[My visit to Israel was chock-a-block full of amazing sights and experiences, including natural phenomena, biblical sites and ancient history, and modern accomplishments. This day, we caught a little of all of those—as you’ll read in Part 4 below.
[If you haven’t read Parts 1 through 3 of “Travel Journal: Israel & Egypt, 1982,” I strongly recommend going back to pick them up before getting into Part 4. (The previous installments of the journal were posted on 11, 14, and 17 July.)]
Jericho, Dead Sea, & Masada – Friday, 17 December
The next day, we drove north and east to Jericho, a city in the West Bank that was occupied by Israel in the Six-Day War. [The city gained limited self-rule under the Palestinian Authority in 1994.]
Believed to be one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities in the world, Jericho has revealed settlements dating back to 9000 BCE. Archaeologists have excavated more than 20 successive layers of civilization. What’s believed to be the oldest protective wall in the world, made famous in the African-American spiritual that goes back to the early 19th century (not to mention the Old Testament story of its fall in Joshua 6:1-27), the city wall was built in approximately 8000 BCE.
Jericho was first excavated in 1868 and has been explored archeologically continuously ever since, each dig making significant discoveries. An Italian-Palestinian expedition conducted a dig for over 20 years from 1997 to 2017.
Archeologists from the 1950s on have put the battle of Jericho at around 1500 BCE, based on examination of a network of collapsed walls unearthed in the 1930s. The biblical account, however, dates only from the 6th century BCE, with earlier versions composed between the 8th and 7th centuries BCE.
Jericho is the fifth site in Israel of archeological excavation I’ve mentioned. Of course, there are many more—the whole country is an active, former, or prospective archeological site. Jericho is arguably the granddaddy of them all in a sense.
There’s such a thing as the Jerusalem Syndrome. It strikes visitors to the Holy Land who are overwhelmed by the religious significance of so much of the surroundings. In its mildest form, the syndrome can cause ordinary people—usually those with strong religious backgrounds or beliefs—to hear the voices of angels or wander the Old City in robes fashioned from the bedsheets from their hotel rooms.
Well, I developed an even milder form of the phenomenon. The trigger wasn’t the religiosity surrounding me or the echoes of the Bible—it was the ancientness of various sites. I first experienced this shadow of the syndrome at Stonehenge in 1963, when I was 17. Visitors were allowed to walk around and in the stone circle then and standing before those primeval megaliths, which were already ancient when the Romans were in Britain, suffused me with a sense of being in the presence of things immensely old.
[Stonehenge wasn’t only old. It was also mysterious. We know—or think we know—more about the ancient stone monument today than we did 58 years ago, but it’s still a powerful mystery after more than 5,000 years.]
Of course, you can’t move in Israel without coming into contact with something really old, so it was hard not to feel that sense of age and history over and over again. I wasn’t tempted to wrap myself in a sheet, don sandals, and carry a staff—but standing before the wall of Jericho . . . well, it was Stonehenge times 10. I just stood there in honest-to-God (not a bad description in this instance) awe for seconds without moving. Though I hope not, my mouth might have been open as well. In my mind, it was.
[I would feel this sensation again here in the U.S. when I visited New Mexico in 2002—specifically in Taos. We went to the Taos Pueblo, and though the present-day structures are only a few years old because the adobe needs to be replaced periodically, the village as a whole has stood on the same spot since as early as the 14th century—700 years ago. (See my two-part post “Taos & Taos Pueblo,” 24 and 27 May 2012.)]
After seeing the ruins of ancient Jericho—we didn’t spend any time in the modern town—we drove south to the Dead Sea. The deepest salt lake in the world at 997 feet, its shores are also the lowest elevation on Earth of any place on land at 1,412 feet below sea level. (By comparison, Death Valley, the point of lowest elevation in North America, is 282 feet below sea level.) On a list of the saltiest bodies of water around the world, the Dead Sea is seventh—9½ times as salty as the ocean.
The lake’s hypersalinity and its high mineral content make it impossible for any living creature to survive in its waters except for bacteria and a few other microscopic life forms. That’s why it’s called the Dead Sea—nothing lives in it. (If the salinity and mineral content are diluted, say after a particularly rainy period, some sea plants, principally algaes will grow for a time.)
