JEWISH KING JESUS IS COMING AT THE RAPTURE FOR US IN THE CLOUDS-DON'T MISS IT FOR THE WORLD.THE BIBLE TAKEN LITERALLY- WHEN THE PLAIN SENSE MAKES GOOD SENSE-SEEK NO OTHER SENSE-LEST YOU END UP IN NONSENSE.GET SAVED NOW- CALL ON JESUS TODAY.THE ONLY SAVIOR OF THE WHOLE EARTH - NO OTHER.
1 COR 15:23-JESUS THE FIRST FRUITS-CHRISTIANS RAPTURED TO JESUS-FIRST FRUITS OF THE SPIRIT-23 But every man in his own order: Christ the firstfruits; afterward they that are Christ’s at his coming.ROMANS 8:23 And not only they, but ourselves also, which have the firstfruits of the Spirit, even we ourselves groan within ourselves, waiting for the adoption, to wit, the redemption of our body.(THE PRE-TRIB RAPTURE)
LUKE 21:28-29
28 And when these things begin to come to pass,(ALL THE PROPHECY SIGNS FROM THE BIBLE) then look up, and lift up your heads; for your redemption (RAPTURE) draweth nigh.
29 And he spake to them a parable; Behold the fig tree,(ISRAEL) and all the trees;(ALL INDEPENDENT COUNTRIES)
30 When they now shoot forth, ye see and know of your own selves that summer is now nigh at hand.(ISRAEL LITERALLY BECAME AND INDEPENDENT COUNTRY JUST BEFORE SUMMER IN MAY 14,1948.)
JOEL 2:3,30
3 A fire devoureth (ATOMIC BOMB) before them;(RUSSIAN-ARAB-MUSLIM ARMIES AGAINST ISRAEL) and behind them a flame burneth: the land is as the garden of Eden before them, and behind them a desolate wilderness; yea, and nothing shall escape them.
30 And I will shew wonders in the heavens and in the earth, blood, and fire, and pillars of smoke.(ATOMIC BOMB AFFECT)
ZECHARIAH 14:12-13
12 And this shall be the plague wherewith the LORD will smite all the people that have fought against Jerusalem; Their flesh shall consume away while they stand upon their feet,(DISOLVED FROM ATOMIC BOMB) and their eyes shall consume away in their holes,(DISOLVED FROM ATOMIC BOMB) and their tongue shall consume away in their mouth.(DISOLVED FROM ATOMIC BOMB)(BECAUSE NUKES HAVE BEEN USED ON ISRAELS ENEMIES)(GOD PROTECTS ISRAEL AND ALWAYS WILL)
13 And it shall come to pass in that day, that a great tumult from the LORD shall be among them; and they shall lay hold every one on the hand of his neighbour, and his hand shall rise up against the hand of his neighbour.(1/2-3 BILLION DIE IN WW3)(THIS IS AN ATOMIC BOMB EFFECT)
EZEKIEL 20:47
47 And say to the forest of the south, Hear the word of the LORD; Thus saith the Lord GOD; Behold, I will kindle a fire in thee, and it shall devour every green tree in thee, and every dry tree: the flaming flame shall not be quenched, and all faces from the south to the north shall be burned therein.
ZEPHANIAH 1:18
18 Neither their silver nor their gold shall be able to deliver them in the day of the LORD'S wrath; but the whole land shall be devoured by the fire of his jealousy: for he shall make even a speedy riddance of all them that dwell in the land.
MALACHI 4:1
1 For, behold, the day cometh, that shall burn as an oven;(FROM ATOMIC BOMBS) and all the proud, yea, and all that do wickedly, shall be stubble: and the day that cometh shall burn them up, saith the LORD of hosts, that it shall leave them neither root nor branch.
And here are the bounderies of the land that Israel will inherit either through war or peace or God in the future. God says its Israels land and only Israels land. They will have every inch God promised them of this land in the future.
Egypt east of the Nile River, Saudi Arabia, Israel, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, The southern part of Turkey and the Western Half of Iraq west of the Euphrates. Gen 13:14-15, Psm 105:9,11, Gen 15:18, Exe 23:31, Num 34:1-12, Josh 1:4.ALL THIS LAND ISRAEL WILL DEFINATELY OWN IN THE FUTURE, ITS ISRAELS NOT ISHMAELS LAND.12 TRIBES INHERIT LAND IN THE FUTURE
For first time in 18 years, Jews pray at biblical tombs in Palestinian village-Ultra-Orthodox worshipers enter PA-controlled area near Hebron under IDF guard to commemorate biblical prophets Gad and Nathan-TOI-By AFP-19 November 2017
Hundreds of Israeli Jews held a rare prayer session by a mosque in a Palestinian village in the West Bank early Sunday, an AFP photographer said.The Israeli army accompanied buses carrying over 300 ultra-Orthodox men, mostly from the Breslov Hasidic sect, to Younis mosque in Halhul, north of Hebron, where according to Jewish tradition biblical prophets Gad and Nathan are buried.One worshiper told AFP it was the first time in 18 years that Jews were allowed to pray at the site, deep in a Palestinian-controlled area.A military spokeswoman said the army and police forces accompanying the worshipers were attacked by Palestinians hurling “rocks and firebombs,” with the forces responding with riot dispersal means to “prevent further escalation.”No injuries were reported, the spokeswoman said.According to tradition, the graves are located inside the mosque, but the Jewish worshipers did not enter the holy site, rather holding an hour of pre-dawn prayers on the road outside before leaving, the photographer said.There are a number of sites holy to Jews in Palestinian-controlled areas in the West Bank that are the site of pilgrimages.Most popular are Rachel’s Tomb near Bethlehem, and the Tomb of Joseph in Nablus.On Friday, a Palestinian terrorist from Halhul rammed his car into Israeli civilians nearby, wounding two, before trying to stab soldiers and being shot.The army arrested a number of his family members and imposed a partial closure on the village, which by Sunday had been lifted, the army said.
