at last, evidence that israelis are native to the levant

Part of the reason why the find has gone unreported for more than a decade was the difficulty researchers faced in dealing with such a gut-wrenching discovery of dead infants, says Oded Lipschits, a professor of archaeology at Tel Aviv University

Non-zero chance this got buried because some Israeli official overheard it and thought it was one of their own mass graves

There is a theory that “Moloch” was not a god of the Levant but rather the practice of child sacrifice by an early Jewish sect. This is why it’s talked about differently than other gods of the region in Talmudic Scriptures. Dr Justin Sledge (yes his real name) has a pretty academic video on this topic on his YT channel. For those not in the know, Dr Sledge isn’t some rando YT guy, he’s a PHD scholar and his works are literally reference material in some colleges for undergrads and grads studying these topics.

This also could reflect how early Jewish practitioners handled natural infant death as well. It may be that infants under a certain age, for religious or social reasons, were not treated as deserving of an individual burial due to high natural mortality rates and therefore just buried in mass graves. It’s not unheard of for ancient peoples to do something like this.

Defiantly not child sacrifice.

“Palestine Exploration Quarterly” what a cursed name for a publication. This is interesting stuff though.