Israel Under the Roman Invasion

NOTE: there is no Palestine or Palestinian peoples identified on the map.

900 B.C. Assyrian Invasion

NOTE: there is no Palestine or Palestinian peoples identified

1000 B.C. Map of Judah & Israel During Foreign Invasions

 NOTE: there is no Palestine or Palestinian peoples identified.

1000 B.C. Map of Judah & Israel During Foreign Invasions

It became the accepted division worldwide as the Bible was translated into Latin and many other languages, even though the chapter endings seem arbitrary and even illogical.

For example, Samuel I ends in the midst of the saga of King Saul’s death, whereas the Jewish sages considered the book of Samuel to be one, undivided book.

Some scholars believe that the chapter divisions were the work of the students of Cardinal Hugo of Saint Cher, 1240 C.E. who was trying to write a concordance. It is more generally believed that Stephen Langton, archbishop of Canterbury (1228 C.E.), is responsible for them.

Shiva Le’Bitzaron, the Project for Restoring the Jewish Index & Division of the Bible – is trying to get Jews to return to the original Jewish index. “The psukim (verses) are ours (Jewish –ed.),” explained project head Betzal’el Ariel. “The question is where to start a new chapter. When you divide a text into chapters, you bring your own ideas and ideology to this division.”

“Our sages,” he explained, “made their own division which we call seder (lit. order –ed.), which means to organize: organize our learning, our thoughts, and our belief. We want to restart using this original Jewish division.”

The separation of verses in the Bible is universally according the Jewish mesorah. This is the tradition handed down through the ages to which the tropes [symbols designating the tune for reading that indicate where phrases and verses end, ed.] adhere.

The verse numbering, however, was later arranged to suit the Christian chapter divisions, starting to count anew at the beginning of each chapter. This numbering is attributed to the 16th century printer Stephanus, who did it for convenience.

It is the chapter division and the verse numbering that will go back to their original Jewish roots in this project, an aspiration that can be fulfilled now that the Jewish nation has come home.

Dig site Skyview /Israel Antiquities Authority

Dig supervisors noted that illustrated Byzantine holy objects are very rarely found in the Holy Land. The find was presented by dig supervisor Yana Tchekhanovets, along with Israel Antiquities Authority’s Dr. Doron Ben Ami.

Box with cover - Israel Antiquities Authority - Clara Amit

The box contained two icon paintings surrounded by gold leaf and was probably a personal prayer object. It is 2.2 cm. (about 0.9 inch) long by 1.6 cm. wide and is made from the bone of a large animal, cattle, a camel or a horse.

One painting inside the box depicts a bearded man with dark hair, wearing what appears to be a white tunic. The other painting seems to show a female figure dressed in blue.

Box -- inside - Israel Antiquities Authority / Clara Amit

Similar boxes were found on bodies discovered in burial caves in the Moshchevaya Balka site in the northern Caucasus.

The Boston Museum of Fine Arts last month returned the top half of Weary Heracles, Greek for Hercules.

Turkey Displays Its Hercules Statue

Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan flew the 1,900-year-old statue back with him at the end of a trip to the U.S. in September. Turkish Culture Minister Ertugrul Gunay inaugurated the display of the statue with both parts rejoined at a museum in Antalya on Sunday. Gunay stated Turkey was determined to retrieve other artifacts believed to be smuggled out of the country.

Hercules is the Roman name for Greek demigod Heracles, son of Zeus (the Greek equivalent of the Roman god Jupiter), and the mortal Alcmene. Early Roman sources suggest that the imported Greek hero supplanted a mythic Italic shepherd called “Recaranus” or “Garanus”, famous for his strength who dedicated the Ara Maxima that became associated with the earliest Roman cult of Hercules.

According to mythology, Hercules was the illegitimate son of Jupiter and Alcmene, the wisest and most beautiful of all mortal women. Juno was enraged at Jupiter for his infidelity with Alcmene, and even more so that he placed the infant Hercules at Hera’s breast as she slept and allowed him to feed, which caused Hercules to be partially immortal, thus, allowing him to surpass all mortal men in strength, size and skill.

Juno held a spiteful grudge against Hercules and sent him into a blind frenzy, in which he killed all of his children and his wife. When Hercules regained his sanity, he sought out the Oracle at Delphi in the hope of making atonement. The Oracle ordered Hercules to serve Eurystheus, king of Mycenae, who sent him on a series of tasks known as the Labors of Hercules. These tasks are told in this order:

Labours of Hercules
To kill the Nemean lion
To destroy the Lernaean Hydra
To capture Ceryneian Hind alive
To trap the Erymanthian boar
To clean the Augean stables
To get rid of the Stymphalian birds
To capture the Cretan bull
To round up the Mares of Diomedes
To fetch Hippolyte’s girdle, or belt
To fetch the cattle of Geryon
To fetch the golden apples of the Hesperides
To bring Cerberus from Tartarus.