IDF again fires at Syrian forces in Golan demilitarized zone-For second time in two days, Israeli tank fires a warning shot at Assad troops fortifying positions along the Israel-Syria cease-fire line-By Judah Ari Gross-TOI-19 November 2017
For the second time in two days, an IDF tank on Sunday fired a warning shot at Syrian forces operating in the demilitarized zone between the two countries, the army said.The shelling comes amid increased tensions as Israeli officials scramble to get better conditions in a ceasefire agreement for southern Syria, specifically to keep Shiite militias and other supporters of Syrian dictator Bashar Assad away from the border.In a statement, the Israeli military said the warning shot came because Syrian forces were constructing a fortified position in the demilitarized zone that runs along the border, in violation of the 1974 truce agreement between Israel and Syria.The agreement “prohibits the entry of heavy construction tools or military vehicles into the demilitarized zone,” the army said.“In response, the IDF fired a warning shot towards the area using a tank.” A similar warning shot was fired Saturday.There were no immediate reports of casualties on the Syrian side.After Saturday’s incident, the army filed a complaint with the United Nations peacekeeper force stationed on the Golan.An army spokesperson said it had not filed a second complaint for Sunday’s alleged violation.Saturday’s shelling occurred near the Druze town of Hader on the Syrian side. The town was the site of a suicide bombing earlier in the month that killed nine Syrian Druze and then sparked clashes between Syrian government forces and rebels.That incident led to an unusual move from Israel, which said it would defend the Druze population of the village.In a series of tweets, the army’s Arabic spokesman Avichay Adraee said the IDF was prepared to “support the village residents and work to prevent any harm or the occupation of the village, out of a commitment to the Druze population.”After the incident, dozens of Druze residents of Israel protested at the Syrian border against the escalating violence in Hader.The IDF’s announcement that it would protect Hader, which lies inside Syria, constituted a very rare example of a public intervention in the Syrian civil war raging across the border.The statement reflected ongoing pressure on Israeli leaders from the Druze communities in the Galilee and on the Golan to help their coreligionists across the border who are often caught in the crossfire between Sunni rebels and Alawite and Shiite pro-government forces.Over the past six years, Israel has clung to a hands-off policy toward the war, only getting involved when one of its “red lines” is transgressed. These “red lines” include the violation of Israeli sovereignty through deliberate or accidental attacks, Iranian-supported militias taking positions on the Golan border, and attempts to transfer advanced weapons to the Hezbollah terrorist group.Times of Israel staff contributed to this report.
IDF soldier injured as patrol comes under fire on Egypt border-Army says incident likely 'spillover' from internal fighting in Sinai between Egyptian forces and Islamic State-affiliated groups-By TOI staff-NOV 20,17
An Israeli soldier was lightly injured when an army vehicle traveling along the border with Egypt came under fire early Monday morning, the army said.The soldier was taken to the Soroka Medical Center in Beersheba for treatment.The IDF suspects that the gunfire was “spillover” from internal fighting between Egyptian forces and a Sinai-based Islamic State affiliate, but was investigating whether it may have been a deliberate attack, the army said.Sinai borders Israel and also the Gaza Strip for a few kilometers at the northern end of the restive peninsula. Islamic State-affiliated gunmen attack Egyptian security forces, and vice versa, there on a regular basis.In 2013, a 400-kilometer (245-mile) Israel-Egypt border fence was completed at an estimated cost of NIS 1.6 billion ($400 million), one of the largest construction projects in Israel’s history.The peninsula has seen rising tensions, rampant gunfights and terror attacks as the Egyptian army battles both insurgent jihadist groups and criminal smugglers.In February this year, an Islamic State-affiliated terror group claimed an attack that saw four rockets fired at the Red Sea resort city of Eilat in southern Israel from the Sinai Peninsula.The Islamic State Sinai Province said in a statement posted online, “A military squad fired a number of Grad rockets at communities of Jewish usurpers in the town of Eilat.”Sinai Province was set up in 2011, ostensibly to attack Israel by firing rockets across the 240-kilometer (149-mile) border or sabotaging a gas pipeline that runs between Egypt and Israel.But most of the fighting, by far, has been with Egyptian government forces, and attacks on Israel have been relatively rare.Jihadists have killed hundreds of Egyptian soldiers and policemen since the military overthrow of Islamist president Mohammed Morsi in 2013 unleashed a bloody crackdown on his supporters.In 2011, assailants who came from the Sinai killed eight Israelis in a triple ambush north of Eilat. Israeli forces in pursuit killed seven attackers and five Egyptian police.In 2013, four jihadists were killed by an Egyptian airstrike as they were about to fire a rocket at Israel, according to the Egyptian military.And in 2014, two patrolling Israeli soldiers were wounded by unidentified men who fired an anti-tank weapon from the Sinai during an attempted drug-smuggling operation, according to the Israeli military.Judah Ari Gross contributed to this report.
Arab League delivers harsh criticism of Iran and Hezbollah, but little action-Holding back on Security Council resolution, foreign ministers say they will 'brief' the UN body on Tehran's destabilizing policies in the region-By Hamza Hendawi-NOV 20,17-TOI
CAIRO, Egypt (AP) — In a resolution long on criticism but short on concrete steps, Arab foreign ministers who met in Cairo Sunday delivered a tirade of criticism against Iran and its Lebanese proxy Hezbollah, saying Tehran was destabilizing the region.They said they planned to “brief” the UN Security Council on Iran’s destabilizing policies in the region, particularly its support for Shiite rebels in Yemen, with a view to submit at a later stage an anti-Iran Arab resolution.In what is perhaps the only concrete measure, the ministers said Arab telecommunications satellites would ban Iranian-financed television stations for what they said was their fomenting of sectarian and ethnic tensions and because they posed a threat to Arab security. They gave no details on the ban, however.“We are not declaring war on Iran at this stage,” Arab League chief Ahmed Aboul-Gheit said. “We have not taken a decision to ask the Security Council to meet, but we are just briefing the council and maybe the next stage would be for us to meet and call for a Security Council meeting and submit a draft Arab resolution [against Iran].”Lebanon, where Hezbollah is a key member of a coalition government, and Iraq, a majority Shiite nation bound by close political and religious ties to Iran, stated their reservations about the harsher parts of the resolution, including one that branded Hezbollah a “terrorist” organization. The draft also blamed the Shiite group of supporting “terrorist groups” across the region and supplying them with weapons, including ballistic missiles.The Lebanese envoy to the Arab League, Antoine Azzam, made carefully weighed comments at the meeting that reflected his country’s delicate religious and ethnic balance.While not mentioning Iran by name, he said Lebanon condemned all attacks against Arab nations, but blamed exploitable inter-Arab divisions that allowed international and regional powers to promote their interests.Saudi Arabia, a Sunni powerhouse, has significantly sharpened its anti-Iran rhetoric since its forces on November 4 intercepted near its capital, Riyadh, a ballistic missile fired by Shiite rebels in Yemen who are allied with the Iranians. The Saudis said the missile was Iranian-made and declared the attack an act of war by the Iranians.Iran denies arming the Yemeni rebels, known as the Houthis, who say they locally produced the missile.Saudi Arabia, through its foreign minister, asked fellow Arab nations to take a “serious and honest” stand against Iranian “aggression” and “meddling” in the internal affairs of Arab countries.Addressing the Arab foreign ministers’ meeting, Foreign Minister Adel Al-Jubeir said: “Showing leniency toward Iran will not leave any Arab capital safe from those ballistic missiles.”“We are obliged today to take a serious and honest stand… to counter these belligerent policies,” he added.He said his country was targeted by a total of 80 ballistic missiles fired by Yemen’s Shiite rebels since the kingdom in 2015 formed and led a coalition to fight them alongside forces loyal to the internationally recognized government there.Saudi Arabia, added Al-Jubeir, will not stand idly by in the face of Iran’s “blatant aggression.”The ministers, according to the final statement, said they supported any action to be taken by Saudi Arabia to protect its national security, within the boundaries of international legitimacy.Speaking before Al-Jubeir at the 20-minute session broadcast live, Aboul-Gheit, the Arab league chief, was just as critical of Iran as the Saudi minister. Alluding to the November 4 attack, he said it delivered a message to Arab nations that their capitals were within the range of Iranian missiles.“We say it in clear terms that Iranian threats have exceeded all boundaries and are pushing the region toward the abyss … [Iran’s] missile program poses a danger to the region,” said Aboul-Gheit.Bahrain’s foreign minister, Sheikh Khalid Bin Ahmed Al Khalifa, urged strong action by the Arab League against Iran. In the absence of such support, he said, his country would have no choice but to rely on the protection of its Western allies, citing the US 5th Fleet headquartered in Bahrain and naval ships patrolling the Persian gulf.
