Traveling in Israel 2

We journeyed south through the Jordan valley. This is modern Israel’s border with Jordan. Yes, they have a border fence. We couldn’t go into Samaria/the hill country of Ephraim for political reasons. The Israeli guide thinks the bus would be stoned. There’s lot’s of history there but …… not this time.

We arrived at Jericho (which is in the Palestinian Authority, but our guide is well known there and felt we wouldn’t have problems). For me the site was a bit of a bust. Jericho was a mud brick city and mud brick doesn’t hold up very well over the centuries. Basically it’s a pile of mud, with a few discernible structures. Still, it’s what happened here that’s important.

It’s also the site of the traditional Mount of the Temptation. Pure tradition but there’s a monastery carved into the side of the mountain. After a cable car ride up, our leader Dennis gave us only 15 minutes there. Somebody asked “How far can we go?” (it’s a long structure), somebody else sagely observed “Seven and a half minutes.” I, along with Kyle my 17 year-old roommate, decided to try to reach the end of the Monastery which had a balcony viewpoint. Lots of steps up and down, hurrying through the monastery, near the end we suddenly entered a room filled with icons. In a typical American tourist blunder I loudly exclaimed “Whoa!” (I’m very fond of icons). I then realized there were a dozen other people in the room deep in prayer and reflection. Whoops. We took a quick look from the balcony and began to hurry back. We agreed that we could cover for being late (that’s breaking one of the ten commandments of the tour) by saying we were looking for one another. Anyway, breathless. at the door of the monastery we met Dennis and the rest of the crew. He’d decided to extend the time and they were going to have a leisurely stroll through the monastery to the viewpoint! So I had time for some personal prayer and reflection (over a cup of coffee) on the Mount of Temptation.

Jericho is on the northwestern edge of the Dead Sea. Just a few miles away is Qumran. WHOA! This was a place I could feel. It’s not a biblical site, there was a monastery there from roughly 100 B.C. to 70 A.D. It’s where the famous Dead Sea Scrolls were found. There’s a lot of controversy about the DSS and the inhabitants of Qumran. Some scholars think it was (or became) a Christian community. Regardless, there’s a sense of isolation/desolation here which is tangible. Huge barren mountains loom over the site, gouged by an enormous ‘wadi waterfall’. A wadi is a dry riverbed through which water flows when there’s rain. This wadi would (3, 4, 5 times a year) have become a scale version of Niagara Falls! They had an elaborate system of aqueducts to channel the water into cisterns. There’s no reconstruction at this site, the rooms and walls were essentially intact, buried under the dust of the ages. In one area they found 100,000 date pits. These guys liked dates. And I liked Qumran. My kind of place. I bought some nice memorabilia here.

We’re staying at En Gedi. It’s a kibbutz at the site of a biblical oasis on the Dead Sea. It’s where Saul pursued David and David cut off the corner of his cloak in the cave (1 Sam. 24). Really amazing place. The Dead Sea is dead, nothing lives in it. It’s surrounded by forbidding desert mountains. Then, out of nowhere. is this lush green canyon, cool and moist, with plants and animals. It’s the power of water, ‘streams in the desert’. The modern kibbutz is a botanical paradise, trees from all over the world grow here, fruit weighing down the branches. Song of Songs 1:14 gives a sense of the luxury, “My lover is to me a cluster of henna blossoms from the vineyards of En Gedi.” They’ve excavated a first century A.D. synagogue here. It has an inscription in the floor which pronounces a curse on anyone who reveals ‘the secret of En Gedi’. The ‘secret’ appears to have been a production technique for a unique kind of perfume. Everybody prized it, and this was the only place it the world it was produced. A very special place then and now.

Nearby is Masada on the southeastern shore of the Dead Sea. It’s an isolated rock plateau which was almost impregnable. It doesn’t appear in the Bible by name but it may be referred to as one of the strongholds or fortresses in the desert. Herod the Great, a paranoid man who never spent a night outside a fortress, had it magnificently fortified. Two palaces, a full Roman bathhouse, a synagogue and sixteen huge storerooms up there. along with enough cisterns to hold water for an army. The only way up is ‘the snake path’ a narrow set of switchbacks ascending 1400 feet (I walked up, I didn’t set any speed records but it was my accomplishment for the day). In the revolt against Rome which began in 66 A.D., after Jerusalem fell in 70 about a thousand rebels, (men, women and children) fled here. They had a year of relative peace before the Romans determined to wipe them out. The place is virtually impregnable. But Rome was willing to spend the time, treasure and blood to take it down. Over the course of 14 months the Romans build a ramp, a man-made mountain to reach the mountain. They used Jewish slave labor to build it (after the fall of Jerusalem there were so many Jewish slaves available that it was cheaper to buy one and work him to death and then buy another than it was to buy one and feed him). The Jews above wouldn’t fire on the Jews below and so the ramp was built. The night before the Romans finally breached the walls the rebels committed suicide. They destroyed all their valuables but left the storehouses full of food. They wanted to show Rome that they hadn’t starved and they hadn’t suffered. They simply preferred to die free rather than live as slaves. Masada in Israel is like the Alamo in the U.S. only more so. It’s more than the Alamo because it’s more than symbolic. The Jewish people don’t have anywhere else to go and they know it. And so they have a saying, “Masada shall not fall again.”

I like this area a lot but the days are passing and we must ‘go up to Jerusalem’.