The Galilee is on the itinerary of most Jews and Christians visiting the Holy Land for the first or second time, but newcomers, or even veterans, rarely go to a modest site in the Lower Galilee called Yodfat, or in Greek, Jotapata. This is one of the many places in Israel (including Masada, Gamla, Jerusalem) which one should not visit without Josephus' Jewish War in hand. There is less to see there than at other sites, but it was there, in a cave, that the young Joseph son of Matthias, the precocious, aristocratic Jewish general, began the process of becoming Josephus the historian, prophet and theologian.

Jotapata today is marked by many caves and cisterns dating from the first century. There is an especially large cave which is shown to visitors as "The Cave", that is, the underground cavern in which the formative drama of Josephus' life was played out. The identification may be fabulous, but the story is not. Josephus himself is our only source for it (Jewish War, Book 3, chapters 341-391), but he has obviously given us some version of the truth. Although his story has been turned against him to incriminate him of the worst kind of treachery, he

A few words on ossuaries.

This may seem a macabre choice for my first blog post on the Travelujah site - why choose a subject closely associated with death? - but in fact, ossuaries are also intimately associated with life, particularly life in Jerusalem of the first century CE.

For those who don't know or need to be refreshed: during a very brief period in Jerusalem's history, Jews engaged in an expensive, laborious, prolonged and utterly inconceivable (to us) process of burying their dead, called "secondary burial". First a family would buy, commission or excavate by themselves a cave in the soft rock around Jerusalem. (I say Jerusalem because well over 90 percent of all known ossuaries were deposited in caves in a wide band around that city.) When someone died, the family would lay the body of the person on a shelf, in a pit, in a spec