Tomb of Samuel
The Tomb of Samuel Hebrew: קבר שמואל הנביא, translit. Kever Shmuel ha-Nevi. An-Nabi Samu'il or Nebi Samwil), is the traditional burial site of the biblical Hebrew and Islamic prophet Samuel, atop a steep hill at an elevation of 908 meters above sea level, it is situated in the Palestinian village of Nabi Samwil in the West Bank, 1.3 kilometers north of the Jerusalem neighborhood of Ramot. On the site is a building containing a mosque built in the 18th century, a church; the tomb itself is located in an underground chamber. The Israeli Ministry of Tourism website states "Over time every ancient Jewish traveler mentioned the place and its synagogue." It is located in the Seam Zone annexed in an enclave by the Israeli West Bank barrier together with the Israeli settlement of Giv'at Ze'ev. Yitzhak Magen conducted archaeological excavations from 1992–2003. On the southeastern slope is a 4-acre urban settlement dating back to the 8th-7th centuries BCE, remnants that Magen believed to be the Mizpah in Benjamin of the Book of Samuel.
By contrast, Jeffrey Zorn concluded that there are no remains at the site, from the period in which the Samuel narratives are set, it could therefore not be Mizpah. Magen's own conclusions have been criticised for stretching the evidence beyond the obvious implications, which he himself hints at: We did not find any remains from the time of the Judges... not a single structure or a standing wall from this period. On this basis, it might be tempting to conclude that the site was unoccupied at this time... However, if Mizpah in Benjamin was Tell en-Nasbeh on the Nablus Road, Ishmael who had assassinated Gedaliah would not have fled to Ammon via Gibeon, located to the west near Nabi Samwil which overlooks Jerusalem. Furthermore, Judas Machabeus, preparing for war with the Syrians, gathered his men "to Maspha, over against Jerusalem: for in Maspha was a place of prayer heretofore in Israel". A large monastery was built by the Byzantines. There is no clear evidence that the place was considered the Tomb of Samuel, or indeed a place of religious significance, before Byzantine times.
Magen argues that the builders of the monastery did not believe they were building over the tomb of Samuel, instead regarding their construction only as a memorial. The fifth century writer Jerome, for example, argues that Samuel's remains were moved to Chalcedon, on the orders of Emperor Arcadius. A sixth-century Christian author identified the site as Samuel's burial place. According to the Bible, the prophet is buried at his hometown, Ramah, to the east of the hill, located near Geba; the 12th-century Jewish traveler Benjamin of Tudela visited the site when he traveled the land in 1173, writing that the Crusaders had found the bones of Samuel in a Jewish cemetery in Ramla on the coastal plain and reburied here, overlooking the Holy City. He wrote; this may refer to the abbey church of St. Samuel built by Premonstratensian canons and inhabited from 1141 to 1244. Raymond of Aguilers, who wrote a chronicle of the First Crusade, relates that on the morning of June 7, 1099, the Crusaders reached the summit of Nebi Samuel, when they saw the city of Jerusalem, which they had not yet seen, they fell to the ground and wept in joy.
The Crusaders built a fortress on the spot, razed by the Mamelukes. Some identify the location with the Biblical temple of Gibeon, though consensus among experts places it at the village of al Jib. Jews had begun efforts to found a village at the site in 1890 called Ramah after the biblical home of Samuel, referred to by the name of the group which had purchased the lands, Nahalat Yisrael. Over the next five years various attempts to actualise the plan had failed due to bureaucratic obstacles, but in 1895, 13 Yemenite Jewish families joined the group and succeeded in the endeavour engaging in agriculture there. Nebi Samuel's strategic location made it the site of battles during the British conquest of Ottoman Palestine in 1917, the village was badly damaged from artillery fire and abandoned, it was resettled in 1921. The mosque built in 1730 was damaged in the battle between the British and the Turks in 1917, it was restored in World War I. The location was again significant in the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, the 1967 Six-Day War, was used by artillery of the Jordanian Arab Legion to bombard Jerusalem, in addition to being a base for attacks on Jewish traffic during the 1948 siege of Jerusalem.