While he was a champion and a great warrior, he was not above cheating and using any unfair trick to his advantage. However, he was renowned as having “made the world safe for mankind” by destroying many dangerous monsters. Although he was a famous demigod, he still could not prevent his death.

Hercules was married to Deianeira. Long after their marriage, one day the centaur Nessus offered to ferry them across a wide river that they had to cross. Nessus set off with Deianeira first, but tried to abduct her. When Hercules realized the centaur’s real intention, Hercules chased after him and shot him with an arrow which was poisoned with Hydra’s blood. Before he died, Nessus told Deianeira to take some of his blood and treasure it, since it was a very powerful medicine and: if she ever thought Hercules was being unfaithful, the centaur told her, the blood would restore his love. Deianeira kept the vial of blood.

Many years after that incident she heard rumours that Hercules had fallen in love with another woman. She smeared some of the blood on a robe and sent it to Hercules by a servant named Lichas. Lichas spilled some blood on the floor and when the sun’s rays fell on it the blood begun to burn. Because of this Deianeira began to suspect Nessus’s advice and decided to send another servant to fetch Lichas back before he could hand over the blood soaked robe to Hercules. She was too late. Hercules had already put on the robe and when he did so the blood still poisoned from the same arrow used by Hercules, burnt into his flesh. When he jumped into a nearby river in hope of extinguishing the fire, it only made it worse. When he tried to rip off the robe from his body his organs were also ripped off with it.

Furiously, Hercules caught Lichas and tossed him into the sea. After that he told his friend Philoctetes to build him a pyre on the mountain Oata. He was burnt to death on the pyre. Before dying, Hercules offered his bow and arrows as a token of gratitude to Philoctetes. His father Zeus then turned him into a god. Deianeira, after hearing what she had caused, she committed suicide.

The tree and its fruit caused Jericho to become a major population center and are praised in the Hebrew Bible possibly several times indirectly, such as in Psalm 92 (“The righteous himself will blossom forth as a palm tree does.”), or date cluster mentioned in Song of Solomon 5:11; 7:7-8 (Heb: tal·tal·lim′; san·sin·nim′).

It was even said by some to have medicinal properties, supposedly curing many diseases and infections, promoting longevity and acting as a mild aphrodisiac. Its likeness was engraved on shekalim, the ancient Hebrew unit of currency.

Vespasian coin celebrating the victory over the rebels. The legend says: IVDEA CAPTA. (Judea captured)

According to historical sources, the taste of them was something splendid. Pliny the Elder, a Roman naturalist of the 1st century AD, wrote that Judæa’s dates were known for their succulence and sweetness.

When the Romans invaded ancient Judea, thick forests of date palms towering up to 80 feet (24 m) high and 7 miles (11 km) wide covered the Jordan River valley from the Sea of Galilee in the north to the shores of the Dead Sea in the south.

The tree so defined the local economy that Emperor Vespasian celebrated the conquest by minting the “Judaea Capta”, a special bronze coin that showed the Jewish state as a weeping woman beneath a date palm. The Judean Date is even mentioned in the Qur’an.

The date growing as a commercial fruit export stopped at the end of 70 A.D., when the Second Temple was destroyed by the Romans. From then, the tradition was lost. Judean date palms were wiped out by about A.D. 500 probably due to being uprooted and transported to Babylon, Persia, Arabia etc..

A date palm is also featured on the ten-shekel coin of the New Israeli Shekel. The Hebrew word for the date palm is ‘tàmâr.’  It became the Jews’ symbol of grace and elegance and was often bestowed by them to women.” Solomon’s beautiful half sister was named Tamar.

Prized for its beauty, shade, and medicinal properties, the cultivar was thought to have become extinct sometime around AD 150. During 1963-1965, excavations at Herod the Great’s palace on Masada, Israel, revealed a cache of date palm seeds preserved in an ancient jar. They had experienced a very dry and sheltered environment for centuries. Radiocarbon dating at the University of Zurich confirmed the seeds dated from between 155 BC to AD 64.

