Holy Land day 7: Bethany, Qumran, Judean Desert

Today was a calmer day in our walk through the Holy Land. We went to Bethany, which is where his friend Lazaro, together with his sisters Marta and Maria, lived.

Bethany is in a straight line from Jerusalem to more than 5km, a little more by road. The Mount of Olives is the road that connects this town with Jerusalem.Here is the house of that saint and his sisters.It is a small Church with iconography referring to Jesus reviving Lazarus. Notice the fact that we do not say “resurrected” but “revived” because later Lázaro would die, and if he were “resurrected” his life would have no end.

Click to enlarge the images

After we went to explore the Judean desert we could see communities of Bedouins and Shepherds living as Jesus knew them, and we reached Qumran where the Dead Sea Scrolls were found. Qumran means in Arabic “Zone of two moons”, this is because the nights of Full Moon the reflection of the same on the Dead Sea that has no waves, creates the sensation of two Moons.It was during the 1950s that a Bedouin chasing a goat that had escaped him starts throwing stones inside a cave, the goat runs out and he hears something that breaks. Enter the cave and find some pots, which he breaks to see if he finds valuable things. So he took some leather and took it to a cobbler in Jerusalem to make sandals.He acknowledged that it was written in Hebrew and made the news known. So they bought the rolls from the Bedouins, and they found 10 more caves making a total of 11 caves with several vessels each. They contain 95% of the Old Testament written by Essenes in the 1st century.

The Essenes were Jewish scribes who lived in communities of men, these withdrew from Jerusalem to lead a monastic life to see that it was corrupting. John the Baptist was part of this community for a while, and it is possible that the idea of ​​baptizing with water was born in the fact that the Essenes did ablutions twice a day to purify themselves.The codices that were known until this discovery dated from Century VIII and are known like Codices of Aleppo while these were written in Century

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