Adasa
Adasa was near Beth Horon, and somewhere in the hills north of Jerusalem and south of Ramallah. The book 1 Maccabees survived only in Greek form, making it somewhat tricky to find other references to Adasa. The Septuagint translation of Joshua 15:37 into Greek includes a place called "Adasa", suggesting that "Hadashah" in Hebrew was an equivalent. However, the Joshua reference is to a town in the southern Judean lowland, which is the wrong direction, suggesting the Joshua reference was to a different place with a similar or identical name. The Eruvin tractate of the Talmud refers to a "Hadasha in Judea" as a tiny settlement of just around 50 inhabitants. The historian Josephus's work Jewish Antiquities uses 1 Maccabees as a source, but adds that Adasa was around 40 stadia (equivalent to somewhere between 6–9 kilometers?) from Beth Horon.
Some have identified Adasa with Khirbet 'Adasa, an archaeological site located 5 kilometers north of Jerusalem.
References
- ^ 1 Maccabees 7:40
- ^ Bar-Kochva, Bezalel (1989). Judas Maccabaeus: The Jewish Struggle Against the Seleucids. Cambridge University Press. pp. 363–365. ISBN 0521323525.
- ^ Joshua 15:37
- ^ Eruvin 5.6
- ^ Khalaily, Hamoudi; Avissar, Miriam; Sokolov, Helena; Bijovsky, Gabriela (2008). "Khirbat 'Adasa: A Farmstead of the Umayyad and Mamluk Periods in Northern Jerusalem". 'Atiqot / עתיקות. 58: 69*–71*. ISSN 0792-8424.
External links
- 1 Maccabees 7:1–7:50
- The full text of 1 Maccabees (Septuagint version) at Wikisource
- The full text of The Antiquities of the Jews/Book XII at Wikisource
- Angus, S (1915). "Adasa". In Orr, James (ed.). International Standard Bible Encyclopedia. Retrieved 16 December 2017.