Charles Manson, whose cult slayings horrified the world, dies at 83-Serial killer became known as the embodiment of evil after orchestrating gruesome murders of pregnant actress Sharon Tate and six others in Los Angeles in 1969-By John Rogers-TOI-NOV 20,17
LOS ANGELES (AP) — Charles Manson, the hippie cult leader who became the hypnotic-eyed face of evil across America after orchestrating the gruesome murders of pregnant actress Sharon Tate and six others in Los Angeles during the summer of 1969, died Sunday after nearly a half-century in prison. He was 83.Manson, whose name to this day is synonymous with unspeakable violence and madness, died of natural causes at Kern County hospital, according to a California Department of Corrections statement.A petty criminal who had been in and out of jail since childhood, the charismatic, guru-like Manson surrounded himself in the 1960s with runaways and other lost souls and then sent his disciples to butcher some of L.A.’s rich and famous in what prosecutors said was a bid to trigger a race war — an idea he got from a twisted reading of the Beatles song “Helter Skelter.”The slayings horrified the world and, together with the deadly violence that erupted later in 1969 during a Rolling Stones concert at California’s Altamont Speedway, exposed the dangerous, drugged-out underside of the counterculture movement and seemed to mark the death of the era of peace and love.Despite the overwhelming evidence against him, Manson maintained during his tumultuous trial in 1970 that he was innocent and that society itself was guilty.“These children that come at you with knives, they are your children. You taught them; I didn’t teach them. I just tried to help them stand up,” he said in a courtroom soliloquy.The Manson Family, as his followers were called, slaughtered five of its victims on August 9, 1969, at Tate’s home: the actress, who was 8½ months pregnant, coffee heiress Abigail Folger, celebrity hairdresser Jay Sebring, Polish movie director Voityck Frykowski and Steven Parent, a friend of the estate’s caretaker. Tate’s husband, “Rosemary’s Baby” director Roman Polanski, was out of the country at the time.The next night, a wealthy grocer and his wife, Leno and Rosemary LaBianca, were stabbed to death in their home across town.The killers scrawled such phrases as “Pigs” and “Healter Skelter” (sic) in blood at the crime scenes.Three months later, a Manson follower was jailed on an unrelated charge and told a cellmate about the bloodbath, leading to the cult leader’s arrest.In the annals of American crime, Manson became the embodiment of evil, a short, shaggy-haired, bearded figure with a demonic stare and an “X” — later turned into a swastika — carved into his forehead.“Many people I know in Los Angeles believe that the Sixties ended abruptly on August 9, 1969,” author Joan Didion wrote in her 1979 book “The White Album.”After a trial that lasted nearly a year, Manson and three followers — Susan Atkins, Patricia Krenwinkel and Leslie Van Houten — were found guilty of murder and sentenced to death. Another defendant, Charles “Tex” Watson, was convicted later. All were spared execution and given life sentences after the California Supreme Court struck down the death penalty in 1972.Atkins died behind bars in 2009. Krenwinkel, Van Houten and Watson remain in prison.Another Manson devotee, Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme, tried to assassinate President Gerald Ford in 1975, but her gun jammed. She served 34 years in prison.Manson was born in Cincinnati on November 12, 1934, to a teenager, possibly a prostitute, and was in reform school by the time he was 8. After serving a 10-year sentence for check forgery in the 1960s, Manson was said to have pleaded with authorities not to release him because he considered prison home.“My father is the jailhouse. My father is your system,” he would later say in a monologue on the witness stand. “I am only what you made me. I am only a reflection of you.”He was set free in San Francisco during the heyday of the hippie movement in the city’s Haight-Ashbury section, and though he was in his mid-30s by then, he began collecting followers — mostly women — who likened him to Jesus Christ. Most were teenagers; many came from good homes but were at odds with their parents.The “family” eventually established a commune-like base at the Spahn Ranch, a ramshackle former movie location outside Los Angeles, where Manson manipulated his followers with drugs, supervised orgies and subjected them to bizarre lectures.He had musical ambitions and befriended rock stars, including Beach Boy Dennis Wilson. He also met Terry Melcher, a music producer who had lived in the same house that Polanski and Tate later rented.By the summer 1969, Manson had failed to sell his songs, and the rejection was later seen as a trigger for the violence. He complained that Wilson took a Manson song called “Cease to Exist,” revised it into “Never Learn Not to Love” and recorded it with the Beach Boys without giving Manson credit.Manson was obsessed with Beatles music, particularly “Piggies” and “Helter Skelter,” a hard-rocking song that he interpreted as forecasting the end of the world. He told his followers that “Helter Skelter is coming down” and predicted a race war would destroy the planet.“Everybody attached themselves to us, whether it was our fault or not,” the Beatles’ George Harrison, who wrote “Piggies,” later said of the murders. “It was upsetting to be associated with something so sleazy as Charles Manson.”According to testimony, Manson sent his devotees out on the night of Tate’s murder with instructions to “do something witchy.” The state’s star witness, Linda Kasabian, who was granted immunity, testified that Manson tied up the LaBiancas, then ordered his followers to kill. But Manson insisted: “I have killed no one, and I have ordered no one to be killed.”His trial was nearly scuttled when President Richard Nixon said Manson was “guilty, directly or indirectly.” Manson grabbed a newspaper and held up the front-page headline for jurors to read: “Manson Guilty, Nixon Declares.” Attorneys demanded a mistrial but were turned down.From then on, jurors, sequestered at a hotel for 10 months, traveled to and from the courtroom in buses with blacked-out windows so they could not read the headlines on newsstands.Manson was also later convicted of the slayings of musician Gary Hinman and stuntman Donald “Shorty” Shea.Over the decades, Manson and his followers appeared sporadically at parole hearings, where their bids for freedom were repeatedly rejected. The women suggested they had been rehabilitated, but Manson himself stopped attending, saying prison had become his home.The killings inspired movies and TV shows, and Manson prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi wrote a best-selling book about the murders, “Helter Skelter.” The macabre shock rocker Marilyn Manson borrowed part of his stage name from the killer.“The Manson case, to this day, remains one of the most chilling in crime history,” prominent criminal justice reporter Theo Wilson wrote in her 1998 memoir, “Headline Justice: Inside the Courtroom — The Country’s Most Controversial Trials .”“Even people who were not yet born when the murders took place,” Wilson wrote, “know the name Charles Manson, and shudder.”
