Yodfat (), is a

moshav shitufi A moshav shitufi (, lit. ''collective moshav'', pl. ''moshavim shitufiim'') is a type of cooperative State of Israel, Israeli village, whose organizational principles place it between the kibbutz and the moshav on the scale of cooperation. Ideolo ...

in northern

Israel Israel, officially the State of Israel, is a country in West Asia. It Borders of Israel, shares borders with Lebanon to the north, Syria to the north-east, Jordan to the east, Egypt to the south-west, and the Mediterranean Sea to the west. Isr ...

. Located in the

Lower Galilee The Lower Galilee (; ) is a region within the Northern District of Israel. The Lower Galilee is bordered by the Jezreel Valley to the south; the Upper Galilee to the north, from which it is separated by the Beit HaKerem Valley; the Jordan Rift ...

, south of

Carmiel Karmiel () is a city in the Northern District (Israel), Northern District of Israel. Established in 1964 as a development town, Karmiel is located in the Beit HaKerem Valley which divides upper and lower Galilee. The city is located south of the A ...

and in the vicinity of the Atzmon mountain ridge, north of the

Beit Netofa Valley The Beit Netofa Valley, or Sahl al-Battuf (, Arabic: سهل البطوف) is a valley in the Lower Galilee region of Israel, midway between Tiberias and Haifa. Covering 46 km2, it is the largest valley in the mountainous part of the Galilee a ...

, it falls under the jurisdiction of

Misgav Regional Council The Misgav Regional Council () is a regional council (Israel), regional council in the Galilee in northern Israel. The regional council is home to 27,421 people, and comprises 35 small towns, mostly Community settlement (Israel), community settle ...

. In it had a population of . Modern Yodfat is named after the

Second Temple period The Second Temple period or post-exilic period in Jewish history denotes the approximately 600 years (516 BCE – 70 CE) during which the Second Temple stood in the city of Jerusalem. It began with the return to Zion and subsequent reconstructio ...

town of the same name and is situated to the north of the archaeological tell.''Encyclopedia Judaica'', ''Joptapata'', Keter Publishing, Jerusalem, 1978, volume 10, p. 300. Yodfat was established in 1960 by graduates of the

Hebrew Reali School The Hebrew Reali School of Haifa (), located in Haifa, Israel, is one of the country's oldest private schools.Haifa Haifa ( ; , ; ) is the List of cities in Israel, third-largest city in Israel—after Jerusalem and Tel Aviv—with a population of in . The city of Haifa forms part of the Haifa metropolitan area, the third-most populous metropolitan area i ...

History

Antiquity

Ancient Yodfat, , which was situated to the southeast of the modern moshav, is mentioned in the

Mishnah The Mishnah or the Mishna (; , from the verb ''šānā'', "to study and review", also "secondary") is the first written collection of the Jewish oral traditions that are known as the Oral Torah. Having been collected in the 3rd century CE, it is ...

as a walled

Israelite Israelites were a Hebrew language, Hebrew-speaking ethnoreligious group, consisting of tribes that lived in Canaan during the Iron Age. Modern scholarship describes the Israelites as emerging from indigenous Canaanites, Canaanite populations ...

village dating from the time of

Joshua Joshua ( ), also known as Yehoshua ( ''Yəhōšuaʿ'', Tiberian Hebrew, Tiberian: ''Yŏhōšuaʿ,'' Literal translation, lit. 'Yahweh is salvation'), Jehoshua, or Josue, functioned as Moses' assistant in the books of Book of Exodus, Exodus and ...

corresponding with the

Iron Age The Iron Age () is the final epoch of the three historical Metal Ages, after the Chalcolithic and Bronze Age. It has also been considered as the final age of the three-age division starting with prehistory (before recorded history) and progre ...

