We woke this morning with the plan of walking through the Old City of Jerusalem which includes some of the holiest places on the trip. We also woke up to a significant drop in temperature and rain. Our guide, the Bishop and tour bus captain conferred and agreed that a change was in store. We would postpone the old city for tomorrow and today we would drive to Qumran, Masada, and Jericho. This was a very good choice.
It was still chilly down in the south of the Holy Land but the rain wasn’t a problem in any way! If you’ve been following my blog, you’ll remember me saying that what I pictured Israel like (arid, dry and a wilderness) wasn’t true. Well today, I take that back. Leaving Jerusalem, we traveled over 3000 feet below sea level to THE lowest spot on the earth. It went from lush and green to dry and rocky. It was striking the contrast of the landscape!
This area of Israel is called the Judean Wilderness and trust me you can understand the wilderness really quickly when you see it! It’s also a place that Jesus wandered for 40 days and John the Baptist had most of his ministry. We drove along the old Roman road that Jesus mentions in the parable of the Good Samaritan – from Jerusalem to Jericho. This parable came alive in ways that I had, nor could have, never thought of before!
Our first stop was Qumran. In 1947, a little Bedouin shepherd was looking for a lost sheep in a cave and threw a stone into the opening. He didn’t hear his sheep, he heard the crashing of a pot. Inside this and many other caves nearby, they found what is now called the Dead Sea Scrolls – an entire collection (minus Habakuk and Esther) of the Old Testament Scriptures. This is extremely significant for biblical scholars because these scrolls date to the time of Christ. They showed us that the tradition of scripture being handed down from generation to generation was extremely reliable. The OT you and I read today is translated from the same hebrew script used 2000 years ago – it hasn’t changed!
The Scrolls were placed in the caves by a community called the Essenes. They were a group of people that believed the judaism of their day had been corrupted and irreversibly stained. Only by removing/separating could “light” win over “darkness.” They formed 3 different places of communion but this one at Qumran seems to have been the main head quarters. It is more than a little possible that John the Baptist spent time with this community (his teaching is eerily similar to many of the writings/teachings of the Essenes). In 70 AD/CE, the community saw the handwriting on the wall as the Romans were leveling Jerusalem and enslaving the Jews. They hid their precious scrolls so that they would be safe from the hands of pagans. They stayed in those caves for 1900 years.
After Qumran, we drove past David’s oasis at En Gedi. This is the place that David used as his hideaway from king Saul. It’s where he cut off the corner of the robe of the King while Saul was “resting.” From En Gedi, we continued along the coast of the Dead Sea. It recedes nearly 3 feet each year and the Jewish/Jordanian authorities are trying to figure out how to increase water to the sea that will eventually evaporate completely.
Our next stop was Masada and I was in Roman History Heaven! Masada is a natural stone top that overlooks a good deal of the area. It has a 24 acre area, mostly, flat space that makes it a perfect fortress. King Herod who was a ruthless, paranoid-visionary used Masada as a back up plan for times of trouble. He built 2 different palaces on the land that each had a Roman Bath. It had a temple or auditorium and houses for all his guests, family and slaves. It had 8-9 cisterns for water with ingenious designs for catching the precious water that falls in the desert. It’s an amazing compound.
When Rome came to wipe out Israel’s rebellion in the late 60’s, a group of Jews escaped to Masada to live as zealots. Rome was having none of it and after they destroyed the temple they went to Masada with 2 very powerful roman legions. They seiged Masada for 2 years. The zealots wouldn’t give up and neither would the Romans, so the Romans began using Jewish slaves to built a ramp up the side of mountain. It took the full 2 years to reach the top. When the Romans finally broke through the walls, they found 4 living people out of roughly 960 inhabitants. The rest had decided that death by their own hands was better than slavery to the Romans. The few that remained were kept alive to tell the story of what happened. The place is overwhelming and being in that place is a little haunting – makes you feel really small!
From Masada, it was on to the oldest inhabited city on earth – Jericho, where Joshua “fit the battle of”. The place is old. I mean the whole land is old, but you feel the ancient-ness of the place. In the excavations they found a tower that dates back 10,000 years. We sat under a tree for a devotional and drank from Elisha’s spring from 2 Kings.
Our plan was to head to the Dead Sea for some floaty time in the salt, but the wind was whipping up so much that they closed the beaches. Bad news, right? Well, not really, because this allowed for a brilliant change of plans. We traveled to the Israeli/Jordanian border and stood on the banks of the Jordan in the spot that John preached and Jesus was baptized! AMAZING moment! As we stood taking pictures, we had Israeli soldiers behind us and Jordanian soldiers watching us not 25 feet away. Then, almost as if staged, white doves flew down and perched across the river. That gave a few goose bumps, I promise you!
From here we traveled to a place that I didn’t know existed. Between Jerusalem and Jericho, in the Judean Wilderness is a place called the “Valley of the Shadow of Death.” The one King David prayed that he would fear no evil from – the very one that the samaritan found the jew and took care of him in Jesus’ story – the very one that Jesus probably wandered in for 40 days! In the middle of the valley, which is crazy steep, is a monastery that has been in order for 1500 years. The place took my breathe away!!!
My Jesus was in that valley fighting it out with the tempter. He walked it and while much of Israel has changed in 2000 years, that valley still remains. I wondered as I looked out over this amazing place, if Jesus would have prayed David’s psalm as he went through it, ” I will fear no evil”?
Tomorrow it’s back to the Old City, but after a day like today, I’m in a state of feeling a bit numb with so many things that I’ve observed – so many stories and lives that continue to touch me and countless others. I remember listening to a song entitled “A man to write about” by one of my favorite christians groups of my youth. The song tells the story of a man thinking about all the stories of scripture and how someone wrote down their story because they lived a life that was inspiring and anointed. The singer says that he wants to live that kind of life so that 1000 years from now, someone will read about what he did. This song popped in my head today. I want to be that man – not for fame and glory, but so that lives can be changed, that the world may be a little more like Heaven come to earth because I walked the ground. I pray that for you tonight as well. Let’s live those stories and invite, as many of us pray each week, to see “His kingdom on earth as it is in heaven” and may we be those that plant, till, water till it happens.
Shalom for now…
jim