New skeletal evidence could put decades-old debate over Qumran settlers to rest-Archaeologists' study appears to confirm theory rooted in ancient texts that the Essenes, a strictly socialist Jewish sect, settled the area some 2,200 years ago-By Amanda Borschel-Dan-NOV 20,17-TOI
At the site where the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered 70 years ago, new analysis of 30 recently excavated graves supports the theory that 2,200 years ago, Qumran was settled by a predominantly male sect — likely the Essenes — whose rituals were described in detail by ancient authors Josephus, Philo, and Pliny.“The People of Qumran — New Discoveries and Paleodemographic Interpretations” was presented at the annual American Schools of Oriental Research meeting last week by Israel Antiquities Authority anthropologist Yossi Nagar, and archaeologists Hanania Hizmi and Yevgeny Aharonovich and explores who dwelled in Qumran when the Dead Sea Scrolls were penned, between circa 150 BCE and the fall of the Second Temple in the Roman conquest of 70 CE.The study’s use of C14 dating of one of the bones, and further inspections of morphology and pathology of the skeletal remains, have led the team to reaffirm “the uniqueness of Qumran’s society, supporting the earliest theories, which view Qumran as a community of ideologically celibate men.”The study confirms that the overwhelming majority of the 33 skeletons found in the graves excavated in 2016 were male, and reevaluated other remains from the cemetery which had falsely been classified as female. According to the website Science News, “reexamination of 53 previously unearthed human skeletons from Qumran’s cemetery, now housed in France, found that six of seven individuals formerly tagged as women were actually men.”This new evidence, said the team, should put to rest the debate over the identity of the residents of the area, where the Dead Sea Scrolls were found, in a series of 11 caves surrounding the settlement.“I don’t know if these were the people who produced the Qumran region’s Dead Sea Scrolls,” Nagar told Science News. “But the high concentration of adult males of various ages buried at Qumran is similar to what has been found at cemeteries connected to Byzantine monasteries.” The Byzantine monks settled in remote regions such as the Judaen Desert beginning in the 4th century BCE.The settlers of the Hellenistic-Roman site of Horbat Qumran and its surrounding large cemetery “have been the subject of endless scientific publications, questioning the association of this site with an enigmatic group of people, the Essenes,” write the authors.Long before the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls, European explorers were aware of the massive cemetery already in the 1800s. However, since the first extensive excavations of the site in the 1950s by Roland de Vaux, more than 60 years ago, “archaeology has not supplied us with convincing proof” of the association between the residents and the Essene sect, states the paper.Due to conflicting findings in the some 1,100 graves discovered at the site, different theories have abounded about whose remains were buried there. Arguably the most popular theory is that the residents were a sect of predominantly celibate men, the Essences, whose Spartan rituals and socialist way of life explained the majority of simple burials, found at the site.According to the new study, “the excavation of 30 newly discovered graves in 2016 at Qumran’s cemetery might put an end to the debates. The skeletal remains were examined using a variety of well-established age and sex estimation methodologies, and past estimations were re-inspected.”According to the authors, “The new demographic results and interpretations are: infants and women are absent from the skeletal sample; the population is composed of adult males, and only a few children are represented; child proportion and adult age at death distribution match the common desert monasteric societies of the subsequent periods.”In other words, it was a men’s club.What does Josephus say? The first century Jewish historian Josephus Flavius (born Yosef ben Matityahu) wrote extensively on the Essenes in The Jewish War and other histories. Josephus expert, Prof. Steve Mason from the University of Groningen, wrote a literal translation of The Judean War from the Greek in a volume he published in 2008, which was excerpted on the Biblical Archaeology website.Josephus writes that the Essenes were Judaens by ancestry — but with distinctions. “There is among them a disdain for marriage, adopting the children of outsiders while they are still malleable enough for the lessons they regard them as family and instill in them their principles of character.” In this way, writes Josephus, the members of the sect “protect themselves from the wanton ways of women, having been persuaded that none of them preserves her faithfulness to one man.”The all-male society Josephus describes is strict in its pious discipline and socialist in nature: “Since [they are] despisers of wealth — their communal stock is astonishing — one cannot find a person among them who has more in terms of possessions… the assets of each one have been mixed in together, as if they were brothers, to create one fund for all.”Bodies decay, writes Josephus, but there is an indelible belief among the sect that “our souls endure forever, deathless: they get entangled, having emanated from the most refined ether, as if drawn down by a certain charm into the prisons that are bodies.”At the same time, writes Josephus, “There is also a different order of Essenes. Though agreeing with the others about regimen and customs and legal matters, it has separated in its opinion about marriage. For they hold that those who do not marry cut off the greatest part of life, the succession, and more: if all were to think the same way, the line would very quickly die out.”Josephus continues by affirming that sexual intercourse was merely a matter of procreation, and only conducted after “testing the brides in a three-year interval, once they have been purified three times as a test of their being able to bear children.” Additionally, once the woman is pregnant, sexual relations are halted, “demonstrating that the need for marrying is not because of pleasure, but for children.”These “married Essenes” could explain the outlier graves of women and children. Others have explained them, and those graves in which burial goods are found, in the belief that in later periods, Bedouins reused a portion of the grave sites — sometimes without removing the previous occupants.Scholars weigh in-While there are those, including Josephus scholar Mason, who do not believe that the historian’s testimony on the Essenes is reliable, others point to the fact that he devotes a whole lot of ink — some 43 paragraphs out of 47 — to the Essenes in his description of the major forms of Judaism in his Jewish War, according to a 2009 Biblical Archaeology Review article by archaeologists Kenneth Atkinson, Hanan Eshel, and Jodi Magness.The archaeologists quote from Josephus’s biography, in which he describes a three-year apprenticeship to an Essene called Bannus, “who dwelt in the wilderness, wearing only such clothing as trees provided, feeding on such things as grew of themselves, and using frequent ablutions of cold water, by day and night, for purity’s sake. I became his devoted disciple. With him, I lived for three years.”In an email on Sunday, Magness, a professor in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, said the new study supports the majority view that the residents were a male sect, likely the Essenes.“I would say that the picture obtained from the 30 newly excavated graves is consistent with the evidence from the graves excavated by de Vaux in the 1950s, specifically, that the Qumran community consisted overwhelmingly of adult Jewish men. The absence of burials of children (although admittedly the excavated sample is small), is striking in light of the high rate of infant and child mortality in the ancient world,” she wrote after speaking at a conference on the Dead Sea Scrolls in New York.“This new evidence appears to support the consensus (majority) view of Qumran, which I share — that Qumran was a sectarian settlement — and many scholars (including myself) identify that sect with the Essenes mentioned in ancient authors such as Josephus, Philo, and Pliny,” wrote Magness.