The tomb, in Area C, is located on the Israeli side of the Israeli West Bank barrier with the nearby Giv'at Ze'ev. Nebi Samuel and the surrounding archeological excavations are now part of a national park; the original village located on the hilltop is still inhabited by 20 Palestinian families. Both Jewish and Muslim prayers are held at the tomb. Many religious Jews visit the tomb on the 28th of Iyar, the anniversary of Samuel the Prophet's death. Reiter, Yitzhak, "Contest or cohabitation in shared holy places? The Cave of the Patriarchs and Samuel's Tomb" in Breger and Hammer, "Holy Places in the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict", Routledge The Institute for Historical Justice and Reconciliation, "Sacred Sites in the Holy Land: Historical and Religious Perspectives", The Hague, 2011. Www.historyandreconciliation.org/publications/includes/sacred_sites-english.pdf Media related to Tomb of
Negev
The Negev is a desert and semidesert region of southern Israel. The region's largest city and administrative capital is Beersheba, in the north. At its southern end is the Gulf of Aqaba and the resort city of Eilat, it contains several development towns, including Dimona and Mitzpe Ramon, as well as a number of small Bedouin cities, including Rahat and Tel as-Sabi and Lakyah. There are several kibbutzim, including Revivim and Sde Boker; the desert is home to the Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, whose faculties include the Jacob Blaustein Institutes for Desert Research and the Albert Katz International School for Desert Studies, both located on the Midreshet Ben-Gurion campus adjacent to Sde Boker. Although a separate region, the Negev was added to the proposed area of Mandatory Palestine to become Israel, on 10 July 1922, having been conceded by British representative St John Philby ”in Trans-Jordan’s name”. In October 2012, global travel guide publisher Lonely Planet rated the Negev second on a list of the world's top ten regional travel destinations for 2013, noting its current transformation through development.
The origin of the word'negev' is from the Hebrew root denoting'dry'. In the Bible, the word Negev is used for the direction'south'. In Arabic, the Negev is known as al-Naqab or an-Naqb, though it was not thought of as a distinct region until the demarcation of the Egypt-Ottoman frontier in the 1890s and has no traditional Arabic name. During the British Mandate, it was called Beersheba sub-district; the Negev covers more than half of Israel, over some 13,000 km² or at least 55% of the country's land area. It forms an inverted triangle shape whose western side is contiguous with the desert of the Sinai Peninsula, whose eastern border is the Arabah valley; the Negev has a number of interesting geological features. Among the latter are three enormous, craterlike makhteshim, which are unique to the region: Makhtesh Ramon, HaMakhtesh HaGadol, HaMakhtesh HaKatan; the Negev is a rocky desert. It is a melange of brown, dusty mountains interrupted by wadis and deep craters, it can be split into five different ecological regions: northern and central Negev, the high plateau and the Arabah Valley.
The northern Negev, or Mediterranean zone, receives 300 mm of rain annually and has fertile soils. The western Negev receives 250 mm of rain per year, with light and sandy soils. Sand dunes can reach heights of up to 30 metres here. Home to the city of Beersheba, the central Negev has an annual precipitation of 200 mm and is characterized by impervious soil, known as loess, allowing minimum penetration of water with greater soil erosion and water runoff; the high plateau area of Negev Mountains/Ramat HaNegev stands between 370 metres and 520 metres above sea level with extreme temperatures in summer and winter. The area gets 100 mm of rain per year, with inferior and salty soils; the Arabah Valley along the Jordanian border stretches 180 km from Eilat in the south to the tip of the Dead Sea in the north. The Arabah Valley is arid with 50 mm of rain annually, it has inferior soils. Vegetation in the Negev is sparse, but certain trees and plants thrive there, among them Acacia, Retama, Urginea maritima and Thymelaea.
