The Lord's Day - Day 4 Revised

Shalom, Shabbat, NEW SONG! It is Sunday morning at the Dead Sea in Israel. Jewish friends concluded their Sabbat last night at sundown. Many shops were closed for business from sundown on Friday to sundown on Saturday. We started our day floating on the Dead Sea! Our tour had a late start this morning to allow us time to rest and "swim" in the Dead Sea. However, you can only float, not swim. The Dead Sea is 10 times saltier than the ocean and is over 30 percent made of salt. We took pictures with our camera, so are unable to attach them to this blog. Suffice it to say that this is a "must do" experience in the Holy Land.

At 10:30 am, we boarded the bus to Masada. Allow us to tell you a bit a out this amazing place. This mountaintop fortress was first built by King Herod (who reigned from 37 BC to 4 AD) as a winter palace. After the death of Herod in 4 AD and the annexation of Judea to the Roman Empire in 6 AD, the Romans stationed a garrison of soldiers at Masada. When the Jews revolted against the Romans in 66 AD, a group of Jews called the "Sicarii," took over Masada. Eleazar Ben Yair fled from Jerusalem to Masada and became the commander of the group. Various groups of refugees found their way to Masada when Jerusalem was destroyed in 70 AD. According to Josephus, a Jewish military commander who had been captured by the Romans and then worked for them, Masada was the last rebel stronghold in Judea. In 73 or 74 AD, the Roman Tenth Legion, led by Flavius Silva, laid seige to the mountain. The legion consisting of 8000 troops among which were auxiliary forces, built eight camps around the base, a siege wall, and a ramp made of earth and wooden supports on a natural support to the west. Captive Jews brought water to the troops from En Gedi (an oasis about 10 miles away),as well as food.

After a siege that lasted a few months, the Romans brought a tower with a battering ram up the ramp they had made. When the Romans retreated for the night to prepare for the invasion, Eleazar Ben Yair gave two speeches in which he convinced the leaders of the 960 members of the community that it would be better to take their own lives and those of their wives and children than to live in shame and humiliation as Roman slaves. The community committed suicide and ten men drew lots to take each others lives until there was no one left. According to Josephus,two women and five children who had been hiding in cisterns on the mountaintop told the Romans what had happened that night, on the 15th of Nissan, the first day of Passover.

From Masada, we did a quick tour of En Gedi (see above) and then travelled to Qumran. In 1947, a Beduin shepherd boy went searching for a lost sheep and discovered some jars filled with old parchment scrolls in a cave. They were sold to the Israeli Antiquities for about $90. These scolls ended up being the most significant archeological find of the Hebrew Scriptures in all of history! Known as the "Dead Sea Scrolls," the parchment fragments contain the equivalent of two complete scrolls of the Book of Isaiah and other important Old Testament texts. One of the most fascinating things about the Isaiah scrolls is that they contain word for word the Book of Isaiah as we know and  read the texts today. The Qumran community were called the Essenes. They were a kind of Jewish monastic community that lived in the desert. The on-site film showed the community it's as exclusively male. However, there is speculation that the community included women and children, as well. They sought a kind of purified life away from the trappings of larger, less religiously stringent communities. There may be a strong connection between John the Baptist and the Essenes. Some have even speculated that Jesus himself was an Essene.