In 2015, the Israeli police caught an illegal antique coin dealer. The services discovered over 3,000 illegally stored coins in his home in northern Israel. Their value is estimated at tens of thousands of dollars.
A resident of Beit Hashita (located about 8 km from the former city of Scythopolis) was accused of trying to illegally selling coins outside the country without formal permission. Some of the coins are more than 2,000 years old and belong to the state under Israeli law. Most of them come from Byzantine times. In the collection, however, you can find coins from the period of the Bar Kochba uprising (132-135 CE) or coins celebrating the suppression of the rebellion in Judea in 70 CE, with the inscription Judaea Capta (“Judea conquered”). Other coins are from the Muslim period.
It is worth adding that the man is a licensed antiquities dealer. He stated in his defence that he had found the coins on his own in a field near the kibbutz and that he had cleaned them in his home laboratory.
According to Jewish law, a coin finder should report the discovery to the appropriate services and hand it over to the authorities. Currently, proceedings are pending against a man for theft of public property.
