Something happened in the Judean wilderness last Saturday that the record books say has never happened before. In the middle of August — the deadest, driest heart of an Israeli summer, when the desert east of Jerusalem is supposed to be nothing but dust and heat — the sky opened over the hills, and water ran down through the wadis toward the Dead Sea.

The numbers were startling enough on their own. According to The Times of Israel, Ma’ale Adumim took eleven millimeters of rain in a single hour and around twenty-six across the day — the most rain ever recorded in that region in the month of August, and only the fourth time since measurements began that anywhere in the country has seen more than twenty millimeters in this month. Jerusalem itself got a soaking it almost never sees at this season.

But the figure that stopped me was not the rainfall total. It was a streambed. Nahal Og, a normally bone-dry channel north of the Dead Sea, filled and flooded — and the Israel Meteorological Service said it was the first flood ever documented there at this time of year. Water ran east through the Judean wilderness, down into the basin of the sea that takes every river and gives none back, at a season when that ground has never once been recorded doing such a thing.

I am a careful reader of Scripture, and I want to be careful here, because this is exactly the........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)