ancient Jewish texts that have

A group of Israeli and international scholars has employed computer-assisted word-frequency analysis to pioneer a new method that may show who wrote the Bible and redacted it some 2,800 years ago. Combining custom-built software with an algorithm developed in the field of statistics, the methodology is detailed in a groundbreaking study published on Tuesday in the leading academic journal PLOS ONE. The researchers applied the new system to tackle longstanding debates over authorship in several contested