Israel Day 3 - attitude change - Dead Sea Scrolls & Masada

Israel Day 3
June 30, 2007, Saturday

Since it is the Sabbath today, there is no one cooking fresh eggs or pancakes for breakfast at the hotel, but there is still plenty of food and still a great variety. Dianne and I end up eating so much for breakfast that we are not even hungry again until dinner. Ron picks us up around 10 am each morning because we are not willing to get up and go any earlier.

Today we head to Qumran, the site where the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered. In the summer of 1947 a couple of Bedouin herders with nothing better to do, which is no surprise when look at how they live, were throwing rocks into holes and caves in the mountains while they tended their goats. On one toss of a rock they hear a funny sound; it hits a vase made of pottery. When they investigate they find sealed urns holding scrolls. Well it looks like junk to the kids, they can’t read, but they do recognize it was written on lambskin, and they could maybe sell the leather to a sandal maker in a nearby village.

The sandal-maker says the lambskin it too old to make a decent sandal and offers the herders 10 cents. The sandal-maker, while he cannot read Hebrew, realizes he does have something old and makes a few phone calls to the University in Jerusalem and reaches a professor Sukenik. The professor drives a couple of hours and arrives in the town and meets the sandal-maker, and being the world’s most lousy poker player, exclaims, “Oh my god! Do you realize what you have here? This scroll must be over a thousand years old.”

Well, that’s all it took for the sandal-maker to sell the scroll to the professor for $10,000 and convince the Bedouin shepherds to find some more, which they did. Seven more scrolls were found and between 1951 and 1956, Father R. de Vaux and a team of French archaeologists excavated the area and found more scrolls and early living structures. This demonstrated that Qumran was the center of the Essenes who lived and studied the torah for 200 years before the birth of Christ.

The Romans destroyed the Temple in Jerusalem and systematically moved south to exterminate or enslave any other Jews they could find. Aware of the impending arrival of the Romans in Qumran the Essenes hid their scrolls in clay pottery in the caves and fled. They scattered and any that were found were either killed or enslaved, and the scrolls sat for the next 2000 years. In the very dry heat of the desert they withstood the ravages of time and were very well preserved. One scroll that was sold to a wealthy private collector in New York was placed in a safe deposit box and forgotten about for 40 years and almost disintegrated in that short time before it was retrieved.

With the capture of the West Bank from Jordan in the 1967 Six Days War, Qumran was put in the care of the National Parks Authority, which built an access road and facilities for visitors.

Our next stop is Masada. After the Romans had killed or enslaved all the rest of the Jews in Israel (then called Palestine) they set their sites on getting a bunch more slaves from Masada. This is an area of the desert that gets rain about once every three years, but this was a very clever compound for the Jews. They used an aqueduct system to capture the rainfall that fell on an entire mountain and divert it to enormous cisterns they dug in the side of the mountain. They had their goats, huge grain storage rooms and could survive for years.

They held off the Romans for 3 years, until some architects from Rome were dispatched to figure out how to break into Masada. They came up with the idea to build a huge ramp that would lead right up the western wall of Masada, and then they could use a battering ram to break down the wall.

This didn’t go so well at first because the Jews would roll large rocks toward the Romans and knock them into the valley below like bowling pins. Next idea by the Romans; use Jewish slaves to build the ramp. Surely they wouldn’t go bowling with their own people, and they didn’t, and the Romans finished their ramp.

Seeing what would happen next, the males of Masada met to determine what to do. Either they allow their wives and children to become slaves of the Romans, get raped, tortured and whatever, and be helpless to do anything about it, or commit suicide. It was a Friday and they held a traditional Shabbat dinner and then destroyed all their food supplies, gold and silver. Then each male head of the family killed his own family and then committed suicide. Ten men were left to be sure the 900+ members of Masada were dead and then they would kill each other. When the Romans broke in the next day they found everyone dead and nothing to plunder.

The only way these events could be passed on was by a mother who hid with her two children to escape the murder-suicide pact. I hate to think of what happened to that poor woman and her children. These were the last significant number of Jews to live in Israel for 1500 years. There were always one or two here and there, but no more communities.

I started this trip with the attitude that I didn’t even want to go to Israel. Now I am in the home of my ancestors, their blood flowing through my veins, their strength and courage is my heritage, and their language and customs still survive after 3000 years of persecution. Maybe I should learn to read Hebrew?