Ossuaries from Jerusalem

A few words on ossuaries.

This may seem a macabre choice for my first blog post on the Travelujah site - why choose a subject closely associated with death? - but in fact, ossuaries are also intimately associated with life, particularly life in Jerusalem of the first century CE.

For those who don't know or need to be refreshed: during a very brief period in Jerusalem's history, Jews engaged in an expensive, laborious, prolonged and utterly inconceivable (to us) process of burying their dead, called "secondary burial". First a family would buy, commission or excavate by themselves a cave in the soft rock around Jerusalem. (I say Jerusalem because well over 90 percent of all known ossuaries were deposited in caves in a wide band around that city.) When someone died, the family would lay the body of the person on a shelf, in a pit, in a spec