Jews have lived at En Gedi for a very long time. In fact, the history of En Gedi is inextricably intertwined with the history of the Jewish nation. In the Bible, En Gedi is one of the cities that Joshua assigned to the tribe of Judah (Josh. 15:62), and David sought refuge there from Saul (I Sam. 24:1–2). When Jeroboam’s rebellion split the kingdom of David and Solomon into two, En Gedi became part of the southern kingdom of Judah: “The report was brought to [the Judean king] Jehoshaphat: ‘A great multitude is coming against you from beyond the sea, from Aram, and is now in Hazazon-tamar’ – that is, En Gedi” (II Chron. 20:2). When the Babylonians conquered Judah and destroyed the Temple of Solomon, they also destroyed En Gedi. And when the Persian conqueror Cyrus the Great defeated the Babylonians and allowed the Jews to return to their homeland and rebuild their Temple, the Jews rebuilt En Gedi, too. En Gedi flourished under the Hasmonean (Maccabean) kingdom, established after the Jewish revolt against the Syrian tyrant Antiochus Epiphanes that is commemorated by the holiday of Hanukah. The Romans brought the Hasmonean kingdom to an end when they occupied Judea, and they destroyed the settlement at En Gedi -- and the Second Temple -- during the First Jewish Revolt (66 - 70 C.E.). The Romans later rebuilt En Gedi and used it to garrison their troops, but it again fell under Jewish control during the Second (Bar Kokhba) Jewish Revolt (132 - 135 C.E.). (Interestingly, the Christian sect refused to join the Bar Kokhba revolt, perhaps because some Jews believed Bar Kokhba, the leader of the revolt, to be the Messiah.) The Romans bloodily suppressed the revolt – Jewish war casualties numbered 580,000, not including those who died of hunger and disease – and destroyed En Gedi once again, but the Jews established a new settlement there in the third century C.E. Eusebius, one of the Church Fathers, described En Gedi during the Roman-Byzantine period as a very large Jewish village. A fire destroyed it in the sixth century C.E., and – with the exception of a Mameluke village in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries – En Gedi remained in ruins until the creation of the State of Israel in 1948, when Jews once again returned to rebuild this ancient settlement.
Today En Gedi is the site of a kibbutz (collective farm) and a nature reserve. A. and I hiked through the nature reserve and swam in the streams and pools fed by the natural springs.
Now, as in the past, human beings share the oasis with desert wildlife.
En Gedi has long been famous for its excellent dates; the Roman scholar Pliny, for example, wrote about them in his Natural History. We picked a few dates and ate them at home, but we decided that either they were not ripe yet or else we preferred them dried.
The Dead Sea apple (also known as the Apple of Sodom) is also common in En Gedi. Mark Twain described it this way: “Nothing grows in the flat, burning desert around [the Dead Sea] but weeds and the Dead Sea apple the poets say is beautiful to the eye, but crumbles to ashes and dust when you break it. Such as we found were not handsome, but they were bitter to the taste. They yielded no dust. It was because they were not ripe perhaps.”
We also saw the remains of an ancient synagogue from the Byzantine period, discovered during the plowing of a field in the 1960s.
The synagogue’s beautiful mosaic floor depicts peacocks eating grapes.
Hebrew and Aramaic inscriptions on the mosaic floor include a genealogy from Adam to Japheth, a list of the months, the signs of the zodiac, and dedications to donors who contributed to the erection of the synagogue. Another inscription threatens to curse “anyone causing a controversy between a man and his fellows or who slanders his friends before the gentiles or steals the property of his friends, or anyone revealing the secret of the town [probably the method used to cultivate and process persimmon, the source of the town’s wealth – W.Y.] to the gentiles.”
The nineteenth-century philosopher Nachman Krochmal believed that the eternity of the Jewish people was assured by the continual renewal of its national life. All nations, he argued, experienced the same three stages of development: growth, vigor, and decline. But unlike other nations, whose development culminated in their eventual disappearance, the Jews have repeatedly risen from the ashes, Phoenix-like, to commence the process all over again. Seeing En Gedi rebuilt amidst the ruins of this ancient synagogue, it’s hard not to be convinced by Nachman Krochmal. Perhaps, for the Jews, the twentieth century was not the End of History, but another renewal out of the ashes of annihilation.
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