A small population of Arabian leopards, an endangered animal in the Arabian peninsula, survives in the southern Negev. The Negev Tortoise is a critically endangered species that lives only in the sands of the western and central Negev Desert; the Negev shrew is a species of mammal of the family Soricidae found only in Israel. Hyphaene thebaica or doum palm can be found in the Southern Negev. Evrona is the most northerly point in the world; the Negev region is arid, receiving little rain due to its location to the east of the Sahara, extreme temperatures due to its location 31 degrees north. However the northernmost areas of the Negev, including Beersheba, are semi-arid; the usual rainfall total from June through October is zero. Snow and frost are rare in the northern Negev, snow and frost are unknown in the vicinity of Eilat in the southernmost Negev. Nomadic life in the Negev dates back at least 4,000 years and as much as 7,000 years; the first urbanized settlements were established by a combination of Canaanite, Amorite and Edomite groups circa 2000 BC.
Pharaonic Egypt is credited with introducing copper mining and smelting in both the Negev and the Sinai between 1400 and 1300 BC. In the Bible, the term Negev only relates to the northern, semiarid part of what we call Negev today, located in the general area of the Arad-Beersheba Valley. According to the Book of Genesis chapter 13, Abraham lived for a while in the Negev after being banished from Egypt. During the Exodus journey to the promised land, Moses sent twelve scouts into the Negev to assess the land and population; the northern part of biblical Negev was inhabited by the Tribe of Judah and the southern part of biblical Negev by the Tribe of Simeon. The Negev was part of the Kingdom of Solomon, with varied extension to the s
Dead Sea
The Dead Sea is a salt lake bordered by Jordan to the east and Israel and the West Bank to the west. It lies in the Jordan Rift Valley, its main tributary is the Jordan River, its surface and shores are 430.5 metres below Earth's lowest elevation on land. It is 304 m deep, the deepest hypersaline lake in the world. With a salinity of 342 g/kg, or 34.2%, it is one of the world's saltiest bodies of water – 9.6 times as salty as the ocean – and has a density of 1.24 kg/litre, which makes swimming similar to floating. This salinity makes for a harsh environment in which plants and animals cannot flourish, hence its name; the Dead Sea's main, northern basin is 50 kilometres long and 15 kilometres wide at its widest point. The Dead Sea has attracted visitors from around the Mediterranean Basin for thousands of years, it was one of the world's first health resorts, it has been the supplier of a wide variety of products, from asphalt for Egyptian mummification to potash for fertilisers. The Dead Sea is receding at an alarming rate.
The recession of the Dead Sea has begun causing problems, multiple canals and pipelines proposals exist to reduce its recession. One of these proposals is the Red Sea–Dead Sea Water Conveyance project, carried out by Jordan, which will provide water to neighbouring countries, while the brine will be carried to the Dead Sea to help stabilise its water level; the first phase of the project is scheduled to begin in 2018 and be completed in 2021. In Hebrew, the Dead Sea is Yām ha-Melaḥ, meaning "sea of salt"; the Bible uses this term alongside two others: the Sea of the Arabah, the Eastern Sea. The designation "Dead Sea" never appears in the Bible. In prose sometimes the term Yām ha-Māvet is due to the scarcity of aquatic life there. In Arabic the Dead Sea is called al-Bahr al-Mayyit, or less baḥrᵘ lūṭᵃ. Another historic name in Arabic was the "Sea of Zoʼar", after a nearby town in biblical times; the Greeks called it Lake Asphaltites. The Dead Sea is an endorheic lake located in the Jordan Rift Valley, a geographic feature formed by the Dead Sea Transform.
