Google made headlines last year when it digitized five Dead Sea Scrolls manuscripts and made them available online. Now, it's making 5,000 more available.

Archaeologist Robert Ballard is best known for discovering the wrecks of the Titanic and the German battleship Bismarck. Now, Ballard has his sights set on proving the existence of a different treasure buried in the deep sea: Noah's Ark.

I read "Walking the Bible" on my flight to and from Israel last summer and thoroughly enjoyed it, and on my short blogroll I link to David Plotz' Blogging the Bible. Last week, I found on Slate that Plotz has returned with "Digging the Bible."

So, it's not exactly the Ark of the Covenant. In fact, it's not exactly much of anything - just a dirty shard of pottery the size of my big toe. But I found it. I had been scraping the floor of this Israeli cave when I spotted its sharp edge. I fished the piece out of the dirt and pushed on it, as instructed, to see if it crumbled. If it did, it was probably just the local limestone, which is as soft as a bar of soap. But my piece firmly resisted, so I brushed off the dirt until I could see smooth pottery, one side black, the other brick red. I'm the raider of the lost pot.

I hand it to my digging partner Ian Stern, the archaeologist in charge of this site. He glances at it and says, "Cooking pot. See the black part? That's where it carbonized. Probably 2,200 years old, time of the Maccabees" - the Jewish heroes of the Hanukkah story. He tosses my shard into a plastic collection bucket. "That's why this place is so great. It has instant gratification. There's a biblical connection. There's a Hanukkah connection. It takes it out of the realm of the abstract and makes it tangible. You can come here and dig up pottery from the time of Judah Maccabee. He fought a battle near here. Now, I'm not saying he ate out of that pot, but you see and hold this pottery, and he is not a fairytale figure anymore. He is real."

I've spent much of the last year blogging the Bible for Slate, writing about reading the Good Book for the first time. Now I've come to Israel to see the Bible, to dig it. I've read the stories. Now I want to see where they happened and to learn if they happened - to experience the Bible through archaeology, history, politics, and faith.

This is a similar premise to "Walking the Bible," which contains quite a few passages where Bruce Feiler is wrestling with the lack of historical evidence for major events like the Flood and the Exodus or whether Moses really existed:

The unusual circumstances of this story -- the fact that Moses gets his name from an Egyptian and is raised in the pharaonic court, the fact that he claims not to speak well -- have led many speculate that Moses wasn't an Israelite at all. Sigmund Freud, in his influential book "Moses and Monotheism," says that Moses was an Egyptian who learned monotheism from Akhenaten and was inspired to lead a revolt of foreign slaves out of a desire to overthrow his symbolic father. Freud says Moses gave the slaves the idea that they were a chosen people, which in turn led to anti-Semitism. "It was one man, the man Moses who created the Jews. To him his people owes its tenacity in supporting life; to him, however, it also owes much of the hostility which it has met and is meeting still.

Leaving aside Freud's psychological interpretation, many scholars agree with his underlying thesis, that Moses might have been an Egyptian.

Like a lot of Christians, I watched the "Gospel of Judas" program on the National Geographic channel in 2006. It was a well-done program. But at the time, the entire endeavor was under a cloud. The manuscript's history has always been a problem. Then, the producers of the program, the codex owners, and several of the program's commentators all seemed to have agendas that conflicted with good scholarship.

Now, come to find out, another scholar has a fresh transliteration of the text that reflects a fundamentally different perspective than the one that NG provided.

You can get up to speed with this piece in the current US News & World report (Yahoo version). Journalist Jay Tolson notes:

Remember all the hoopla about the Gospel of Judas, the long-lost Gnostic text that depicted Judas not as wicked villain but as the Messiah's favorite, who was given the nasty job of betraying him because he understood Jesus's special mission better than anybody else did?

Well, now it turns out that that might not be what the Gospel of Judas was saying at all. If April De Conick, a professor of biblical studies at Rice University, is right, the English translation that was sponsored by the National Geographic was so flawed in crucial places that it reversed what the text was actually saying: that Judas was just as nasty as all the traditional orthodox Christian accounts said he was.

The problem, De Conick says, is that the translation was based on very incomplete reconstructions of the original Coptic text. In the October 15 entry of her Forbidden Gospels Blog, she explains that the mistakes were so bad that she was inspired to write a book, the newly published Thirteenth Apostle, to rectify them:

I haven't see a copy of the book yet. But if De Conick's work holds up under further scrutiny it will weaken further the attempts by lefty scholars to undermine Christian orthodoxy through the elevation of gnostic writings.

Wikipedia will give you a good summary overview of this ongoing controversy.

To me, the other amazing realization is how

Now that Hebrew University archaeologist has held his Tuesday press conference, the newspaper Haaretez has updated its coverage of the discovery of King Herod's tomb.

It turns out that Herod's limestone sarcophagus was raided and smashed shortly after his death. Netzer's team discovered no bones, but they are sure the tomb is Herod's given its ornate decoration and other unusual characteristics.

The Herod news has paled, however, as Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert has survived three attempts at a no-confidencde vote in the Knesset. Sixteen members of his party either voted against him, abstained, or absented themselves. Remarkably, Olmert, unlike Herod, is still politically alive.

The Israeli newspaper Haaretz broke the news Monday night of a stunning archaeological discovery, scooping the press conference Hebrew University had planned for Tuesday.

Ehud Netzer, a Hebrew University professor, has discovered the tomb of King Herod the Great - the same Herod that according to Matthew 2 tried to kill the infant Jesus by massacring all the male children under two in the region of Bethlehem. Herod's cruelty to his own family was so well known that even Augustus Caesar said he would rather be Herod's dog than his son.

Netzer has been looking for Herod's grave at the site known as Herodium, some 12 km miles south of Jerusalem, since 1972. The ancient Jewish historian Josephus had named Herodium as the site of Herod's burial, but until now, the grave had escaped detection.

Herodium was a fortified palace, refuge, and mausoleum. The site was destroyed by the Romans in AD 71.

The Haaretz story is at http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/856784.html. More details will be released at Tuesday's press conference. Archaeology buffs should watch the Haaretz web site and that of Hebrew University.