28 And when these things begin to come to pass,(ALL THE PROPHECY SIGNS FROM THE BIBLE) then look up, and lift up your heads; for your redemption (RAPTURE) draweth nigh.
29 And he spake to them a parable; Behold the fig tree,(ISRAEL) and all the trees;(ALL INDEPENDENT COUNTRIES)
30 When they now shoot forth, ye see and know of your own selves that summer is now nigh at hand.(ISRAEL LITERALLY BECAME AND INDEPENDENT COUNTRY JUST BEFORE SUMMER IN MAY 14,1948.)
JOEL 2:3,30
3 A fire devoureth (ATOMIC BOMB) before them;(RUSSIAN-ARAB-MUSLIM ARMIES AGAINST ISRAEL) and behind them a flame burneth: the land is as the garden of Eden before them, and behind them a desolate wilderness; yea, and nothing shall escape them.
30 And I will shew wonders in the heavens and in the earth, blood, and fire, and pillars of smoke.(ATOMIC BOMB AFFECT)
ZECHARIAH 14:12-13
12 And this shall be the plague wherewith the LORD will smite all the people that have fought against Jerusalem; Their flesh shall consume away while they stand upon their feet,(DISOLVED FROM ATOMIC BOMB) and their eyes shall consume away in their holes,(DISOLVED FROM ATOMIC BOMB) and their tongue shall consume away in their mouth.(DISOLVED FROM ATOMIC BOMB)(BECAUSE NUKES HAVE BEEN USED ON ISRAELS ENEMIES)(GOD PROTECTS ISRAEL AND ALWAYS WILL)
13 And it shall come to pass in that day, that a great tumult from the LORD shall be among them; and they shall lay hold every one on the hand of his neighbour, and his hand shall rise up against the hand of his neighbour.(1/2-3 BILLION DIE IN WW3)(THIS IS AN ATOMIC BOMB EFFECT)
EZEKIEL 20:47
47 And say to the forest of the south, Hear the word of the LORD; Thus saith the Lord GOD; Behold, I will kindle a fire in thee, and it shall devour every green tree in thee, and every dry tree: the flaming flame shall not be quenched, and all faces from the south to the north shall be burned therein.
ZEPHANIAH 1:18
18 Neither their silver nor their gold shall be able to deliver them in the day of the LORD'S wrath; but the whole land shall be devoured by the fire of his jealousy: for he shall make even a speedy riddance of all them that dwell in the land.
MALACHI 4:1
1 For, behold, the day cometh, that shall burn as an oven;(FROM ATOMIC BOMBS) and all the proud, yea, and all that do wickedly, shall be stubble: and the day that cometh shall burn them up, saith the LORD of hosts, that it shall leave them neither root nor branch.
And here are the bounderies of the land that Israel will inherit either through war or peace or God in the future. God says its Israels land and only Israels land. They will have every inch God promised them of this land in the future.
Egypt east of the Nile River, Saudi Arabia, Israel, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, The southern part of Turkey and the Western Half of Iraq west of the Euphrates. Gen 13:14-15, Psm 105:9,11, Gen 15:18, Exe 23:31, Num 34:1-12, Josh 1:4.ALL THIS LAND ISRAEL WILL DEFINATELY OWN IN THE FUTURE, ITS ISRAELS NOT ISHMAELS LAND.12 TRIBES INHERIT LAND IN THE FUTURE
For first time in 18 years, Jews pray at biblical tombs in Palestinian village-Ultra-Orthodox worshipers enter PA-controlled area near Hebron under IDF guard to commemorate biblical prophets Gad and Nathan-TOI-By AFP-19 November 2017
Hundreds of Israeli Jews held a rare prayer session by a mosque in a Palestinian village in the West Bank early Sunday, an AFP photographer said.The Israeli army accompanied buses carrying over 300 ultra-Orthodox men, mostly from the Breslov Hasidic sect, to Younis mosque in Halhul, north of Hebron, where according to Jewish tradition biblical prophets Gad and Nathan are buried.One worshiper told AFP it was the first time in 18 years that Jews were allowed to pray at the site, deep in a Palestinian-controlled area.A military spokeswoman said the army and police forces accompanying the worshipers were attacked by Palestinians hurling “rocks and firebombs,” with the forces responding with riot dispersal means to “prevent further escalation.”No injuries were reported, the spokeswoman said.According to tradition, the graves are located inside the mosque, but the Jewish worshipers did not enter the holy site, rather holding an hour of pre-dawn prayers on the road outside before leaving, the photographer said.There are a number of sites holy to Jews in Palestinian-controlled areas in the West Bank that are the site of pilgrimages.Most popular are Rachel’s Tomb near Bethlehem, and the Tomb of Joseph in Nablus.On Friday, a Palestinian terrorist from Halhul rammed his car into Israeli civilians nearby, wounding two, before trying to stab soldiers and being shot.The army arrested a number of his family members and imposed a partial closure on the village, which by Sunday had been lifted, the army said.
IDF again fires at Syrian forces in Golan demilitarized zone-For second time in two days, Israeli tank fires a warning shot at Assad troops fortifying positions along the Israel-Syria cease-fire line-By Judah Ari Gross-TOI-19 November 2017
For the second time in two days, an IDF tank on Sunday fired a warning shot at Syrian forces operating in the demilitarized zone between the two countries, the army said.The shelling comes amid increased tensions as Israeli officials scramble to get better conditions in a ceasefire agreement for southern Syria, specifically to keep Shiite militias and other supporters of Syrian dictator Bashar Assad away from the border.In a statement, the Israeli military said the warning shot came because Syrian forces were constructing a fortified position in the demilitarized zone that runs along the border, in violation of the 1974 truce agreement between Israel and Syria.The agreement “prohibits the entry of heavy construction tools or military vehicles into the demilitarized zone,” the army said.“In response, the IDF fired a warning shot towards the area using a tank.” A similar warning shot was fired Saturday.There were no immediate reports of casualties on the Syrian side.After Saturday’s incident, the army filed a complaint with the United Nations peacekeeper force stationed on the Golan.An army spokesperson said it had not filed a second complaint for Sunday’s alleged violation.Saturday’s shelling occurred near the Druze town of Hader on the Syrian side. The town was the site of a suicide bombing earlier in the month that killed nine Syrian Druze and then sparked clashes between Syrian government forces and rebels.That incident led to an unusual move from Israel, which said it would defend the Druze population of the village.In a series of tweets, the army’s Arabic spokesman Avichay Adraee said the IDF was prepared to “support the village residents and work to prevent any harm or the occupation of the village, out of a commitment to the Druze population.”After the incident, dozens of Druze residents of Israel protested at the Syrian border against the escalating violence in Hader.The IDF’s announcement that it would protect Hader, which lies inside Syria, constituted a very rare example of a public intervention in the Syrian civil war raging across the border.The statement reflected ongoing pressure on Israeli leaders from the Druze communities in the Galilee and on the Golan to help their coreligionists across the border who are often caught in the crossfire between Sunni rebels and Alawite and Shiite pro-government forces.Over the past six years, Israel has clung to a hands-off policy toward the war, only getting involved when one of its “red lines” is transgressed. These “red lines” include the violation of Israeli sovereignty through deliberate or accidental attacks, Iranian-supported militias taking positions on the Golan border, and attempts to transfer advanced weapons to the Hezbollah terrorist group.Times of Israel staff contributed to this report.