This left lateral-moving transform fault lies along the tectonic plate boundary between the African Plate and the Arabian Plate. It runs between the East Anatolian Fault zone in Turkey and the northern end of the Red Sea Rift offshore of the southern tip of Sinai, it is here that the Upper Jordan River/Sea of Galilee/Lower Jordan River water system comes to an end. The Jordan River is the only major water source flowing into the Dead Sea, although there are small perennial springs under and around the Dead Sea, forming pools and quicksand pits along the edges. There are no outlet; the Mujib River, biblical Arnon, is one of the larger water sources of the Dead Sea other than the Jordan. The Wadi Mujib valley, 420 m below the sea level in the southern part of the Jordan valley, is a biosphere reserve, with an area of 212 km2. Other more substantial sources are Wadi Darajeh /Nahal Dragot, Nahal Arugot. Wadi Hasa is another wadi flowing into the Dead Sea. Rainfall is scarcely 100 mm per year in the northern part of the Dead Sea and 50 mm in the southern part.
The Dead Sea zone's aridity is due to the rainshadow effect of the Judaean Mountains. The highlands east of the Dead Sea receive more rainfall than the Dead Sea itself. To the west of the Dead Sea, the Judaean mountains rise less steeply and are much lower than the mountains to the east. Along the southwestern side of the lake is a 210 m tall halite formation called "Mount Sodom". There are two contending hypotheses about the origin of the low elevation of the Dead Sea; the older hypothesis is that the Dead Sea lies in a true rift zone, an extension of the Red Sea Rift, or of the Great Rift Valley of eastern Africa. A more recent hypothesis is that the Dead Sea basin is a consequence of a "step-over" discontinuity along the Dead Sea Transform, creating an extension of the crust with consequent subsidence. Around 3.7 million years ago, what is now the valley of the Jordan River, Dead Sea, the northern Wadi Arabah was inundated by waters from the Mediterranean Sea. The waters formed in a narrow, crooked bay, called by geologists the Sedom Lagoon, connected to the sea through what is now the Jezreel Valley.
The floods of the valley went depending on long-scale climate change. The Sedom Lagoon deposited beds of salt that became 2.5 km thick. Two million years ago, the land between the Rift Valley and the Mediterranean Sea rose to such an extent that the ocean could no longer flood the area. Thus, the long lagoon became a landlocked lake; the Sedom Lagoon extended at its maximum from the Sea of Galilee in the north to somewhere around 50 km south of the current southern end of the Dead Sea, the subsequent lakes never surpassed this expanse. The Hula Depression was never part of any of these water bodies due to its higher elevation and the high threshold of the Korazim block separating it from the Sea of Galilee basin; the first prehistoric lake to follow the Sedom Lagoon is named Lake Amora, followed by Lake Lisan and by the Dead Sea. The water levels and salinity of these lakes have either risen or fallen as an effect of the tectonic dropping of the valley bo
Castel National Park
Castel National Park is an Israeli national park, which consists of a fortified summit in the Judean Mountains, at the site of the former Arab village of Al-Qastal, known to Hebrew-speakers as HaCástel, "the Cástel". It is located 8 km west of Jerusalem on the road linking it to Tel Aviv; the site is known as the place of the key battles of Operation Nachshon, which were fought there in April 1948 during the 1948 Arab–Israeli War. Fierce battles that claimed many lives took place there as Arabs and Jews fought for control of the site, which overlooked the main Tel Aviv-Jerusalem highway. Castel exchanged hands several times in the course of the fighting; the tides turned when Abd al-Qadir al-Husayni, was killed. Many of the Arabs left their positions to attend al-Husayni's funeral at the Al-Aqsa Mosque on Friday, April 9; that same day, Castel fell to the Israeli forces unopposed. The national park includes a memorial for the Israeli soldiers who died there, including a monument designed in 1980 by Yitzhak Yamin and a memorial to the convoys that tried to break through the blockade of Jerusalem.
