This weekend, like most others, was approximately two days long. Over the course of those two days we visited ten different places. I will hopefully be able to recount all of them and provide pictures for most of them. All the pictures will be on facebook anyway, but I took over 150 of them, so it’s gonna be slow uploading.
Like last weekend, we got to sleep in until 7:30 for breakfast on Saturday. Breakfast, as always, was a good time, and we were on the bus heading south by 8:00. As we entered the desert, I was struck at how deserted it was. I’ve spent some time in the southwest United States, so I’ve seen some desert, but this was a whole different animal, or lack thereof. The place was barren of even meager plant-life for the most part. I was blown away by the vastness and the browness and the hotness of the area.
The first place we stopped was the Wadi Kilt. I think that’s how it’s spelled.
This location is noted for being the place Jesus spent 40 days in the desert being tempted by the Devil, or at least that’s what those crazy peo… Christians said. Anyway, picture above is a monastery that was established a long time ago. Monasteries can take a number of forms, either involving a communal system where everyone lives and eats together and withdraws to a private chamber in the evenings for prayer or an individual system where aside from working to sustain themselves the monks would spend all there time in solitude praying and writing and stuff. I honestly forget which kind this one is, but I know they use the rock face it’s against for cave-based living quarters.
After we dodged the Bedouin merchants peddling some kind of bullshit and got back onto the possibly over air conditioned bus, we headed south again towards the Dead Sea. Our second stop was the settlement of Qumran. Qumran’s claim to fame is being the home for the writers of the Dead Sea Scrolls. Unfortunately, the scrolls were found in caves dotting the Dead Sea, and Qumran itself isn’t especially interesting. The most interesting things were the ritual baths that dotted the whole area, which looked something like this:
The residents of Qumran were super devout Jews who believed they were going to be on the winning side of an imminent and great war between good and evil. They were also obsessed with ritual baths and living in the desert. The way they ensured that their baths would be full, and their cisterns as well, was a series of aqueducts that funneled the biannual flooding from the Jordanian Mountains into several successive baths and cisterns. There will photos on Facebook illustrating this point a little better. We got lunch at Qumran, which was a little pricey, but whatever, it got us into the Dead Sea for cheap, plus I got Coke in a glass bottle. While I was waiting in line to buy my Shawarma I saw the funniest thing:
Vodka in a little cup. Perfect.
Despite the cautionary wisdom of the wait thirty minutes after eating to swim thing, the post-lunch activity was swimming in the Dead Sea. Now, I don’t know about you folks who’ve never been, but the message I always received about the Dead Sea was that it’s a fun salty ocean you can float in. Bullshit. It’s poison. In the words of Jon Strong, one of the area supervisors at Tel Gezer, your body won’t let you swallow it. We were warned many times not to get it in our eyes or mouth for fear of blindness or unscheduled regurgitation.
Despite these caveats, the Dead Sea was so goddamn fucking fun I can’t even fucking describe it without profanity. The floor is slippery because of the mineral enriched mud and there are pits of soft mud you sink into that almost topple you over. The stories of floating are absolutely true! All you have to do is lie back and you just bob around. It’s soooooo cool.
Did I mention that the mud is supposed to be good for your skin? I don’t know if this is true or if they just like seeing tourists cover themselves in mud. Either way, they sell this stuff for exorbitant amounts of money in gift shops, so we got the treatment for free! It was a good time, but the water did, in fact, taste terrible. I got some in my mouth by mistake and was immediately filled with the desire to not have it in my mouth. I spat a lot. Another phenomenon that I am pretty sure is not exclusive to the Dead Sea is how incredibly hot sand and pavement gets in Israel. I had neglected to pack sandals, not foreseeing this problem, so my foot situation was less than favorable. I ended up getting my socks really dirty.
After we showered off and were privy to shriveled old man bits, we hopped back on the bus to En Gedi. For those of you heathens who I know are reading this, En Gedi is where David hit his sorry ass from Saul, who was on a murderous rampage, but only against David. There was supposedly a cave around this spring that has since collapsed, but these pretty waterfalls remain.
A few people decided to take a dip. I didn’t because I had already changed out of my swimsuit, but that didn’t stop some people. I wanted dry undies for Masada, though it was probably hot enough that it wouldn’t have mattered. I took pictures instead. It was a beautiful place.
Aside from its biblical associations, En Gedi is also a wildlife preserve. It plays a home to the Ibex
and the Rock Hyrex.
It was getting late, but one of the coolest, most impressive stops on our southern tour was ahead, and we didn’t have much time.