IDF soldier injured as patrol comes under fire on Egypt border-Army says incident likely 'spillover' from internal fighting in Sinai between Egyptian forces and Islamic State-affiliated groups-By TOI staff-NOV 20,17
An Israeli soldier was lightly injured when an army vehicle traveling along the border with Egypt came under fire early Monday morning, the army said.The soldier was taken to the Soroka Medical Center in Beersheba for treatment.The IDF suspects that the gunfire was “spillover” from internal fighting between Egyptian forces and a Sinai-based Islamic State affiliate, but was investigating whether it may have been a deliberate attack, the army said.Sinai borders Israel and also the Gaza Strip for a few kilometers at the northern end of the restive peninsula. Islamic State-affiliated gunmen attack Egyptian security forces, and vice versa, there on a regular basis.In 2013, a 400-kilometer (245-mile) Israel-Egypt border fence was completed at an estimated cost of NIS 1.6 billion ($400 million), one of the largest construction projects in Israel’s history.The peninsula has seen rising tensions, rampant gunfights and terror attacks as the Egyptian army battles both insurgent jihadist groups and criminal smugglers.In February this year, an Islamic State-affiliated terror group claimed an attack that saw four rockets fired at the Red Sea resort city of Eilat in southern Israel from the Sinai Peninsula.The Islamic State Sinai Province said in a statement posted online, “A military squad fired a number of Grad rockets at communities of Jewish usurpers in the town of Eilat.”Sinai Province was set up in 2011, ostensibly to attack Israel by firing rockets across the 240-kilometer (149-mile) border or sabotaging a gas pipeline that runs between Egypt and Israel.But most of the fighting, by far, has been with Egyptian government forces, and attacks on Israel have been relatively rare.Jihadists have killed hundreds of Egyptian soldiers and policemen since the military overthrow of Islamist president Mohammed Morsi in 2013 unleashed a bloody crackdown on his supporters.In 2011, assailants who came from the Sinai killed eight Israelis in a triple ambush north of Eilat. Israeli forces in pursuit killed seven attackers and five Egyptian police.In 2013, four jihadists were killed by an Egyptian airstrike as they were about to fire a rocket at Israel, according to the Egyptian military.And in 2014, two patrolling Israeli soldiers were wounded by unidentified men who fired an anti-tank weapon from the Sinai during an attempted drug-smuggling operation, according to the Israeli military.Judah Ari Gross contributed to this report.
Arab League delivers harsh criticism of Iran and Hezbollah, but little action-Holding back on Security Council resolution, foreign ministers say they will 'brief' the UN body on Tehran's destabilizing policies in the region-By Hamza Hendawi-NOV 20,17-TOI
CAIRO, Egypt (AP) — In a resolution long on criticism but short on concrete steps, Arab foreign ministers who met in Cairo Sunday delivered a tirade of criticism against Iran and its Lebanese proxy Hezbollah, saying Tehran was destabilizing the region.They said they planned to “brief” the UN Security Council on Iran’s destabilizing policies in the region, particularly its support for Shiite rebels in Yemen, with a view to submit at a later stage an anti-Iran Arab resolution.In what is perhaps the only concrete measure, the ministers said Arab telecommunications satellites would ban Iranian-financed television stations for what they said was their fomenting of sectarian and ethnic tensions and because they posed a threat to Arab security. They gave no details on the ban, however.“We are not declaring war on Iran at this stage,” Arab League chief Ahmed Aboul-Gheit said. “We have not taken a decision to ask the Security Council to meet, but we are just briefing the council and maybe the next stage would be for us to meet and call for a Security Council meeting and submit a draft Arab resolution [against Iran].”Lebanon, where Hezbollah is a key member of a coalition government, and Iraq, a majority Shiite nation bound by close political and religious ties to Iran, stated their reservations about the harsher parts of the resolution, including one that branded Hezbollah a “terrorist” organization. The draft also blamed the Shiite group of supporting “terrorist groups” across the region and supplying them with weapons, including ballistic missiles.The Lebanese envoy to the Arab League, Antoine Azzam, made carefully weighed comments at the meeting that reflected his country’s delicate religious and ethnic balance.While not mentioning Iran by name, he said Lebanon condemned all attacks against Arab nations, but blamed exploitable inter-Arab divisions that allowed international and regional powers to promote their interests.Saudi Arabia, a Sunni powerhouse, has significantly sharpened its anti-Iran rhetoric since its forces on November 4 intercepted near its capital, Riyadh, a ballistic missile fired by Shiite rebels in Yemen who are allied with the Iranians. The Saudis said the missile was Iranian-made and declared the attack an act of war by the Iranians.Iran denies arming the Yemeni rebels, known as the Houthis, who say they locally produced the missile.Saudi Arabia, through its foreign minister, asked fellow Arab nations to take a “serious and honest” stand against Iranian “aggression” and “meddling” in the internal affairs of Arab countries.Addressing the Arab foreign ministers’ meeting, Foreign Minister Adel Al-Jubeir said: “Showing leniency toward Iran will not leave any Arab capital safe from those ballistic missiles.”“We are obliged today to take a serious and honest stand… to counter these belligerent policies,” he added.He said his country was targeted by a total of 80 ballistic missiles fired by Yemen’s Shiite rebels since the kingdom in 2015 formed and led a coalition to fight them alongside forces loyal to the internationally recognized government there.Saudi Arabia, added Al-Jubeir, will not stand idly by in the face of Iran’s “blatant aggression.”The ministers, according to the final statement, said they supported any action to be taken by Saudi Arabia to protect its national security, within the boundaries of international legitimacy.Speaking before Al-Jubeir at the 20-minute session broadcast live, Aboul-Gheit, the Arab league chief, was just as critical of Iran as the Saudi minister. Alluding to the November 4 attack, he said it delivered a message to Arab nations that their capitals were within the range of Iranian missiles.“We say it in clear terms that Iranian threats have exceeded all boundaries and are pushing the region toward the abyss … [Iran’s] missile program poses a danger to the region,” said Aboul-Gheit.Bahrain’s foreign minister, Sheikh Khalid Bin Ahmed Al Khalifa, urged strong action by the Arab League against Iran. In the absence of such support, he said, his country would have no choice but to rely on the protection of its Western allies, citing the US 5th Fleet headquartered in Bahrain and naval ships patrolling the Persian gulf.