The lake’s water is so dense that it’s virtually impossible to sink—but very easy to float. Simon invited anyone in our group who wanted to to jump in and try to sink under the surface—but I don’t recall anyone taking him up on his challenge. No one had brought a swim suit, of course, and going in dressed, even partially, would have meant spending the rest of the day in wet clothing.
Besides, anyone who did get wet from the Dead Sea’s water, with its salt and minerals, would have been pretty stinky for the rest of the day as well. Mineral baths are not what you’d call fresh-smelling!
The Dead Sea, by the way, is a mineral spa. In fact, it’s one of the world’s first health resorts (for Herod I and his court). At least one nearby kibbutz was set up as a health spa for visitors to the Dead Sea (another example of a non-agricultural kibbutz). It also marketed products made from the lake’s waters, salts, minerals, and mud sold to promote various health benefits.
(The Dead Sea and the other sights on this outing are all in the Judean Desert, which lies in Israel and the West Bank east of Jerusalem and south to the lake. Later, we’d drive into the Negev, further south. Israel, save for the coastlines of the Mediterranean and Galilean Seas, the Gulf of Eilat [Gulf of Aqaba] of the Red Sea, and the banks of the River Jordan, is largely a desert country—as is most of the region.
(Unlike the Sahara—which I’d be seeing later when my trip moved west to Egypt—which is sand, the Israeli deserts are dirt and rocks, more like the U.S. deserts such as the Mojave in California and Nevada. Simon liked to joke that in most countries, tourists and visitors are admonished not to take anything they didn’t buy away with them . . . but in Israel it was different. If you see a rock you like, he’d plead, please—take it with you!
(Israel was still in the process of reclaiming desert land for agriculture and homesites. It was almost an obsession with the first modern Zionists who came to Palestine in the late 19th century, and it had been a pursuit of the new State of Israel, to make the desert bloom.
(It was one of the most astonishing phenomena of modern Israel to see how fields of growing vegetation have taken hold of what had been for centuries barren, brown, lifeless wasteland. It’s truly a remarkable accomplishment—even as it’s precariously artificial in that it can all disappear in a flash if the man-made and man-assisted irrigation systems are removed—say, by war or sabotage, or natural disaster.)
It’s hard to talk about the Dead Sea and not at least mention the scrolls. The famous Dead Sea Scrolls are ancient Jewish and Hebrew religious manuscripts that were found in the Qumran Caves near the northern end of the lake.
The initial find was seven scrolls found in 1946 and ’47 by three Bedouin shepherds; many more were discovered in the years to come in other locations in the Judean Desert. [The most recent discoveries were made in March 2021, but newly uncovered fragments have been found continuously since the first finds.]
I won’t say any more about the scrolls now because coming up shortly was our visit to the Shrine of the Book in Jerusalem (see Part 5), where some of the scrolls and fragments were on display.
From the Dead Sea, we drove further south along the western shore of the lake to the ruin of Masada, the site of perhaps the most famous Jewish revolt against the Roman occupiers of Judea. According to Josephus (37-ca. 100 CE), the Roman-Jewish historian, the siege of Masada took place from late 73 to early 74 CE. (The actual dates are debated among historians.)
Masada had taken on a mythic aura less because of history or archeology, but because of the television miniseries that had just aired on ABC in the United States in April 1981. (Airing over four nights with stars like Peter O’Toole, Peter Strauss, Anthony Quayle, and David Warner, Masada attracted a lot of attention. Furthermore, shortly before I left on this tour, I participated in a reading of a musical on Masada, Grains of Sand by Lois W. Gunsberg, William Garvin, and Donna G. Lerner.)
The miniseries had been filmed on location in Masada itself, which was another reason this visit was impressive to many of us American tourists. As Jews, standing in the ruins of the ancient fortress atop a plateau [much like the mesas of the U.S. southwest that I saw in 2002] in the Judean Desert, my companions and I felt a frisson.
For those who don’t already know this bit of history, I’ll summarize: The First Jewish-Roman War, a Jewish rebellion against Roman rule in Judea, was the result of a series of clashes in which small groups of Jews offered sporadic resistance to the Romans. The Romans, in turn, responded with severe reprisals.
In the fall of 66 CE, the Jewish insurrectionists expelled the Romans from Jerusalem. King Herod Agrippa II (27/28-ca. 92 or 100 CE; reigned: 50-92/100 CE), who was pro-Roman, fled Jerusalem.
