BeliefWatch: Entombed

In interviews with NEWSWEEK in the days before the announcement of the “Jesus family tomb” (the suburban Jerusalem cave said to contain the bones of Jesus and his relatives, a claim that later turned out to be overblown), publishers and publicists worried aloud that the public might be suffering from what they called “ossuary fatigue.” What they meant was this: how many first-century bone boxes can archeologists boast of finding before people stop caring about first-century bone boxes? (Especially, one might ask in retrospect, when those discoveries often tend to be not so historically important.) The answer is: a lot. It’s always cool when someone digs up a relic related to the Biblical past, and last week’s alleged discovery of the tomb of King Herod is no different.