Jewish Life Digital Edition November 2014 | Page 12

THINGS YOU NEVER KNEW YOU NEVER KNEW

ANCIENT TOWNS OF ISRAEL

MEGIDDO

Megiddo lies 10km south of Afulah in the Jezreel Valley.
Excavations carried out in the 1930s revealed 22 layers of
civilisation, ranking it as one of the most significant ‘tels’*
in the world.
During the Israelite period, Megiddo was an administrative centre. King Solomon built a monumental gate and
two palaces there – while King Ahab later refortified it.
Since Megiddo overlooks the opening of the narrow
Wadi Ara into the Jezreel Valley, it was chosen as a strategic lookout point. Its location brought Megiddo benefits
during times of peace, but much misfortune during times
of war, when armies chose the open Jezreel plain as a battlefield. One of the most famous battles fought here occurred between Egypt and the then King of Judah, Josiah,
in 476 BCE, leaving Josiah dead. The demise of the kingdom of Judah occurred less than a hundred years later,
and was a major factor in the exile to Babylon.
Non-Jews call Megiddo ‘Armageddon’, a distortion of the
Hebrew Har Mageddon, the mountain on which Megiddo is
built, and it is believed by some to be the place where the final battle will take place between good and evil.
* A tel is a large mound or hill created by many generations of people living and rebuilding on the same spot.

THE JEWS AND THE BLACK DEATH
The Black Death, also known as the Black Plague and the
Bubonic Plague, was a calamitous pandemic that first struck
Europe in the mid-late-fourteenth century (1347-1351), killing
between one-third and two-thirds of Europe’s population. It
was transmitted by fleas and carried by rats, which thrived in
the unhygienic conditions of the time. Despite the devastation
wrought on the general population, the Jews of Europe were
less affected by the disease, with some historians putting the
Jewish death toll at just 20 percent of the total community. It is
widely believed that the broad variance in survival between
Jews and non-Jews was due in part to their isolation in ghettos,
but mostly because of their adherence to ritual cleanliness.
As later set down in the Code of Jewish Law, an observant Jew
of the Middle Ages would have been obliged to wash his hands
“on awakening from sleep, on leavin