Holy Land Pilgrimage - Day Ten

Wednesday, March 11th

We got up around 6:00 a.m. Breakfast was once again at 7:00 a.m. We got on the bus and were on our way by 8:10 a.m.

We drove by the city of Bethany where Mary, Martha, and Lazarus lived.

We drove through the Judean Desert.

We traveled along the Dead Sea for quite awhile. The area around it was quite beautiful in its own way.

Our first stop of the day was at Masada. You get to the top by either hiking up or taking a cable car. We took the cable car to the top. Masada (Hebrew for fortress), is situated atop an isolated rock cliff at the western end of the Judean Desert, overlooking the Dead Sea. According to Josephus Flavius, Herod the Great built the fortress of Masada between 37 and 31 BC. Herod had been made King of Judea by his Roman overlords and was hated by his Jewish subjects. Herod, the master builder, “furnished this fortress as a refuge for himself.” It included a casemate wall around the plateau, storehouses, large cisterns ingeniously filled with rainwater, barracks, palaces and an armory. Some 75 years after Herod’s death, at the beginning of the Revolt of the Jews against the Romans in 66 AD, a group of Jewish rebels overcame the Roman garrison of Masada. After the fall of Jerusalem and the destruction of the Temple (70 AD) they were joined by zealots and their families who had fled from Jerusalem. With Masada as their base, they raided and harassed the Romans for two years. Then, in 73 AD, the Roman governor Flavius Silva marched against Masada with the Tenth Legion, auxiliary units and thousands of Jewish prisoners-of-war. The Romans established camps at the base of Masada, laid siege to it and built a circumvallation wall. They then constructed a rampart of thousands of tons of stones and beaten earth against the western approaches of the fortress and, in the spring of the year 74 AD, moved a battering ram up the ramp and breached the wall of the fortress. The defenders – almost one thousand men, women and children – led by Eleazar ben Ya’ir, decided to burn the fortress and end their own lives, rather than be taken alive. The Zealots cast lots to choose 10 men to kill the remainder. They then chose among themselves the one man who would kill the survivors. That last Jew then killed himself. To Israelis, Masada symbolizes the determination of the Jewish people to be free in its own land. They had held off the Romas for a year. The Romans were none to happy when they overtook the city and only a handful of people were alive.

This was quite an amazing place to visit. I pulled one picture off the internet that shows an arial view of Masada.

What sweet angels...

Driving along the Dead Sea:

From Masada, we headed to Qumran, where the Dead Sea Scrolls were found. In 1947 two Bedouin shepherds accidentally came across a clay jar in a cave near Khirbet Qumran that contained seven parchment scrolls. The scrolls came into the hands of dealers in antiquities who offered them to scholars. The first scholar to recognize their antiquity was E.L. Sukenik, who succeeded in acquiring three of them for the Hebrew University. Between 1948 and 1950 he published specimens of them, his "editio princeps" appearing posthumously in 1955. The four other scrolls were smuggled to the United States, where three of them were published in 1950-51. Later they were offered for sale. Yigael Yadin, the son of E.L. Sukenik and also an outstanding archaeologist, succeeded in buying them and bringing back to Israel. The Israel Museum in Jerusalem constructed a special site for exhibiting the scrolls - the Shrine of the Book (opened in 1965). In the meantime a group of scholars under the leadership of R. de Vaux began to search and excavate the cave where the first scrolls were found, as well as some 40 caves in its vicinity. Many scrolls and thousands of fragments were found in 11 caves. Y. Yadin has acquired several important items from them. Due to difficulties in deciphering, the material it was published very slowly. The Qumran manuscripts were mostly written on parchment, some on papyrus. They are dated by the closing period of the Second Temple and assumed to be a part of the library belonging to a community from Qumran, known also as a "Dead Sea Sect". In some caves the manuscripts were carefully placed in covered cylindrical jars, whereas in other ones they appear to have been dumped in haste. In a cave that yielded the greatest amount of documents, the storage conditions were the worst, and the manuscripts disintegrated into tens of thousands of fragments, which had to be pieced together with the utmost patience and care. The documents contain over 100 copies of the books of the Hebrew Bible, most of which survived only as fragments. Out of 24 books all except the Book of Ester are represented. Fragments of Septuagint text have been also identified, some of them evidently the oldest documents of this kind. Certain manuscripts apparently describe the life of Qumran community: the Manual of Discipline, the Damascus Document, the Thanksgiving Psalms, and the War scroll. They tell about the community's origin and history, its rules of life, and expectations for the dawn of new age.
After looking around, we ate lunch at a restaurant near Qumran. I, of course, had to have another felafel!! I just can't get enough!