.'' The Mishnah'', (ed.) Herbert Danby, ''Arakhin'
9:6 (p. 553, note 10)
/ref> "Jotapata may be the same as Jotbah which was the birthplace of Meshullemeth ... the mother of Amon, king of Judah (2 Kgs. 21:19)." Archaeological explorations of the site, however, have thus far revealed a modest village established sometime during the

Hellenistic period In classical antiquity, the Hellenistic period covers the time in Greek history after Classical Greece, between the death of Alexander the Great in 323 BC and the death of Cleopatra VII in 30 BC, which was followed by the ascendancy of the R ...

between the fourth and third centuries BCE. As the Hasmonean kings extended their influence into the Galilee during the last decades of the second century BCE, a change of population occurred at Yodfat and the village was populated by

Jews Jews (, , ), or the Jewish people, are an ethnoreligious group and nation, originating from the Israelites of History of ancient Israel and Judah, ancient Israel and Judah. They also traditionally adhere to Judaism. Jewish ethnicity, rel ...

First Jewish–Roman War

By the first century CE Yodfat had expanded to encompass an area of 50 dunams (13 acres). Its siege and subsequent destruction in 67 CE are described in

Josephus Flavius Josephus (; , ; ), born Yosef ben Mattityahu (), was a Roman–Jewish historian and military leader. Best known for writing '' The Jewish War'', he was born in Jerusalem—then part of the Roman province of Judea—to a father of pr ...

' ''

The Jewish War ''The Jewish War'' is a work of Jewish history written by Josephus, a first-century Roman-Jewish historian. It has been described by the biblical historian Steve Mason as "perhaps the most influential non-biblical text of Western history". ...

'', his chronicle of the

First Jewish–Roman War The First Jewish–Roman War (66–74 CE), also known as the Great Jewish Revolt, the First Jewish Revolt, the War of Destruction, or the Jewish War, was the first of three major Jewish rebellions against the Roman Empire. Fought in the prov ...

. Led by future emperor

Vespasian Vespasian (; ; 17 November AD 9 – 23 June 79) was Roman emperor from 69 to 79. The last emperor to reign in the Year of the Four Emperors, he founded the Flavian dynasty, which ruled the Empire for 27 years. His fiscal reforms and consolida ...

, three

Roman legion The Roman legion (, ) was the largest military List of military legions, unit of the Roman army, composed of Roman citizenship, Roman citizens serving as legionary, legionaries. During the Roman Republic the manipular legion comprised 4,200 i ...

s— Legio V ''Macedonica'', X ''Fretensis'', and XV ''Apollinaris''—besieged Yodfat, meeting strong Jewish resistance. After 47 days the city fell by treachery, and Josephus describes the death of 40,000 Jews and the enslavement of 1200 women and children. Yodfat was razed and burnt on the first of the Hebrew month of Tammuz (July 20, 67). While a few dozen remaining fighters committed suicide, Josephus managed to survive this pact and was captured by the Romans. After its capture by the Romans, Yodfat was re-established at a nearby site by refugees from

Jerusalem Jerusalem is a city in the Southern Levant, on a plateau in the Judaean Mountains between the Mediterranean Sea, Mediterranean and the Dead Sea. It is one of the List of oldest continuously inhabited cities, oldest cities in the world, and ...

, among them the priestly family of Miyamin (). Inscriptions describe it as the sixth ''miśmār'' or priestly division of the era. " inscription bearing the names of the ''miśmarōṯ'' (priestly wards), which was initially discovered in September 1970 by W. Müller and then, independently, by P. Grjaznevitch within a mosque in Bayt al-Ḥāḍir, a village situated near Tan‘im, east of Ṣanʻā’."Ephraim E. Urbach, ''Mishmarot u-maʻamadot'',

Tarbiẕ ''Tarbiẕ'' () is a quarterly academic journal of contemporary Jewish studies, humanities and religion (including Judaism, Biblical criticism, Talmud, Kabbalah, Jewish customs, and Jewish history). It is published in Hebrew by the Institute of J ...