Due to its strategic location, settlement in the area go back to antiquity. The Romans built a fortress there, known as Castellum to ensure their control of the road to Jerusalem; the Crusaders built over the ruins of the Roman fortress a castle mentioned in chronicles as Castellum Belveer, of which no traces have been found. After the fall of the Crusaders, Castel disappeared from historical sources for centuries. An Arab village grew up around this spot; the muhktar's house was built on the ruins of the Crusader castle. During the British Mandate of Palestine, the British referred to this district as "The Castle". In 1947, the Arab siege on Jerusalem led to severe food rationing. With the population on the verge of starvation, supply vehicles began travelling the road in convoys accompanied by guards. Buses and trucks were covered with steel plates surrounding a wooden board which made them heavy and cumbersome, their slow ascent to Jerusalem made them a perfect target. When the Arabs of al-Qastal saw a convoy approaching they would place a boulder across the narrow road and hide among the trees.
When the driver stopped to clear the road, they massacred everyone in sight. By April 1, 1948, when Jerusalem had run out of water and the population was reduced to eating plants, the Palmach launched Operation Nachshon; the commandos met with little resistance. When word of the Castel's fall reached Arab leaders, they ordered revered commander Abd al-Qadir al-Husayni to take it back. Thousands answered his call to arms. Equipped with knives, rifles and explosives, they ascended the hill in waves, attacked for five days; the Jewish defenders ran out of food and ammunition, reinforcements failed to arrive. On April 8, two guards spotted three unidentified figures walking up the slopes and opened fire on them. Two fled. An hour a soldier listening to Arabic radio broadcasts heard a phrase repeated over and over: "The bird fell in the cage." The "bird" was a code word for al-Huysani. Masses of Arabs opened fire on three fronts. Many of the Jewish fighters were killed, the Castel was recaptured; the next day, Palmah commandos found only a few people left on the hill.
The Arabs had gone to bury him. The Jewish village of Maoz Zion was established there in 1951 at the foot of Castel Hill. Today the entire hill with the fortress trenches is a memorial site; the site contains many bronze plaques which describe the course of the fighting in April 1948. National parks and nature reserves of Israel at the Israeli Parks Authority site
Yahweh
Yahweh was the national god of the Iron Age kingdoms of Israel and Judah. His exact origins are disputed, although they reach back to the early Iron Age and the Late Bronze: his name may have begun as an epithet of El, head of the Bronze Age Canaanite pantheon, but the earliest plausible mentions of Yahweh are in Egyptian texts that refer to a similar-sounding place name associated with the Shasu nomads of the southern Transjordan. In the oldest biblical literature, Yahweh is a typical ancient Near Eastern "divine warrior", who leads the heavenly army against Israel's enemies. By the end of the Babylonian exile, the existence of foreign gods was denied, Yahweh was proclaimed as the creator of the cosmos and the true god of all the world. There is no agreement on the origins of Yahweh, his name is not attested other than among the Israelites, seems not to have any reasonable etymology. He does not appear to have been a Canaanite god, although the Israelites were Canaanites; the head of the Canaanite pantheon was El, one theory holds that the word Yahweh is based on the Hebrew root HYH/HWH, meaning "cause to exist," as a shortened form of the phrase ˀel ḏū yahwī ṣabaˀôt, "El who creates the hosts", meaning the heavenly host accompanying El as he marched beside the earthly armies of Israel.
The argument has numerous weaknesses, among others, the dissimilar characters of the two gods, the fact that el dū yahwī ṣaba’ôt is nowhere attested either inside or outside the Bible. The oldest plausible recorded occurrence of Yahweh is as a place-name, "land of Shasu of yhw", in an Egyptian inscription from the time of Amenhotep III, the Shasu being nomads from Midian and Edom in northern Arabia. In this case a plausible etymology for the name could be from the root HWY, which would yield the meaning "he blows", appropriate to a weather divinity. There is considerable but not universal support for this view, but it raises the question of how he made his way to the north; the accepted Kenite hypothesis holds that traders brought Yahweh to Israel along the caravan routes between Egypt and Canaan. The strength of the Kenite hypothesis is that it ties together various points of data, such as the absence of Yahweh from Canaan, his links with Edom and Midian in the biblical stories, the Kenite or Midianite ties of Moses.
