 |
| Dead Sea view from Ein Bokek, courtesy, NSF.gov |
It lies
squarely in between Israel on the west and Arab-occupied Jordan on the east.
Historically though, it was bounded on the west and northeast by the Land of
Israel, specifically, the tribe of Judah on the west and the tribe of Reuven on
the northeast. Along the southeastern quarter lie the Kingdom of Moab. The
Biblical Arnon River, today referred
to as Wadi Mujib, which flows into the Sea, has historically separated Reuven
from Moab. On the southern extremity of the Sea, lie the Kingdom of Edom.
Between Moab and Edom is the Zered brook,
today, Wadi al Hasa, which also flows into the Sea, and which has historically
separated those two kingdoms. Along the southwestern side of the lake is the
700 foot tall "Mount Sodom"
of Sodom and Gamorrah fame. At Mount
Sodom is a stony outcrop called by the local Bedouin “Lot’s Wife” due to its shape that, some say, resembles Lot’s wife
who looked back after Sodom’s destruction and turned into a pillar of salt,
according to the Biblical account. Many animal species live in the mountains
surrounding the Dead Sea - ibex, hares, hyraxes, jackals, foxes, and even leopards.
Hundreds of bird species
inhabit the zone as well and nature reserves were established by both Jordan
and Israel.
In the Talmud the Dead Sea was called Yammah
shel Sedom, "the Sea of Sodom" and was considered within the
juridical boundary of Ereẓ Israel (tj, Shev. 6:1, 36c). According to R. Dimmi,
"no one ever drowns in the Sea of Sodom" (Shab. 108b). Throwing an
object into the sea was suggested as a means of disposing of a religiously or
morally undesirable advantage which a person had received unintentionally (Av.
Zar. 3:9; Av. Zar. 49b; Tosef., Dem. 6:13, etc.). The
Talmud (Shab. 108b) mentions the density of the water, and says that a bath in
the Dead Sea is considered good for certain ills, especially diseases of the
eye, although the salt extracted from the sea was considered noxious to the
eyes (Ḥul. 105b). Because of the poisonous air about the sea no ship sailed on
it.
In Joshua 15:62,
Ein Gedi, located midway on the
western side of the Sea, was enumerated among the wilderness cities of
the Tribe of Judah in the desert of Betharaba,
and in Ezekiel 47:10,
it was prophesied that one day, its coastal location will make it into a
fishing village, after the water of the Dead Sea has been made sweet: Fishing
nets will be spread from En-gedi to En-eglaim.
Fleeing from King Saul, David hid
in Ein Gedi (1 Samuel 23:29 and 24:1-2)
and Saul sought him "even upon the most craggy rocks, which are accessible
only to wild goats" (1 Samuel 24:2). Psalm 63, subtitled a Psalm of David
when he was in the wilderness of Judah, has been associated with David's
sojourn in the desert of En-gedi. The Song of Songs (Song of
Solomon 1:14) speaks of the "vineyards of En
Gedi". The town was mentioned many times in the Mishna,
as a producer of persimmon for the temple's fragrance and for export,
using a secret recipe. "Sodomite salt" was an essential mineral for
the temple's holy incense, but was said to be dangerous for home use and could
cause blindness. 2 Chronicles 20:2 noted that Ein Gedi was
surrounded with an abundance of palm groves. It was here that the Moabites and Ammonites gathered
in order to fight King Josaphat of
Judah. Ein Gedi was destroyed or abandoned after the Babylonian destruction of Jerusalem in 587/86 BCE.
In the 2nd century BCE, it received a fortress and became a
royal Hasmonean estate.
The Jewish historian Josephus writes that Masada was first fortified by Hasmonean ruler Alexander Jannaeus in the
first century BCE. It survived the siege of the last Hasmonean king Antigonus II Mattathias, who ruled
with Parthian support.
Josephus further writes that Herod the Great captured it in the power struggle
that followed the death of his father Antipater and between
37 and 31 BCE, built a large fortress on the plateau as a refuge for himself in
the event of a revolt. He also erected there two palaces.
During the
Roman occupation, John the Baptist was imprisoned by Herod Antipas at
the fortress of Machaerus, on the
eastern bank, and died there. At the same time, groups of Essenes settled
on western bank including the fortress of Qumran which was constructed
during the reign of John Hyrcanus (134–104 BCE)
or somewhat later. When the Jewish Revolt against Rome broke out in 66, Vespasian's ships would often
pursue Jewish refugees fleeing by way of the Dead Sea. At the same time, the
extremist Jewish rebel group, the Sicarii,
antagonists to the Zealots, overcame the Roman garrison of Masada with the aid
of a ruse. After the destruction of the Second Temple in
70, additional members of the Sicarii fled Jerusalem and settled in
Masada after slaughtering the Roman garrison. Josephus writes that the
Sicarii would raid nearby Jewish villages including Ein Gedi,
where they massacred 700 women and children. The siege of
Masada by Roman troops
from 73 to 74, at the end of the First Jewish–Roman War,
ended in the mass suicide of
960 Sicarii rebels who were hiding there. Qumran
was also destroyed. Documents from the time of the Bar Kokhba
War (132–135) found in the surrounding caves indicate that En-Gedi was the main
supply port for the Jewish army during the final phase of this war. Later, Ein
Gedi became an important source of balsam for
the Greco-Roman world until its destruction by Byzantine emperor Justinian as part of his persecution of the
Jews in his realm.