I didn’t catch a photo of the Masada from below, so this model will have to do (though in English we spell it Masada, a it’s phonetic spelling would be Matsada):
It’s a city/fortress/palace built by King Herod the Great and reused during one of the Jewish results against the Romans, in 64 AD I think (I mean 64 CE, of course). If you remember what I wrote about Herodion, think of that on crack. This place was crazy. In fact, it’s so crazy that the ancient path that is still used to mount this, well, mountain, wasn’t a viable option for our group, since it’s about an hour of steep incline. Instead, we took the tram.
My mother would have hated it, but the view was amazing. Masada was, you know, a pile of rocks, but aside from being an impressive bit of architecture and ancient civilization, the story of Masada’s role in the Jewish rebellion is legendary. It comes to us from the historian Josephus and tells the tale of the Roman siege of Masada.
There are still remnants of the Roman siege wall and camps that completely encompass the mesa the fortress is built on. The Romans knew it would be impossible to assault the mountain directly, so they constructed a massive, and I mean HUGE, siege ramp with which they could mount an attack with rams and towers and all that fun LOTR stuff.
There’s your ramp, a pile of dirt that lasted 2000 years. The Romans busted down the gate or wall or whatever they were busting down, then retreated for the night, knowing that they could easily breach the walls the next morning and take the fortress. Meanwhile, the Jews inside decided that the Romans were a bunch of shits and they’d rather be dead at their own hands than be killed or enslaved by Rome.
Excavations actually revealed these potsherds that were drawn as lots. After the heads of house had killed their wives and children, they drew these sherds to decide who had to kill everyone else and then off himself. Heavy shit.
We walked down the mountain by way of the Roman siege ramp and boarded the bus for the modern city of Arad where we were going to spend the night. The place was an old hospital that was converted into a hotel, and though that seems kinda sketchy the place was really nice. It had this weird system, though, where you had to insert this card thing attached to your key into a slot in the room in order to activate the electricity. You either had to turn off the lights on your way out or get locked out of your room. Good system.
Not to be a bunch of lame-butts, after dinner we went out on the town, or as out on the town you can get in a Jewish city on the Sabbath. We went to the mall so that Eric could get shorts (he split his at the crotch digging this week, hehehe). When we came out things had started to open up so we went to a bar and got a couple drinks. I tried Goldstar, a local brew (that is, Israeli), and while I don’t like to sound ethnocentric, I’ll stick to beer from anywhere else from now on.
After breakfast today we went to Tel Arad, which is about fifteen minutes from the modern city. This is a site I was really looking forward to because it’s one of those places Dr. K is always showing us pictures of and talking about. It’s notable features are an Iron Age fortress containing a Jewish altar and a Canaanite city below.
This altar is lovely, and it is interesting because of the two stones present. One is obviously for YHWH, Lord of the Jews. The smaller one is probably for Asherah, YHWH’s wife, whom the writers of the Bible so desperately would like everyone to just forget about. I think it’s pretty neato.
The Canaanite city was pretty cool. I like the Bronze Age a lot. It was too large for us to explore the whole thing, but it did have a cool water system. Little did we know, 300 was shot here.
Next it was to Tel Beer Sheba, another biblical hot spot. In the Bible it is the site of Abraham and Abimelek’s agreement not to fuck which each other’s shit, so to speak. There is also mention in Genesis of Isaac building an altar there, and one of the notable features of the site is the four horned altar that the bottom of the tel (it was moved there).
Another impressive feature is the water system. It was deep underground, and we had to don some pretty spiffy hardhats in order to venture into it’s depths.
Good thing, too. I bonked my head on the low ceiling a few times. I’m glad we put safety first. Beer Sheba is also cool for halving a circular city plan with those four-room houses I’ve mentioned before on the outside. During wartime, the back room of the houses could be filled with rubble, and so the ring of houses created a casemate wall to defend the city. Those ancients were a clever bunch.
We drove west to Ashkelon to take a dip in the Mediterranean. The water was super warm and the waves were huge. We spent almost an hour in the water just horsing around. The Dead Sea, while a fucking blast, was a little light on the splashing around. I managed to get salt water blasted into my nose a fair number of times, which was unpleasant, but overall it was excellent. A lot of us got stung by jellyfish. I think I got it behind the knee. Poor Sinéad got in right on the ass. That sucks.
We didn’t get to visit the actual Philistine city of Ashkelon, which was sad, but we rounded off the day with a trip to the valley that David kicked Goliath’s ass.
It was a nice view. Not much else to it. It was a very long weekend. I’m almost ready to pack it in for another 4:30 wake-up. OH! We did get our ranks boosted by some fifteen students at Lancaster Bible College. Hurray, more crazi… Christians! Hopefully a few are competent and they end up in my square.
This is Lucas Reckling, signing off from Neve Shalom/Wahat al-Salam. Stay shiny, browncoats.
A very colorful post. Sounds f-ing awesome! :)
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