However, while it is plausible that the Kenites and others may have introduced Yahweh to Israel, it is unlikely that they did so outside the borders of Israel or under the aegis of Moses, as the Exodus story has it. Israel emerges into the historical record in the last decades of the 13th century BCE, at the end of the Late Bronze Age when the Canaanite city-state system was ending; the milieu from which Israelite religion emerged was accordingly Canaanite. El, "the kind, the compassionate," "the creator of creatures," was the chief of the Canaanite gods, he, not Yahweh, was the original "God of Israel"—the word "Israel" is based on the name El rather than Yahweh, he lived in a tent on a mountain from whose base originated all the fresh waters of the world, with the goddess Asherah as his consort. This pair made up the top tier of the Canaanite pantheon. Prominent in this group was Baal. Baal's sphere was the thunderstorm with its life-giving rains, so that he was a fertility god, although not quite the fertility god.
Below the seventy second-tier gods was a third tier made up of comparatively minor craftsman and trader deities, with a fourth and final tier of divine messengers and the like. El and his sons made up the Assembly of the Gods, each member of which had a human nation under his care, a textual variant of Deuteronomy 32:8–9 describes El dividing the nations of the world among his sons, with Yahweh receiving Israel: When the Most High gave to the nations their inheritance, when he separated humanity,he fixed the boundaries of the peoplesaccording to the number of divine beings. For Yahweh's portion is his people,Jacob his allotted heritage; the Israelites worshipped Yahweh alongside a variety of Canaanite gods and goddesses, including El, Asherah and Baal. In the period of the Judges and the first half of the monarchy, El and Yahweh became conflated in a process of religious syncretism; as a result, ’el became a generic term meaning "god", as opposed to the name of a worshipped deity, epithets such as El Shaddai came to be applied to Yahweh alone, diminishing the worship of El and strengthening the position of Yahweh.
Features of Baal, El and Asherah were absorbed into the Yahweh religion, Asherah becoming embodied in the feminine aspects of the Shekinah or divine presence, Baal's nature as a storm and weather god becoming assimilated into Yahweh's own identification with the storm. In the next stage the Yahweh religion separated itself from its Canaanite heritage, first by rejecting Baal-worship in the 9th century through the 8th to 6th centuries with prophetic condemnation of Baal, the asherim, sun-worship, worship on the "high places", practice
Bayt 'Itab
Bayt ʿIṭāb was a Palestinian Arab village located in the Jerusalem Subdistrict. The village is believed to have been inhabited since biblical times. An ancient tunnel which led to the village spring is associated with story of Samson. Prior to, after its incorporation into Crusader fiefdoms in the 12th century, its population was Arab. Sheikhs from the Lahham family clan, who were associated with the Qays tribo-political faction, ruled the village during Ottoman era. In the 19th century, this clan controlled 24 villages in the vicinity; the homes were built of stone. The local farmers cultivated cereals, fruit trees and olive groves and some engaged in livestock breeding. After a military assault on Bayt ʿIṭāb by Israeli forces in October 1948, the village was depopulated and demolished. Many of the villagers had fled to refugee camps in the West Bank less than 20 kilometres from the village. In 1950, an Israeli moshav, Nes Harim, was established north of the built up portion of Bayt'Itab, on an adjacent peak.
Bayt ʿIṭāb is identified with Enadab, a name that appears in a list of Palestinian towns compiled by Eusebius in the fourth century CE. In the mid-12th century, Bayt ʿIṭāb hosted an impressive maison forte, or hall house, in the ancient centre of the modern village, thought to have served as the residence of Johannes Gothman, a Frankish crusader knight; the building vaulted. Nonetheless, his wife was forced to sell his landholdings after he was taken prisoner by Islamic forces in 1161, in order to raise the money needed for his ransom, it was acquired by and made a fief of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre organised by the Order of the Holy Sepulchre. The Arabic name of the village appears in Latin transliteration as Bethaatap in a list recording the sale of the land holdings belonging to Gothman in 1161, its affiliations with the Crusader era has led some to erroneously characterize the village as "Crusader", when in fact its habitation by Arabs predates, persisted through and extended beyond this period.
