Seafaring, as will become evident as chapter after chapter unfolds, was an integral part of the economic, social, and emotional world of the Hebrews in biblical times and of their heirs, the Jews, in the days of the Second Jewish Commonwealth, of the Hellenistic period, and of the Talmudic era (until about 500 CE). At the time I started working on my Hebrew book on this subject (in the mid-1930s) the significance of seafaring in the life of the ancient Jews had been unrecognized or unconsidered by Jewish historical scholarship, and practically no studies about it were available. Even in the course of the more than half a century that has passed since the appearance of my Hebrew book (1938), which I never considered as more than a first attempt, no additional book on the subject has been published. Consequently, the picture presented by historical studies of that long early period in the life of the Jewish people remained incomplete: it showed the Jews as a landlocked people, whose world—with the exception of one or two episodes—ended where the sea began. As against this, a study of Jewish seafaring clearly demonstrates that after an initial period during which the Philistines and other peoples barred the Children of Israel from the sea, they learned to use the sea as a path to other lands in a manner no different from that of the other circum-Mediterranean cultures. This insight in itself has important bearing on the question of the early relationship between the cultures of the Aegean peoples and that of the biblical Hebrews . . . The ancient Jews did not differ from the other peoples of the Mediterranean in using ships in naval warfare (Chapter 9). They also developed, again like other peoples, a corpus of laws governing property relations, chartering, buying and selling ships, and including, in the Jewish case, a body of religious laws that prescribed what mitzvoth (religious commandments) must be observed aboard, on high seas, in the harbor, while loading and unloading ships, and so on (Chapter 10). The next two chapters (11 and 12) introduce us to sea lore, and provide an insight into the place the sea, its awesome power, and its miraculous denizens occupied in Jewish imagination. Finally, the last two chapters (13 and 14) present the gist of the available historical information on the ports that existed in ancient Palestine along its long Mediterranean coastline, on the Red Sea, and around the Sea of Galilee. The usual notes and index complete the book