The Galilean village of Yodefat (ancient Jotbah, Jotapata), situated 20km/12.5mi south of Akko under the north side of Mount Azmon (548m/1,798ft), was founded in 1926 as a reforestation center. To reach the village from Akko, leave on the road to Ahihud (8km/5mi), take a road on the right to Yavor (3km/2mi), turn into a narrow road on the left and then beyond Segev (9km/6mi) turn right for Yodefat.
History
The town played a part in the Jewish rising of A.D. 66-70, as Flavius Josephus relates in two chapters of the "Jewish War" (III,7-8). The town lay, he says, "almost entirely on a steep-sided crag, surrounded by gorges so deep that a man looking down into them is dizzy before his eye reaches the foot.
The town is accessible only on the north side, where it extends down a sloping hillside." The site was thus eminently suited for a fortress. In A.D. 67 a large party of Jewish rebels entrenched themselves in this stronghold under the leadership of a young priest from Jerusalem, Joseph son of Mattathias, who defended Jotapata so successfully against the Romans that Vespasian himself hastened to the scene and threw a double ring of troops round the town. As at Masada six years later, the Romans built up a ramp on the more easily accessible north side, to which the defenders responded by increasing the height of the walls. The rebels' situation became critical, however, when they ran out of food and the cisterns which were their only source of water dried up. Many of the defenders, too, were killed on sorties or by missiles from catapults. Finally on the 47th day of the siege the Romans breached the walls with a battering-ram, stormed the town and, "knowing neither mercy nor compassion", slaughtered great numbers of the defenders and took 1,200 prisoners.
Joseph, commander of the defenders, had hidden in a cistern, but came out and gave himself up a few days later. His life was spared because he prophesied to Vespasian that he would become Emperor, as in fact he soon did. In A.D. 70 - now in the service of the Roman conqueror, Titus - he witnessed the conquest of Jerusalem. Thereafter he took the Roman name of Flavius Josephus under which he is now known and wrote his "Jewish War" and "Jewish Antiquities", the most important sources for the events of this period in Palestine.
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