Edward Robinson visited the village in 1838, described its stone houses, several of which had two storeys, as solidly built. In the center of the village were the ruins of a castle or tower. Robinson estimates, the village population was six to seven hundred people, he notes that Beit'Atab, as he transcribes it, was the chief town of the'Arkub district and the Nazir of the district lived there. Robinson recounts that he was "a good-looking man" from the Lahaam clan, that when they arrived in the village, he was sitting conversing with other sheikhs on a carpet under a fig tree. Rising to greet them, he invited them to stay for the night, but as they were in a hurry to see more of the country before the setting of the sun, so declined his offer. In the mid-19th century, the sheikh of Bayt'Itab was named'Utham al-Lahham, he had managed to escape and return. A supporter of the Qays faction, Lahham was in conflict with the Yamani faction leaders the sheikh of Abu Ghosh. In the 1850s the conflict between these two families over the control of the district of Bani Hasan dominated the area.
As Meron Benvenisti writes, al-Lahham waged "a bloody war against Sheik Mustafa Abu Ghosh, whose capital and fortified seat was in the village of Suba." In 1855, Mohammad Atallah in Bayt Nattif, a cousin of'Utham al-Lahham, contested his rule over the region. In order to win support from Abu Ghosh, Mohammad Atallah changed side over to the Yamani faction; this is said to have enraged'Utham al-Lahham. He raised a fighting force and fell on Bayt Nattif on 3 January 1855; the village lost 21 dead. According to an eyewitness description by the horrified British consul, James Finn, their corpses were mutilated. In February 1855, the Abu Ghosh-family came to the aid of Atallah, conquered Bayt ʿIṭāb, imprisoned ʿUtham al-Laḥḥām in his own house. With the help of one of the younger members of the Abu Ghosh-family, James Finn was able to negotiate a cease-fire between the Atallah and Lahham -factions in Bayt'Itab. For three years, relative peace reigned in the area. By the fall of 1859, when'Utham al-Lahham was ninety years old, both he and Mohammad Atallah were deported to Cyprus by Thurayya Pasha.
The rest of the Laḥḥām family was resettled in Ramla. When French explorer Victor Guérin visited the village in 1863, "he found that the Sheikh's house, with the adjoining houses, is built upon the site of an old fort, some vaults of which remain, seemed to him older than the Crusades; the people say that there is a subterranean passage from the castle to the spring at the bottom of the hill. They told him that the village of Eshua was called Ashtual, that between the villages of Sur'ah and Eshua is a waly consecrated to the Sheikh Gherib, known as the Kabr Shamshun, Tomb of Samson."Socin found from an official Ottoman village list from about 1870 that Bayt'Itab had a population of 241, with a total of 89 houses, though the population count included men, only. Hartmann found. In the late 19th century, Bayt ʿIṭāb was described as a village built on stone, perched on a rocky knoll that rose 60 to 100 feet above the surrounding hilly ridge, its population in 1875 was 700, all Muslim. Olive trees were cultivated on terraces to the north of the village.
A large cavern (18 feet wide and 6 feet
Arad, Israel
Arad is a city in the Southern District of Israel. It is located on the border of the Negev and Judean Deserts, 25 kilometres west of the Dead Sea and 45 kilometres east of Beersheba; the city is home to a diverse population of 25,530, including Ashkenazi and Sephardi Jews, both secular and religious and Black Hebrews, as well as new immigrants. After attempts to settle the area in the 1920s, Arad was founded in November 1962 as an Israeli development town, the first planned city in Israel. Arad's population grew with the Aliyah from the former Soviet Union and peaked in 2002 at 24,500 residents. Landmarks in Arad include the ruins of Tel Arad, Arad Park, a domestic airfield and Israel's first legal race circuit; the city is known for the Arad Festival. Arad is named after the Biblical Bronze Age Canaanite town located at Tel Arad, located 8 kilometers west of modern Arad; the Bible describes it as a Canaanite stronghold whose king kept the Israelites from moving from the Negev to the Judean Mountains, although Tel Arad was destroyed over 1,200 years before the arrival of the Israelites.