From that
time until the modern era, the Dead Sea area was totally desolate save for a
few Bedouin. After the find of the "Moabite Stone"
in 1868 on a plateau east of the Dead Sea, Moses Wilhelm Shapira, a Polish-Jewish
antiquities dealer, and his partner Salim al-Khouri, forged and sold a
whole range of presumed "Moabite" antiquities, and in 1883 Shapira
presented what is now known as the "Shapira Strips", a supposedly
ancient scroll written on leather strips which he claimed had been found near
the Dead Sea. The strips were declared to be forgeries and Shapira took his own
life in disgrace.
In 1929, Moshe
Novomeysky,
a Jewish engineer from Siberia who first visited the Dead Sea area in 1911, won
the British government tender for potash mining on its northern shore after
working for the charter for over ten years. The site’s marshland was drained
and housing was built to accommodate employees of the newly-founded Palestine Potash Company (today, the Dead Sea Works) and its first plant was
established on the site. Kibbutz Kalia
was born. The plant produced potash, or potassium chloride, by solar
evaporation of the brine. It employed both Arabs (mainly from Jericho) and
Jews. The next year, on
the initiative of Novomeysky
and Palestine Potash, the first potash and bromine works were built at Rabbat Ashlag near Kalia in 1930 and it
grew into the largest industrial site in the Middle East. In
1934, the company built a second plant on the southwestern shore, in the Mount Sedom area.
A supplementary plant in
the same location was opened in 1937. Among the pioneers working at both places
was a group composed of members of Ha-Kibbutz ha-Me'uḥad which called itself
"Pelugat Yam ha-Melaḥ."
During the late 30s, Kalia opened a resort hotel. It was
spared the violence of the Arab riots due to good relations with the Arabs and during
World War II, Palestine Potash Company supplied half of Britain's potash. In 1939, kibbutz Bet ha-Aravah was established
northeast of Rabbat Ashlag. Beginning in 1947, hundreds of
religious documents dated between 150 BCE and 70 CE were found by a local
Bedouin in caves near the ancient settlement of Qumran,
about one mile inland from the northwestern shore of the Dead Sea. They became
known as the Dead Sea Scrolls.
During the
War of Independence, the Dead Sea area suffered major damage. The potash plants
on both ends of the Sea were destroyed by the Jordanians. Despite negotiations between the
Kalia leadership and Jordan's Arab Legion to preserve the
kibbutz under Jordanian occupation, the imprisonment of Jews in the Jordanian-occupied
Naharayim complex and the Kfar Etzion massacre, not to
mention their total isolation, led David Ben-Gurion to
call for the residents' evacuation and their consolidation in the southern Dead
Sea. Residents of Kalia and nearby Beit HaArava ultimately
fled by boat on May 20 and the two kibbutzim were destroyed by the Jordanians.
The area remained unpopulated save a Jordanian military camp. In
"Operation Lot" (October 1948) overland contact with Sedom was
reestablished, and in March 1949 units of the Israeli Army moved along the Dead
Sea shore north to the site of En-Gedi which had been allocated to the Jewish
state in the 1947 UN partition plan.
After the War, all points north of the Ein Gedi, which
included places like Qumran, was off-limits to Israelis, and Jews in general,
with rare exceptions. In 1966, Jewish journalist and archaeologist Solomon
Steckoll received rights from the Jordanian government to excavate in the
Qumran area.
After the War, the chief of staff of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), Moshe Dayan, initiated the
practice of holding the swearing-in ceremony of Israeli Armoured Corps soldiers
who had completed their tironut (IDF basic training) on top of Masada. The
ceremony ended with the declaration: "Masada shall not fall again."
By 1952, the
Palestine Potash Company was revived as the Dead Sea
Works, a state-owned enterprise. In 1953, the ancient town of Ein
Gedi was revived as a kibbutz. And in
1955, the new Sedom potash plant of the Dead Sea Works began operating after
the Beersheba-Sedom highway was
completed. This highway was followed the next year with the building of the Sedom-Ein Gedi motor road. The Arad-Sedom and Sedom-Eilat highways were constructed in 1964 and 1967
respectively. These not only aided production and marketing of the Dead Sea
Works but also created conditions for the development of the tourism and
recreation in the region.
