Money Down the Drain Nazir 24 The mishnah here gets into complicated cases of what happens to money set aside for Nazir sacrifices if the sacrifices can no longer be brought. The money for a sin offering חטאת cannot be used for anything else and therefore the coins have to be disposed of. In the language of the mishnah: יוליכם לים המלח, bring them to the Dead Sea. The Dead Sea is the mishnaic equivalent of flushing something down the toilet, ensuring that it can never be used or even found again. About ten years ago a huge cache of Hasmonean coins was found in the Dead Sea. Among the suggestions of where they came from is one connected to this idea, of coins that needed to be disposed of because they could not (or would not!) be brought to the Temple. The articles are below. > http://www.haaretz.com/print- edition/features/pennies-from- heaven-or-elsewhere-1.133313 > > http://sfile.f-static.com/ image/users/240224/ftp/my_ files/ITAMR/In%20for%20a% 20Penny%20-%20Itama
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Queen for a Day Nazir 19 Our mishnah is one of the places where we hear about the intriguing figure of Queen Helene or Heleni HaMalka. Here she is described as taking a Nazirite vow while still in the Diaspora, and then having to redo part (or all) of it when she arrives in the land of Israel. Who is Helene, where is she from and what can archaeology tell us about her? We hear about Helene and her sons Monbaz and Izates in a number of places. Josephus, who was almost her contemporary (she probably died when he was a child, in the mid first century CE), writes about the family’s conversion to Judaism. Helene and her husband Monbaz were the rulers of a country called Adiabene or חדייב in Hebrew. It is located on the northern end of the Tigris River, near ancient Nineveh and the Assyrian kingdom. Today it is in northern Iraq, in Kurdistan: http://womenofhistory.blogspot.co.il/2014/07/queen-helena-of-adiabene.html Adiabene’s location was on a major trade route a