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Where Lot’s Daughters Seduced their Father

Excavations Reveal Commemorative Monastery

By Konstantinos Politis

Perched precariously on a steep, barren slope overlooking the southeastern shore of the Dead Sea, I found the remains of what had once been elegant stone buildings—walls, pieces of metal and glass, tiny mosaic cubes and pottery sherds. It was 1986 and I was conducting a survey with Canadian excavator Burton MacDonald. The site is called Deir ‘Ain ‘Abata, the Monastery of the Abata Spring. It was clear that the site had once been an impressive Byzantine-era complex. But why would anyone build in such an inhospitable and desolate location? How much longer these archaeological remains would continue […]

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Endnotes

1.

Gerard Garittee “Le debut de la vie de Saint Etienne le Sabaite,” Analecta Bollandiana 77 (1959), facs. III-IV, pp. 332–369, esp. p. 365.

2.

Charles William Wilson, “The Pilgrimage of the Russian Abbot Daniel in the Holy Land 1106–1107 A.D.,” Palestine Pilgrim’s Text Society (London, 1888), vol. 4, pp. 47–48.

3.

M. Najjar and F. Sa‘id, “A New Umayyad Church at Khilda-Amman,” Liber Annuus 44 (1994), pp. 547–560; pls. 31–40; Michele Piccirillo, “Acropolis Church of a Ma‘in,” Liber Annuus (1992), p, 35, and “Church of St. Stephan: Um al-Rasas,” Liber Annuus (1992), p. 46.