Archaeological activity has always been intense in
this area, especially in and around Masada, Ein Gedi, and Qumran, and
especially since independence. After visiting Masada several times in the 1930s
and 1940s, Shmarya Guttman conducted an initial probe
excavation in 1959. Ten years later, Yigael Yadin discovered a few skeletal
remains at the site. After concluding that they were the Jewish defenders
against Rome, they were reburied in a state ceremony by Israel’s rabbinate. Other
famed Israeli archaeologists who conducted excavations in the area include:
Yohanan Aharoni, Amir Drori,
Yitzhak Magen, Magen Broshi, Hanan Eshel, Yuval Peleg, Oren Gutfield,
and Yizhar Hirschfeld. A 2,000-year-old Judean date palm seed discovered
during excavations in the early 1960s was successfully germinated into a date plant, popularly known as
"Methuselah" after the longest-living figure
in the Hebrew Bible. At the time, it was
the oldest known germination, remaining so until a new record was set in
2012. As of September 2016, it remains the oldest germination from a seed.
Since the early 60s, major hotels
were built along the Dead Sea. Neve
Zohar, in ancient times, a major transport junction, was re-established in
1964 as a work camp for Dead Sea factory workers. It was named after the Zohar Stream, a wadi that flows into
the Dead Sea. The liberation
of the Judean Desert from Arab
occupation, and the entire west coast of the Dead Sea by Israel in the Six-Day War made
the region again easily accessible from Jerusalem. Kalia was re-established, as
a paramilitary Nahal settlement in 1968, the first in the
area. It was turned over to civilian use in 1972. In the late 1960s a
restaurant, hotel, picnic camps, and a museum
of the Dead Sea Works were opened at Shefekh
Zohar, as well as the Ein Bokek
resort complex making use of medicinal springs and thermal mud, youth
hostels, etc. In 1970, the town of Mitzpe
Shalem was founded in 1970 as a Nahal
settlement and became a kibbutz in 1976. It was named
after Natan Shalem who investigated the area
of the Judean Desert where the kibbutz
is located. In 1971, the Ein Gedi nature
reserve was founded. The settlement Ein Tamar
was established in August 1982 by 24 families on the site of the Biblical town
of the same name near the Hatzeva Fortress near Ir Ovot. Ein Tamar and the
neighboring village of Neot HaKikar are among
the country's most remote places, forty minutes away from the nearest city, Dimona. Ovnat
was founded in
mid-2004 where a Nahal settlement previously existed. The religious high school "Yiftach"
is located there, and some of the residents work there. The Ein Gedi
race, also known as the Shalom Marathon – Dead Sea Half Marathon is
a popular road running event over several distances that has been held by the Tamar Regional Council since 1983. In
1988, Ahava Skin Care products was
established in Mitzpe Shalem.
In 1995, the Dead Sea Works was privatized and it is now owned
by Israel Chemicals. In 2007, the Masada Museum in Memory of Yigael Yadin opened at the site, in
which archeological findings are displayed in a theatrical setting. The
world's lowest installed ATM is at
Ein Bokek; it was installed independently by a grocery store at 1,381 feet below
sea level.
The Dead Sea
temporarily comes to life in the wake of rainy winters. In 1980, after one such
rainy winter, the normally dark blue Dead Sea turned red. Researchers
from Hebrew University of Jerusalem found
the Dead Sea to be teeming with a type of algae called Dunaliella. Dunaliella in
turn nourished carotenoid-containing (red-pigmented) halobacteria,
whose presence caused the color change. Since 1980, the Dead Sea basin has been
dry and the algae and the bacteria have not returned in measurable numbers. In
2011 a group of scientists from Israel and Germany discovered fissures in the
floor of the Dead Sea by scuba diving and observing the surface. These fissures
allow fresh and brackish water to enter the Dead Sea. They sampled biofilms
surrounding the fissures and discovered numerous species of bacteria and archaea.
In December
2013, Israel, Jordan and the Palestinian Authority signed
an agreement for laying a water pipeline
to link the Red Sea with the Dead Sea. The pipeline will be 110 miles long and
is estimated to take up to five years to complete.
Neve Midbar Beach at the northern end of the Dead Sea is
a small private resort with a section of the shore set aside as a nude beach. Metsoke Dragot Beach by
the Dead Sea,
is an oasis where a couple of sweet water springs pour into the Dead Sea.
The Dead Sea area has become a location for health research and
potential treatment for several reasons. The mineral content of the water, the
low content of pollens and other allergens in
the atmosphere, the reduced ultraviolet component
of solar
radiation, and the higher atmospheric pressure at this great
depth each may have specific health
effects. For example, persons experiencing reduced respiratory function from diseases such
as cystic fibrosis seem to benefit from the
increased atmospheric pressure. Rhinosinusitis patients
receiving Dead Sea saline nasal
irrigation exhibited improved symptom relief compared to
standard hypertonic saline spray in one study. Dead Sea mud pack
therapy has been suggested to temporarily relieve pain in patients with osteoarthritis of
the knees. The Zohar Hot Springs are
located three kilometers south of Ein Bokek. Rich in sulphur, the water is
believed to be particularly beneficial in the treatment of muscular ailments,
diseases of the joints and allergies.
No comments:
Post a Comment