Visiting a bit after lunch:

Me, chatting with Brother David:

We then headed to the Dead Sea for a float. A few people put on swimsuits and went all the way in to see if they could float. Some even rubbed mud on themselves. There were a few, including myself, who just waded in a ways. The Dead Sea is a salt lake bordering Jordan to the east and Israel and the West Bank to the west. Its surface and shores are 1,388 ft below sea level, the lowest elevation on the Earth's surface on dry land. The Dead Sea is 1,237 ft deep, the deepest hypersaline lake in the world. It is also one of the world's saltiest bodies of water. It is 8.6 times more salty than the ocean. This salinity makes for a harsh environment where animals cannot flourish, hence its name. The Dead Sea has attracted visitors from around the Mediterranean basin for thousands of years. Biblically, it was a place of refuge for King David. It was one of the world's first health resorts (for Herod the Great), and it has been the supplier of a wide variety of products, from balms for Egyptian mummification to potash for fertilizers. People also use the salt and the minerals from the Dead Sea to create cosmetics and herbal sachets. The sea has a density of 1.24 kg/L, making swimming difficult but providing a relaxing floating experience. Just north of the Dead Sea is Jericho. Somewhere, perhaps on the southeast shore, would be the cities mentioned in the Book of Genesis which were said to have been destroyed in the time of Abraham: Sodom and Gomorra (Genesis 18).

From the Dead Sea we headed to Jericho. Jericho is a city located near the Jordan River in the West Bank in Israel. It has a population of over 20,000. Situated well below sea level, Jericho is the lowest permanently inhabited site on earth. It is also believed to be one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities of the world. Described in the Hebrew Bible as the "City of Palm Trees", copious springs in and around Jericho have made it an attractive site for human habitation for thousands of years. It is known in Judeo-Christian tradition as the place of the Israelites' return from bondage in Egypt, led by Joshua. Archaeologists have unearthed the remains of over 20 successive settlements in Jericho, the first of which dates back to 11,000 years ago (9000 BC. Jericho was captured from Jordan by Israel during the Six-Day War of 1967 along with the rest of the West Bank. It was one of the first cities handed over to Palestinian Authority control in 1994. Not too many people are allowed in the city. We once again had to go through security to get inside the town walls. We drove all over the city. It is amazing to see how the people there live. You can see a lot of destruction from previous bombings.







We saw the Mount of Temptation. The Mount of Temptation was the hill in the Judean Desert where Jesus was tempted by Satan (Matthew 4:8). The exact location is unknown, and impossible to determine. It is generally identified with Mount Quarantania, a mountain approximately 1,200 feet high, located about 7 miles north-west of the West Bank town of Jericho. Atop the mount is the Greek Orthodox Monastery of the Temptation or "Qarantal". Above Qarantal, on top of the cliff, is a wall, that sits on the ruins of the Hasmonean (later Herodian) fortress, Dok – Dagon. (Sorry the picture is not very good - the sun was in the wrong place...)

"Jesus entered Jericho and was passing through it. Now a man named Zacchaeus was there; he was a chief tax collector and was rich. He was trying to get a look at Jesus, but being a short man he could not see over the crowd. So he ran on ahead and climbed up into a sycamore tree to see him, because Jesus was going to pass that way" (Luke 19:1-4). This sycamore tree is said to be over 10,000 years old. With a giant trunk and boughs towering 60 feet high, a gnarled sycamore near Jericho's main square has long been touted as the very tree that the hated tax collector climbed to get a glimpse of Jesus.

George, our guide, stopped at a fruit stand and bought us some Jericho bananas. They are smaller than our banana with more of a curve. They were very good, sweeter than our bananas.

Our next stop was at a shop in Jericho where we could purchase pottery, hand blown glass items, and Dead Sea products.

Then we headed back to Jerusalem. We saw a beautiful sunset as we came upon the city. We went back to our hotel to rest a bit before dinner. Dinner was at 7:00 p.m. After dinner, a group of us went back to Abraham's shop. Then we walked around trying to find some other stores. We did find one but it was closed. It was a beautiful night for a walk. We got back to the hotel around 9:30 p.m. Brenda and I looked at what we had purchased today. We were in bed by 10:15 p.m.