Jericho, the Dead Sea, and Qumran
We returned to the Fiesta, our floating hotel, had dinner and listened to a lecture from Dr. Jack Lewis. He would usually lecture on what we had seen and what we were going to see. He took the tourist hype out of the trip, and made it a memorable educational experience. I owe a lot of my interest in Biblical geography and archeology to Dr. Lewis.
By daybreak we were pulling into the harbor of Haifa, Israel’s Mediterranean port city. We were given strict warnings not to take any pictures as we approached the harbor. We were told that Israeli agents were on board and if they heard the click of a shutter, they would unceremoniously remove the film from the camera and drop it into the water. I don’t know how they handle that in these days of digital photography.
Security was tight as we entered Israel and the people who processed us through were totally humorless, but we soon boarded buses and prepared to see the land of the Savior’s birth. We drove to Jericho and visited the remains of the excavation of the tel at the ancient city. (A tel is a raised mound that marks the site of an ancient city.Twenty years earlier Kathleen Kenyon, the British archaeologist, had completed the last excavation there. Afterwards she made some pro-Arab statements, so she was never allowed to return.
Noon found us as the Dead Sea, which is a sort of eerie place. The folks from the Fiesta had packed us a sack lunch, so we ate on the shore of the sea. From there we went to Qumran, where we saw the ruins of the ancient communal residences where the Dead Sea Scrolls were written.
Our guide told us there was nothing to see there. He was wrong. We were not tourists whose sole interest was in visiting holy shrines. Qumran was rich in history and archeology. It was about a hundred degrees and I suppose he wanted to get out of the heat, but I had read quite a bit about the Essenes and the community at Qumran. I took it all in. At one point, I stood facing Cave IV where the famous Isaiah scroll was discovered. I took a picture of it, from what appears to have been the exact vantage point that had been printed in the National Geographic magazine.
To me it was a breathtaking experience, even though we weren’t allowed to stay there very long. There were no souvenir shops there. We soon learned that the guides received a commission from the souvenir shops, so they were anxious to get you to those places that sold trinkets. There they would leave you a long time. Where there was no money to be made, they didn’t want to linger long.
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