The verses in question concern the passage in which Joshua leads the Israelites into Canaan. “Sun, stand still at Gibeon, and moon, in the Valley of Aijalon. And the sun stood still, and the moon stopped,” the text reads.

The meaning had been lost in English renderings, but recent translations by Professor Sir Colin Humphreys suggest they reference an eclipse. “Going back to the original Hebrew text, we determined that an alternative meaning could be that the sun and moon just stopped doing what they normally do: They stopped shining. In this context, the Hebrew words could be referring to a solar eclipse,” Humphreys explained.

By reading the hieroglyphs carved in the granite Merneptah Stele, an Egyptian text dating from the reigns of Pharaoh Merneptah and his son Ramesses the Great, historians were able to date  the Israelites’ presence in Canaan to between 1500 B.C. and 1050 B.C.

The breakthrough in comparing the two texts was made by backdating not only total solar eclipses using astronomical patterns but also annual eclipses in which the sun does not completely cover the moon but creates a distinctive ring of fire. From the calculations, which took into account the fluctuations in Earth’s orbit and rotation, Humphreys and his team posited that the only annual eclipse that could have taken place while the Israelites were in Canaan occurred in 1207 B.C.

Ancient Egyptian and Biblical Texts Reveal Oldest Known Solar Eclipse—and Secrets of Ramesses the Great’s Rule

Wild!

Icarda’s most vital project — a seed bank containing 155,000 varieties of the region’s main crops, a sort of agricultural archive of the Fertile Crescent — faced extinction.

But the researchers at Icarda had a backup copy. Beginning in 2008, long before the war, Icarda had begun to send seed samples — “accessions” as they are called — to the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, the so-called doomsday vault, burrowed into the side of a mountain on a Norwegian island above the Arctic Circle. It was standard procedure, in case anything happened.

War happened. In 2015, as Aleppo disintegrated, Icarda’s scientists borrowed some of the seeds they had stored in Svalbard and began building anew. This time, they spread out, setting up one seed bank in Morocco and another just across Syria’s border with Lebanon in this vast valley of cypress and grapes known as the Bekaa.

…Mr. Shehadeh says, [he] is why he is obsessed with the wild relatives of the seeds that most farmers plant today. He eschews genetically modified seeds. He wants instead to tap the riches of those wild ancestors, which are often hardy and better adapted to harsh climates. “They’re the good stock,” he said.

He hunts for the genetic traits that he says will be most useful in the future: resistance to pests or blistering winds, or the ability to endure in intensely hot summers. He tries to select for those traits and breeds them into the next generation of seeds — in the very soil and air where they have always been grown.

…Icarda’s entire collection houses seeds that have sustained the people of the Middle East for centuries, including some 14,700 varieties of bread wheat, 32,000 varieties of barley, and nearly 16,000 varieties of chickpea, the key component of falafel. The Lebanon seed bank houses about 39,000 accessions, and Morocco, another 32,000. Most of it is backed up in Svalbard.

In Sudan, Icarda has introduced a wheat variety it hopes will be more resistant to drought and heat. It is breeding a fava bean variety that can withstand a parasitic weed and lentils that can mature in a short growing season.

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hmmmmm