Charles Manson, whose cult slayings horrified the world, dies at 83-Serial killer became known as the embodiment of evil after orchestrating gruesome murders of pregnant actress Sharon Tate and six others in Los Angeles in 1969-By John Rogers-TOI-NOV 20,17
LOS ANGELES (AP) — Charles Manson, the hippie cult leader who became the hypnotic-eyed face of evil across America after orchestrating the gruesome murders of pregnant actress Sharon Tate and six others in Los Angeles during the summer of 1969, died Sunday after nearly a half-century in prison. He was 83.Manson, whose name to this day is synonymous with unspeakable violence and madness, died of natural causes at Kern County hospital, according to a California Department of Corrections statement.A petty criminal who had been in and out of jail since childhood, the charismatic, guru-like Manson surrounded himself in the 1960s with runaways and other lost souls and then sent his disciples to butcher some of L.A.’s rich and famous in what prosecutors said was a bid to trigger a race war — an idea he got from a twisted reading of the Beatles song “Helter Skelter.”The slayings horrified the world and, together with the deadly violence that erupted later in 1969 during a Rolling Stones concert at California’s Altamont Speedway, exposed the dangerous, drugged-out underside of the counterculture movement and seemed to mark the death of the era of peace and love.Despite the overwhelming evidence against him, Manson maintained during his tumultuous trial in 1970 that he was innocent and that society itself was guilty.“These children that come at you with knives, they are your children. You taught them; I didn’t teach them. I just tried to help them stand up,” he said in a courtroom soliloquy.The Manson Family, as his followers were called, slaughtered five of its victims on August 9, 1969, at Tate’s home: the actress, who was 8½ months pregnant, coffee heiress Abigail Folger, celebrity hairdresser Jay Sebring, Polish movie director Voityck Frykowski and Steven Parent, a friend of the estate’s caretaker. Tate’s husband, “Rosemary’s Baby” director Roman Polanski, was out of the country at the time.The next night, a wealthy grocer and his wife, Leno and Rosemary LaBianca, were stabbed to death in their home across town.The killers scrawled such phrases as “Pigs” and “Healter Skelter” (sic) in blood at the crime scenes.Three months later, a Manson follower was jailed on an unrelated charge and told a cellmate about the bloodbath, leading to the cult leader’s arrest.In the annals of American crime, Manson became the embodiment of evil, a short, shaggy-haired, bearded figure with a demonic stare and an “X” — later turned into a swastika — carved into his forehead.“Many people I know in Los Angeles believe that the Sixties ended abruptly on August 9, 1969,” author Joan Didion wrote in her 1979 book “The White Album.”After a trial that lasted nearly a year, Manson and three followers — Susan Atkins, Patricia Krenwinkel and Leslie Van Houten — were found guilty of murder and sentenced to death. Another defendant, Charles “Tex” Watson, was convicted later. All were spared execution and given life sentences after the California Supreme Court struck down the death penalty in 1972.Atkins died behind bars in 2009. Krenwinkel, Van Houten and Watson remain in prison.Another Manson devotee, Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme, tried to assassinate President Gerald Ford in 1975, but her gun jammed. She served 34 years in prison.Manson was born in Cincinnati on November 12, 1934, to a teenager, possibly a prostitute, and was in reform school by the time he was 8. After serving a 10-year sentence for check forgery in the 1960s, Manson was said to have pleaded with authorities not to release him because he considered prison home.“My father is the jailhouse. My father is your system,” he would later say in a monologue on the witness stand. “I am only what you made me. I am only a reflection of you.”He was set free in San Francisco during the heyday of the hippie movement in the city’s Haight-Ashbury section, and though he was in his mid-30s by then, he began collecting followers — mostly women — who likened him to Jesus Christ. Most were teenagers; many came from good homes but were at odds with their parents.The “family” eventually established a commune-like base at the Spahn Ranch, a ramshackle former movie location outside Los Angeles, where Manson manipulated his followers with drugs, supervised orgies and subjected them to bizarre lectures.He had musical ambitions and befriended rock stars, including Beach Boy Dennis Wilson. He also met Terry Melcher, a music producer who had lived in the same house that Polanski and Tate later rented.By the summer 1969, Manson had failed to sell his songs, and the rejection was later seen as a trigger for the violence. He complained that Wilson took a Manson song called “Cease to Exist,” revised it into “Never Learn Not to Love” and recorded it with the Beach Boys without giving Manson credit.Manson was obsessed with Beatles music, particularly “Piggies” and “Helter Skelter,” a hard-rocking song that he interpreted as forecasting the end of the world. He told his followers that “Helter Skelter is coming down” and predicted a race war would destroy the planet.“Everybody attached themselves to us, whether it was our fault or not,” the Beatles’ George Harrison, who wrote “Piggies,” later said of the murders. “It was upsetting to be associated with something so sleazy as Charles Manson.”According to testimony, Manson sent his devotees out on the night of Tate’s murder with instructions to “do something witchy.” The state’s star witness, Linda Kasabian, who was granted immunity, testified that Manson tied up the LaBiancas, then ordered his followers to kill. But Manson insisted: “I have killed no one, and I have ordered no one to be killed.”His trial was nearly scuttled when President Richard Nixon said Manson was “guilty, directly or indirectly.” Manson grabbed a newspaper and held up the front-page headline for jurors to read: “Manson Guilty, Nixon Declares.” Attorneys demanded a mistrial but were turned down.From then on, jurors, sequestered at a hotel for 10 months, traveled to and from the courtroom in buses with blacked-out windows so they could not read the headlines on newsstands.Manson was also later convicted of the slayings of musician Gary Hinman and stuntman Donald “Shorty” Shea.Over the decades, Manson and his followers appeared sporadically at parole hearings, where their bids for freedom were repeatedly rejected. The women suggested they had been rehabilitated, but Manson himself stopped attending, saying prison had become his home.The killings inspired movies and TV shows, and Manson prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi wrote a best-selling book about the murders, “Helter Skelter.” The macabre shock rocker Marilyn Manson borrowed part of his stage name from the killer.“The Manson case, to this day, remains one of the most chilling in crime history,” prominent criminal justice reporter Theo Wilson wrote in her 1998 memoir, “Headline Justice: Inside the Courtroom — The Country’s Most Controversial Trials .”“Even people who were not yet born when the murders took place,” Wilson wrote, “know the name Charles Manson, and shudder.”