However, Shoshenq I's chronicles seem to mention a settlement in Tel Arad. After its destruction during the Canaanite era, the town lay abandoned for centuries before being resettled by the Israelites from the 11th century BC onward; the Israelites settled it as an unwalled piece of land cut off as an official or sacred domain was established on the upper hill. It was a garrison-town known as "The Citadel"; the citadel and sanctuary are believed to have been constructed at the time of Kings David and Solomon. Artifacts found within the sanctuary of the citadel reflect offerings of oil, wheat, etc. brought there by numerous people during the time of the Kingdom of Judah, up to Judah's fall to the Babylonians. Under the Judaean kings, the citadel was periodically refortified and rebuilt, until it was destroyed between 597 BCE and 577 BCE whilst Jerusalem was under siege by Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar II. However, during the Persian, Maccabean and early Muslim eras, locals continued to transport these items to the sacred precinct of the upper hill.
Markers of these ancient Israelite rituals remain to this day, with broken pottery littering the entire site. During the Byzantine period, the location was still identified by Eusebius, the name "Arad" was preserved by the Bedouins. Ancient Arad became a Christian bishopric. Stephanus, one of its bishops, was a signatory of the synodal letter of John III of Jerusalem against Severus of Antioch in 518 and took part in the 536 synod of the three Roman provinces of Palaestina Prima, Palaestina Secunda, Palaestina Salutaris against Anthimus I of Constantinople. No longer a residential bishopric, Arad is today listed by the Catholic Church; the first modern attempt to settle the area was made by the Yishuv, the body of Jewish residents in Mandatory Palestine, on 23 February 1921, when the British Mandate government allowed discharged soldiers from the Jewish Legion to settle in the area. Nine men and two women attempted the task, but after four months were forced to leave because water was not found in the area.
On 15 November 1960, a planning team, followed by a full-fledged committee on 29 December, was appointed by the Israeli cabinet to examine the possibility of establishing a city in the northeastern Negev desert and Arad region. An initial budget of 50,000 Israel pounds was granted for the project, headed by Aryeh Eliav. On 31 January 1961, the final location was chosen, plans were approved for roads and water connections. In March 1961, blueprints for a city of 10,000- 20,000 residents were drawn up. Yona Pitelson was planner; the plan took into account topography and climate, with residential buildings constructed with large inner courtyards that offered protection from the desert sun and wind. High density residential areas were built first in order to create an urban milieu and shorten walking distances; the oil company Nefta built a work camp in the area in July 1961, consisting of six temporary sheds, after oil was found there in commercial quantities. The town itself was established in 1962 by a group of young ex-kibbutz and ex-moshav members seeking an environment free of overcrowding, traffic and pollution.
The founding ceremony was held on 21 November, attended by then-Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion. It was one of the last development towns to be founded. According to the city website, Arad was the first pre-planned city in Israel; until 1964 Arad had about 160 families. After 1971 Arad began absorbing olim from the Soviet Union, but from English speaking countries and Latin America, its population increased from 4,000 in 1969 to 10,500 in 1974 and 12,400 in 1983. During the first half of the 1990s, Arad absorbed 6,000 immigrants from the former Soviet Union. In 1995, the city had 20,900 residents. Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin declared Arad a city on 29 June 1995. Arad is located on the western and southwestern Kidod Range, the Arad Plain, which marks the southwestern end of the Judean Desert, it is located 23 kilometers west of the southern end of the Dead Sea, is by road, 45 kilometers east of Beersheva, 111 kilometers south of Jerusalem, 138 kilometers south east of Tel Aviv, 219 kilometers north of the southern-most city of Eilat.
The city spans an area of 93,140
Israel
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