One rebel faction launched a surprise attack on the garrison at Masada and took the fortress. A Roman force under a general from neighboring Syria marched on Jerusalem and retook the city, but foolishly withdrew and was ambushed and destroyed by the insurgents.
The Jews controlled the capital again and established a provisional government which extended its influence throughout the whole territory.
Emperor Nero (37-68 CE; reigned: 54-68 CE) dispatched Vespasian (9-79 CE) to crush the rebellion. Under his command, the Roman legions entered Galilee, where Josephus (then a rebel leader known as Yosef ben Matityahu) commanded the Jewish forces. Josephus’ army was confronted by Vespasian’s legions and fled and Josephus surrendered.
The Roman forces swept the country—but back in Rome, Nero committed suicide on 9 June 68. In July 69, Vespasian was named emperor (reigned until 79) by his own legions and returned to Rome, leaving his son and second-in-command, Titus (39-81 CE), in Judea to finish the war.
Titus laid siege to fortified Jerusalem and on Tisha B’Av (literally, the ninth of the month of Av) in 70 CE (29 August), Jerusalem fell; the Temple, also fortified and one of the last bastions to fall, was burned.
(Known as the saddest day of the Jewish year, Tisha B’Av, a fast day in the Jewish calendar, is observed as a day of mourning for the destruction of Solomon’s Temple and the Second Temple, as well as other disasters that have befallen the Jewish people throughout their history from the murders by the Romans of the Ten Martyrs [ten rabbis executed on the order of the Roman emperor in the period after the destruction of the Second Temple], massacres in several Jewish communities during the Crusades [1095-1291], and the European Holocaust during the 1940s. Tisha B’Av is observed between mid-July and early August on the modern Western calendar.)
The Jewish state collapsed, although the fortress of Masada was not conquered by the Romans until April 73.
The rebel faction that had taken the fortress at Masada in 66 had been joined by other rebels who’d been expelled from Jerusalem between 67 and 68 during the period of internecine struggles. Later, after the destruction of the Temple in 70, more Jerusalem refugees and their families fled to Masada.
The insurgent faction that held Masada were radical and extremist in their drive to rid Judea of the Roman occupiers; they even saw other Jewish groups as enemies if they didn’t oppose the Roman rule vehemently enough. Known as the Sicarii, a splinter group of the Zealots, these radicals used Masada as a base to raid and terrorize the surrounding countryside.
In 71 CE, the Roman governor of Judea laid siege to Masada with an estimated force of 8,000 to 9,000 fighting men. (Josephus, the only historian to chronicle the Jewish revolt and the siege of Masada, recorded that the fortress held 960 people, though archeologists have found no evidence to support such a large figure.)
The Sicarii defenders had made some alterations to the original fortress, including cisterns for capturing rainwater carved into the rock on which Masada was built and a tunnel to the spring or well that provided water to the fortress. The storehouses had been filled with food, much of it obtained in raids on the nearby towns and villages.
A long siege by the Romans was inadvisable as the Masada defenders could hold out for many months, if not years. So the Romans built an earthen ramp, completed in the spring of 73 CE, to the fortress. The Romans pushed a siege tower equipped with a ram up the ramp and battered a breach in the wall on 16 April 73.
When they entered the fortress, however, the legionaries discovered its 960 inhabitants all dead. Witnesses—Josephus claimed to have gotten an account of the siege from two survivors who hid inside a drain—claimed that, because suicide was against Jewish belief but preferring death at their own hands to slavery or execution, the Sicarii had drawn lots to kill each other, with the last man the only one to take his own life.
The siege of Masada has become controversial in modern times. Some Jews regard Masada as a place of reverence, commemorating ancestors who fell fighting heroically against oppression. Others, several of my traveling companions among them, see it as a paradigm of extremism and a refusal to compromise.
Masada was the last act of the Jewish war. The Jews became scattered into areas around the Mediterranean with many thousands being sold into slavery. Though a Jewish diaspora had existed for centuries as merchants and travelers moved around the known world and resettled beyond Palestine, the sack of Jerusalem and the destruction of the Second Temple was really the beginning of the dispersal of Jews around the globe, with no homeland of their own.
[Part 5 of “Travel Journal” will come out on 23 July. I hope you’ll come back to Rick On Theater for glimpses of the Israeli Knesset (parliament), the Shrine of Book, Yad Vashem, and more.
[That’ll
be the next-to-last entry of the Israeli portion of my trip. After Part 6, I move on the Egypt.]
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