New skeletal evidence could put decades-old debate over Qumran settlers to rest-Archaeologists' study appears to confirm theory rooted in ancient texts that the Essenes, a strictly socialist Jewish sect, settled the area some 2,200 years ago-By Amanda Borschel-Dan-NOV 20,17-TOI
At the site where the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered 70 years ago, new analysis of 30 recently excavated graves supports the theory that 2,200 years ago, Qumran was settled by a predominantly male sect — likely the Essenes — whose rituals were described in detail by ancient authors Josephus, Philo, and Pliny.“The People of Qumran — New Discoveries and Paleodemographic Interpretations” was presented at the annual American Schools of Oriental Research meeting last week by Israel Antiquities Authority anthropologist Yossi Nagar, and archaeologists Hanania Hizmi and Yevgeny Aharonovich and explores who dwelled in Qumran when the Dead Sea Scrolls were penned, between circa 150 BCE and the fall of the Second Temple in the Roman conquest of 70 CE.The study’s use of C14 dating of one of the bones, and further inspections of morphology and pathology of the skeletal remains, have led the team to reaffirm “the uniqueness of Qumran’s society, supporting the earliest theories, which view Qumran as a community of ideologically celibate men.”The study confirms that the overwhelming majority of the 33 skeletons found in the graves excavated in 2016 were male, and reevaluated other remains from the cemetery which had falsely been classified as female. According to the website Science News, “reexamination of 53 previously unearthed human skeletons from Qumran’s cemetery, now housed in France, found that six of seven individuals formerly tagged as women were actually men.”This new evidence, said the team, should put to rest the debate over the identity of the residents of the area, where the Dead Sea Scrolls were found, in a series of 11 caves surrounding the settlement.“I don’t know if these were the people who produced the Qumran region’s Dead Sea Scrolls,” Nagar told Science News. “But the high concentration of adult males of various ages buried at Qumran is similar to what has been found at cemeteries connected to Byzantine monasteries.” The Byzantine monks settled in remote regions such as the Judaen Desert beginning in the 4th century BCE.The settlers of the Hellenistic-Roman site of Horbat Qumran and its surrounding large cemetery “have been the subject of endless scientific publications, questioning the association of this site with an enigmatic group of people, the Essenes,” write the authors.Long before the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls, European explorers were aware of the massive cemetery already in the 1800s. However, since the first extensive excavations of the site in the 1950s by Roland de Vaux, more than 60 years ago, “archaeology has not supplied us with convincing proof” of the association between the residents and the Essene sect, states the paper.Due to conflicting findings in the some 1,100 graves discovered at the site, different theories have abounded about whose remains were buried there. Arguably the most popular theory is that the residents were a sect of predominantly celibate men, the Essences, whose Spartan rituals and socialist way of life explained the majority of simple burials, found at the site.According to the new study, “the excavation of 30 newly discovered graves in 2016 at Qumran’s cemetery might put an end to the debates. The skeletal remains were examined using a variety of well-established age and sex estimation methodologies, and past estimations were re-inspected.”According to the authors, “The new demographic results and interpretations are: infants and women are absent from the skeletal sample; the population is composed of adult males, and only a few children are represented; child proportion and adult age at death distribution match the common desert monasteric societies of the subsequent periods.”In other words, it was a men’s club.What does Josephus say? The first century Jewish historian Josephus Flavius (born Yosef ben Matityahu) wrote extensively on the Essenes in The Jewish War and other histories. Josephus expert, Prof. Steve Mason from the University of Groningen, wrote a literal translation of The Judean War from the Greek in a volume he published in 2008, which was excerpted on the Biblical Archaeology website.Josephus writes that the Essenes were Judaens by ancestry — but with distinctions. “There is among them a disdain for marriage, adopting the children of outsiders while they are still malleable enough for the lessons they regard them as family and instill in them their principles of character.” In this way, writes Josephus, the members of the sect “protect themselves from the wanton ways of women, having been persuaded that none of them preserves her faithfulness to one man.”The all-male society Josephus describes is strict in its pious discipline and socialist in nature: “Since [they are] despisers of wealth — their communal stock is astonishing — one cannot find a person among them who has more in terms of possessions… the assets of each one have been mixed in together, as if they were brothers, to create one fund for all.”Bodies decay, writes Josephus, but there is an indelible belief among the sect that “our souls endure forever, deathless: they get entangled, having emanated from the most refined ether, as if drawn down by a certain charm into the prisons that are bodies.”At the same time, writes Josephus, “There is also a different order of Essenes. Though agreeing with the others about regimen and customs and legal matters, it has separated in its opinion about marriage. For they hold that those who do not marry cut off the greatest part of life, the succession, and more: if all were to think the same way, the line would very quickly die out.”Josephus continues by affirming that sexual intercourse was merely a matter of procreation, and only conducted after “testing the brides in a three-year interval, once they have been purified three times as a test of their being able to bear children.” Additionally, once the woman is pregnant, sexual relations are halted, “demonstrating that the need for marrying is not because of pleasure, but for children.”These “married Essenes” could explain the outlier graves of women and children. Others have explained them, and those graves in which burial goods are found, in the belief that in later periods, Bedouins reused a portion of the grave sites — sometimes without removing the previous occupants.Scholars weigh in-While there are those, including Josephus scholar Mason, who do not believe that the historian’s testimony on the Essenes is reliable, others point to the fact that he devotes a whole lot of ink — some 43 paragraphs out of 47 — to the Essenes in his description of the major forms of Judaism in his Jewish War, according to a 2009 Biblical Archaeology Review article by archaeologists Kenneth Atkinson, Hanan Eshel, and Jodi Magness.The archaeologists quote from Josephus’s biography, in which he describes a three-year apprenticeship to an Essene called Bannus, “who dwelt in the wilderness, wearing only such clothing as trees provided, feeding on such things as grew of themselves, and using frequent ablutions of cold water, by day and night, for purity’s sake. I became his devoted disciple. With him, I lived for three years.”In an email on Sunday, Magness, a professor in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, said the new study supports the majority view that the residents were a male sect, likely the Essenes.“I would say that the picture obtained from the 30 newly excavated graves is consistent with the evidence from the graves excavated by de Vaux in the 1950s, specifically, that the Qumran community consisted overwhelmingly of adult Jewish men. The absence of burials of children (although admittedly the excavated sample is small), is striking in light of the high rate of infant and child mortality in the ancient world,” she wrote after speaking at a conference on the Dead Sea Scrolls in New York.“This new evidence appears to support the consensus (majority) view of Qumran, which I share — that Qumran was a sectarian settlement — and many scholars (including myself) identify that sect with the Essenes mentioned in ancient authors such as Josephus, Philo, and Pliny,” wrote Magness.