The seeds were held in storage for 40 years at Bar-Ilan University, Jerusalem, until in 2005. The seeds were pretreated in a fertilizer and hormone-rich solution and in 2005, a preserved 2,000-year-old seed sprouted. It is the oldest known human-assisted germination of a seed.

Three of the seeds were subsequently planted at Kibbutz Ketura in the Arabah desert in southern Israel. Eight weeks later one of the seeds had sprouted, and by June 2008, the tree had nearly a dozen fronds and was nearly 1.4 m (4 ft) tall. By the summer of 2010, the sapling stood at about 2 meters tall.

The plant was nicknamed “Methuselah,” after the longest-lived person in the Bible. Methuselah is remarkable in being the oldest known tree seed successfully germinated, and also in being the only living representative of the Judean date palm, a tree extinct for over 1800 years, which was once a major food and export crop in ancient Judea.

Date palm trees are dioecious. If Methuselah was female, it should have produced fruit by 2010. Methuselah’s seeds could then be used to cultivate additional Date palm trees. However, Methuselah did not flower in 2010. Two possible reasons for this are: 1) Seedlings take longer to flower than offshoots. 2) The maturation may be slowed because of Methuselah still being in a pot, and not in the ground. Plans are being made to plant Methuselah in the ground.

When compared with three other cultivars of date palm, genetic tests showed the plant to be closely related to the old Egyptian variety Hayany (also Hiani, Hayani), 19% of its DNA being different, and an Iraqi cultivar (16% different DNA). They may have shared the same wild ancestor.

Dr. Sarah Sallon, the head of the project, wants to see if the ancient tree has any unique medicinal properties no longer found in today’s date palm varieties.  “The Judean date was used for all kinds of things from fertility, to aphrodisiacs, against infections, against tumors,” she stated. “This is all part of the folk story.”

In addition to its honoured place in Judean history, the palm may contribute useful characteristics such as environmental tolerance and disease resistance, to modern date cultivars.

The five scrolls are among some 900 manuscripts purchased by Israeli researchers between 1947 and 1967 from antiquities dealers after having first been discovered by a Bedouin shepherd in the Judean Desert.

The Dead Sea scrolls are considered to have been written or collected by an ascetic Jewish sect at Qumran overlooking the Dead Sea, some 2,000 years ago. For decades, the Dead Sea Scrolls were the subject of intense academic dispute, not just because of varying interpretations of their content but also because only a select group of researchers had access to them.

The new digitized versions of the Dead Sea Scrolls can be found here.

Beck stated, “Everything we know about human rights and real civilization came from this place, this land.” “Whether you live by 613 commandments, 10 Commandments, or one sweet Golden Rule, it all started here. It all started here – the throne of G-d.”

“When the world turns its back on Israel and the Jewish people, the world turns its back on human rights. Without the Jewish people, humanity would never know that every single individual life has dignity, that every single life is sacred. That G-d names every star and knows every soul. That was G-d’s message to Abraham. That was G-d’s message to Moses.

That is the message of the Jewish people to the world and by their very existence they teach it to us, every single day.” “Who will protect your rights better?” he asked with passion. “A king? A president or you? Who will protect the truth? A reporter? A producer? Or you?”

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Scene of house destruction after the Arab massacre of Jews in Hebron

Hevron is the city where the Jewish Patriarchs and Matriarchs are buried and where King David ruled for seven years before going to Jerusalem, so that it is one of the four holy cities in Israel for Jews.

Synagogue desecrated

There was no reason for the massacre other than the encouragement of the Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin El-Husseini, who later joined Hitler. The Arabs murdered children in front of their parents, severed limbs, raped and burned people alive.

A student of the Hebron Yeshiva, Elhana Zelig Roch, lost a hand during the attack

A student of the Hebron Yeshiva, Zvi Hirsh Heller, dies from his wounds in hospital

The massacre preceded any Jewish military acts as it took place in 1929. The Jews of Hevron predated the new Jewish pioneers returning to their homeland of Israel.

Massacre of Jewish women, children at Hebron

The British High Commissioner in the Land of Israel, Sir John Chancellor, published a statement following the massacre, saying, “I have learned with horror of the atrocious acts committed by bodies of ruthless and bloodthirsty evil-doers, of savage murders perpetrated upon defenseless members of the Jewish population regardless of age or sex, accompanied as at Hebron, by acts of unspeakable savagery, of the burning of farms and houses in town and country and of the looting and destruction of property. These crimes have brought upon their authors the execration of all civilized peoples throughout the world.”

A Jewish survivor mourning in the aftermath of the massacre in Hebron.