Let he who is without sin cast the first stone — and let he who is with sin return it. A man who pilfered a 2,000-year-old ballista stone from an archeological site in Jerusalem in 2005 has returned the long-“lost” artifact to Israeli authorities, citing apocalyptic fears of the novel coronavirus pandemic.
The anonymous man arranged to have the stone returned because he feared “the end of the world is near,” the Israel Antiquities Authority said in a statement on Facebook.
The thief feared catching COVID-19 and didn’t want the stone weighing on his conscience any longer, according to Moshe Manies, who returned the stone on the thief’s behalf. “You are connected and know what to do with it,” the thief told Manies, according to a post on