Me and my friend are having a discussion and I want to know the color/race of the skin of ancient Israelis. I can't seem to find any academic sources stating anything online at the moment and as we are at a conference we're unable to do any hard digging due to lack of resources. Could you provide any sources that you used to find you're answer? It's relevant to our discussion and I'll definitely like to go through and read them.
Thanks!
There's no authoritative way of knowing, since no one bothered to take pictures, artistic depictions of Israelites are scant, and to my knowledge there are no descriptions that are precise enough to put into a modern context (there are some poetic biblical ones, but they don't really paint a picture we can use).
However, science can answer this question to an extent. This map shows the skin color of people who live in a particular area long-term, based on UV exposure. So presumably, Israelites would've looked much like other Levantine groups.