Day 5: Judean Desert, Masada, Dead Sea, and Jericho

We left the city to drive through the Judean Desert, which is in Israel and the West Bank and descends to the Dead Sea. Because of the lack of water and good routs, the Judean wilderness has been largely uninhabited except for Bedouin shepherds and others seeking refuge from enemies or retreat from the world. When on the run from King Saul, David his in various places in the Judean wilderness. John the Baptist preached here, and tradition holds that Jesus was tempted here. King Herod the Great (the King Herod who killed the Holy Innocents) built two fortresses in the Judean desert for protection should his people ever revolt against him.

We had to ride up to Masada on a large cable car. Both on the way up and on the way, I got to stand near an Israeli soldier holding an Uzi submachine gun ready to put his finger on the trigger at any moment. This country is clearly on high alert. Every place we go we see soldiers armed with Uzi submachine guns. Imagine going to Disney World and seeing armed soldiers. It is very sobering.

Anyway, Masada is hard to comprehend. Granted, they used plenty slaves to build it, but I cannot imagine the manpower it took to lug those big stones up there to build this enormous fortress. This place had warm and cool baths, enormous food storage areas, two luxurious palaces, a swimming pool and a giant water system. This was a stunning achievement for that era.

After the Masada, we visited Qumram. Qumram was a settlement of the Jewish sect of the Essenes in the inhospitable wilderness bordering the Dead Sea, where the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered in 1947. The eleven caves in the adjacent hillside yielded their treasure, including fragments of every book of the Hebrew Bible except the Book of Esther, and many non-Biblical documents as well. These documents date from before the destruction of Jerusalem by Titus. Most of the documents are not scrolls, but are fragments mixed with bat poop and detritus. After viewing the cave at Qumram where the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered, we has lunch at a very crowded kibbutz before moving on to the Dead Sea.

The Dead Sea is a salt lake bordering Jordan to the east and Israel and the West Bank to the West. It is 1,388 feet below sea level making it Earth’s lowest elevation on land. It has about 33% salt which makes it one of the world’s saltiest bodies of water, and you can float on it without sinking. Biblically, the Dead Sea was a place of refuge for King David, and it is also mentioned in the Books of Genesis, Joshua and Zechariah. The floating on the water in the Dead Sea was fun, but getting out there was an ER visit waiting to happen. You see, you cannot get that salty water in your eyes, and you end up walking into the water in your swimsuit and your boat shoes. The clay-like mud on the bottom of the sea is terribly uneven, and awfully slick. When you try to walk into the water, your shoes slide around on the mud, and often the oily-feeling mud will grab ahold of one or both of your shoes and you get stuck, or worse you slide until you fall under water. This happened to me while I was carrying my smart phone out into the sea! What a potential disaster! I was okay, but I survived and so did my phone.

After we managed to shower the sand and goo from the sea off of us, we drove the Jericho, we Monsignor Al and Father Rich celebrate Mass at a small Catholic Church called Jesus the Good Shepherd. What is interesting to me about Catholic Churches over here versus Catholic Churches in the U.S. is that our Catholic Churches all seem to have a large crucifix as the focal point on the altar. In Catholic Churches over here, Jesus is pictured consistently with the theme or name of the particular church. So, for example, in the Church of the Jesus the Good Shepherd, there is no large crucifix, but there is a large illustration of Jesus as a shepherd tending to his flock.

As we headed back to Jerusalem after our time in the Judean Desert and the Dead Sea and Jericho, we stopped at Mountain Temptation. This is believed to be the place where Jesus was tempted. According to the Gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke, Jesus fasted for 40 days and nights in the Judean Desert, and during this time, Satan appeared to Him and tried to tempt Him.  On this day, it was a place where some in the group, including Father Rich, road a camel. While watching some members of the group ride a camel was entertaining, I was more amused by the store located across the street from the camel called “Temptation Gallery.”