42, Jerusalem 1973, pp. 304–327 (Hebrew) This town is mentioned in the

Talmud The Talmud (; ) is the central text of Rabbinic Judaism and the primary source of Jewish religious law (''halakha'') and Jewish theology. Until the advent of Haskalah#Effects, modernity, in nearly all Jewish communities, the Talmud was the cen ...

as the home of Rabbi Menachem (, Zevahim 110b:4). It flourished for another 300 years before being destroyed.

Modern era

Modern Yodfat was established in 1960 by graduates of the

. It is currently an agricultural Jewish community, located about 1 km north-west of the ancient ruins. The modern village was built by traditional Jews, seeking to preserve traditional values in parallel to agricultural work. At first, the village was an observation site of the JNF, while its inhabitants were mostly the JNF employees. Later, the village became an agricultural society, with most of its residents working the nearby lands. By the 1990s, the village turned into a larger communal center, with a larger variety of professions for its residents. Today it includes 200 families. Agricultural community of Yodfat

Economy

In 1968, Yodfat established a flower bulb nursery which exports millions of bulbs throughout the world. The nursery employs forty people and has an R&D facility for developing new hybrids, including the '' Ornithogalum dubium'' and '' Cyclamen persicum''. Yodfat's Jerusalem hybrid F1 anemones and Galilee hybrid F1 anemones are hand-pollinated and unique in the cut-flower trade. A short walk from Yodfat there is the "Goats with the Wind farm", a family-run organic goat cheese farm and restaurant, founded in 1993 by former residents of Yodfat. The farm's walls and buildings were constructed over time out of stones collected from the surrounding area.

Archaeology

Ancient Yodfat was first identified in 1847 by Ernst Gustav Schultz (1811–1851), Egyptologist and Prussian consul in Jerusalem, using the geographical and topographical descriptions provided by Josephus, as well as by the phonetic similarity to the adjacent ruin of ''Khirbet Shifat''. Six excavation seasons were carried out at the site between 1992 and 2000, under the direction of Mordechai Aviam of Kinneret Academic College on behalf of the

Israel Antiquities Authority The Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA, ; , before 1990, the Israel Department of Antiquities) is an independent Israeli governmental authority responsible for enforcing the 1978 Law of Antiquities. The IAA regulates excavation and conservatio ...

and the

University of Rochester The University of Rochester is a private university, private research university in Rochester, New York, United States. It was founded in 1850 and moved into its current campus, next to the Genesee River in 1930. With approximately 30,000 full ...

. These have revealed remains of fortifications, cisterns and extensive evidence of the large scale battle which took place at Yodfat, including a mass grave containing human remains. The last season ended in November 2020. According to Aviam, the residents poured boiling oil on the Roman soldiers as they climbed the town wall on ladders. A fragment from a storage jar bears a Jewish script inscription displaying the Hebrew letters אכ was also found at the site.

References

External links

* The Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures,

University of Chicago The University of Chicago (UChicago, Chicago, or UChi) is a Private university, private research university in Chicago, Illinois, United States. Its main campus is in the Hyde Park, Chicago, Hyde Park neighborhood on Chicago's South Side, Chic ...

, , Lecture given by Mordechai Aviam, PHD, at the University of Chicago on June 13, 2018
Yodefat-A Town in Galilee

Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs The Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs (; ) is one of the most important ministries in the Israeli government. The ministry's role is to implement Israel's foreign policy, and promote economic, cultural, and scientific relations with other co ...

Goats with the Wind farm
{{Authority control 10s establishments in the Roman Empire 1960 establishments in Israel 4th-century disestablishments in the Roman Empire 60s disestablishments in the Roman Empire Ancient Jewish settlements of Galilee Archaeological sites in Israel First Jewish–Roman War Former populated places in West Asia Misgav Regional Council Moshavim Populated places established in 1960 Populated places in Northern District (Israel) Talmud places