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ARTICLES OF FAITH. The rosette-decorated stone container is an ossuary—a box for bones—that was used in the monastery as a reliquary, a repository for sacred objects. For about a century, until 70 C.E., corpses in Jerusalem were often placed on stone ledges within burial caves; after about a year, when the flesh had decayed, a family member would gather the bones into an ossuary. The box at the Monastery of the Virgins is the first known example of a Jewish ossuary to be reused for Christian religious purposes, perhaps in the belief that it contained the remains of an early Christian martyr.