We packed up early today and headed off for a two day trip to the desert areas of the Negev and the Judean desert. Our first destination was the West Bank (Palestinian) city of Hebron. Our bus took us into the old city of Hebron, just by the souk, and Paulette, an American woman, came to meet us. She was working with a group called Christian Peacemaker Teams. She gave us an introduction to an amazing situation where 400 Jewish settlers have illegally occupied a site in the centre of the old city. Because they are there (albeit illegally) Israeli soldiers have moved in to protect them (and the local Palestinians) from armed conflict. (Normally security in this area is under the control of the Palestinian authorities.) There were two massacres in the twentieth century - the first of Jews and the second, in 1994, of Palestinians. Paulette believed that there were four to six times as many soldiers there as illegal settlers. There was a roof-top army post just next to Paulette's house, which we were not allowed to photograph.
The presence of the settlers means that some areas of the old city have been marked out as for Israeli settlers only. In effect, the 150,000 Palestinian inhabitants of Hebron are being prevented from going about their day to day business because of 400-600 settlers. The photo below shows Paulette leading us down an empty souk street on a week day morning. Things are so difficult in this area that few people come, so the shop keepers have closed down. Never in all the time I have spent in the Middle East have I seen a souk this empty during a working day. This is a different kind of desert.
Another example of the trouble caused for the local inhabitants is the story of an old Palestinian lady who lives close to Paulette. The Israeli army has forbidden Palestinians to use several streets close to the settlers. As this lady is not allowed in the street in front of her house, she now has to do the following things to enter her home. She has to climb a ladder to a neighbour's roof, and go through a hole broken for her in a wall between their two houses, climb down a ladder to her back yard and enter her back door. We saw the ladders and the hole in the dividing wall.
As well as being a major Palestinian city, it has a very important site sacred to three faiths - the cave of Machpelah, which Abraham bought from Ephron the Hittite for a family burial place (Gen. 23). The bodies of Abraham, Sarah, Isaac, Jacob, Rebekah and Leah are thought to have been buried there in the caves well below the current monument - the Ibrahimi mosque, and for this reason the site has been sacred since at least the 10th century BC.
The Ibrahimi mosque is said to be the oldest building in the world in continual use, with its walls having been built in the reign of King Herod in the first century BC. Note the huge stones, which are typical of the buildings of Herod. (The man with his back to the wall - so to speak - is our guide Nasser Elias.)
This place is the second most sacred site for the Jews, after the Western (Wailing) wall in Jerusalem, and a portion of the building is in use as a synagogue, while the rest is a mosque. As the site of a mass murder of Palestinians by a Jewish man in 1994, it is very highly policed (photos prohibited!).
Inside the mosque (or in an adjoining building) are the cenotaphs (empty tombs) of the patriarchs and matriarchs. This is the tomb of Isaac.
After some time at the mosque we headed back to the bus and went on our way to Be'er Sheva in the Negev desert. Along the way we were stopped at a checkpoint, going from the Palestinian territory (West Bank) back into Israel. Both our bus driver and our guide were Palestinians, and that might have been one of the reasons it took us a while to get through. After the hold-up we went on to Be'er Sheva, often spoken of in the Bible as the southernmost part of Israel (e.g. 'from Dan to Be'er Sheva' - Judges 20:1). Here God appeared to Isaac and he dug a well that struck water (Gen. 26:23-33).
Be'er Sheva had been on a trade route between Egypt and Mesopotamia that was used for thousands of years. There are signs of habitation from the Chalcolithic period (around 4,000 BC) onwards. As always, the presence of water in this place was a key factor in establishing it as a city. We went down a huge cistern built into the tell.
We headed up to the Be'er Sheva Tel (the city mound where the archaeological excavations had been undertaken). Archaeologists believe that most of the remains there date from around 1,000BC. You can see from the photo below where the ancient walls have been added to in the process of restoration of the site.
We entered a huge water cistern that had been found in the tell. As in other archaeological sites we visited, this cistern went down into the tell.
After looking through the cistern, we headed off to our campsite for the night at Kfar Hanoqdim ('the village of the shepherds') a Bedouin settlement in the desert. When we got there a group of camels had been made ready for camel rides, so most of us had a very slow and sedate camel ride, led by the Bedouin staff of the settlement. That's me on the 'single-seater' in the middle of the photograph!
We got our bedding sorted out and then went to a tent for a welcome presentation from our hosts. While someone told us about the Bedouin lifestyle, others roasted and boiled coffee for us and some fire-baked bread. The man who spoke to us also answered questions, and I thought that he had a lot of interesting things to say. He seemed to share as a host rather than simply give a spiel for the tourists.
After the talk I went for a walk in the desert and recognised Massada not too far away in the distance. This time I was seeing it from the Arad side. Here you can see the Roman earth ramp built almost 2,000 years ago, about two thirds along the mountain side from left to right.
Before dinner I checked my mobile for a text, and I was shocked to read that my mother-in-law Joan had died that morning New Zealand time. I was very sad to hear the news, as I had thought that she was getting better after a health crisis, and I was looking forward to seeing her on my return. I was sad too, of course, for all those at home who loved her. I felt rather useless, so far away from home at that important time. I texted Helen to say that I would call her on my return to St George's College. We had spoken earlier about the possibility of Joan dying and had worked out that I would stay on my course if that happened.
After dinner, we settled in for a marae-style night with 40 of us in a single tent. The family was very much on my mind, so I took some time to go to sleep....
The next day many of us rose with the dawn. Before breakfast we had a Eucharist, at which Joan and the family were remembered. We headed east down to the Dead Sea area and turned north to travel past Massada and En Gedi to Qumran. There we viewed the site where the Essenes (an ultra-Orthodox Jewish ascetic community) had lived at the time of Jesus.
The Essenes are famous because of the discovery of the Dead Sea scrolls in caves in the hills surrounding Qumran between 1947 and 1956. Nearly 900 scrolls were found, many of them in fragmentary state, which members of the community appear to have hidden from the Romans at the time of the Jewish Revolt (66-70AD). The scrolls covered three main areas, Hebrew Bible texts, commentaries on the texts, and other community-focused texts, including a rule for the life of the community. Two amazing thing about the Biblical texts are firstly that they were around 1,000 years earlier than any other Hebrew Bible texts found to that date, and secondly that although this great time gap separated the ancient and the medieval texts, the texts had been copied so faithfully throughout the ages that the medieval texts were correct in all but a few minor details. The Dead Sea scrolls were the greatest discovery of ancient texts in the 20th century.
One of the caves in which the scrolls, contained in pots, were found, is this one that can be seen from the Qumran site.
After lunch at the tourist cafeteria at Qumran, on our way back to Jerusalem, we headed on to the Dead Sea to swim (or rather, to float). The Dead Sea is the lowest point on earth, 422 metres below sea level. The marketers use this as a point of difference!
The Dead Sea is unique in being approximately 30% salt and other minerals, instead of the normal 3%. That means that it is the most buoyant body of water anywhere in the world. The truth of this is plain (but not pretty) to see!
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