Holy Land Day5 Jericho, Qumran. Dead Sea and Masada

On our way to Jericho, we passed Gilgal.

This is Tel Jericho. At the time of the Israelite conquest of Canaan, Joshua's soldiers marched round Jericho, and you know what happened - the walls came tumbling down. If any event in Israel's history can be traced by archaeology, surely this one can. Jericho appears to have been at one time a centre of moon-worship; its name is clearly derived from the Canaanite and Hebrew word for 'moon'. It was not a city in David's day, but it was a place he knew - a frontier-post of his kingdom, on the west bank of the Jordan, only a few miles north of the point where the river flows into the Dead Sea. Jericho is the site of 21 cities built on top of one another.

This peacock was found just outside of the Temptation Restaurant, near Tel Jericho.

We bought some of our dates, figs, date honey and saffron from this place. They are not cheap.

This sycamore fig tree is believed to be the tree Zacchaeus, the Tax Collector, climbed when he wanted to see who Jesus was (Luke 19). The next picture is a herd of camels we saw on our way to the 5-star Intercontinental Hotel which we stayed for the night.

We took the cable car to visit Masada National Park. View from top of Masada. Picture 3 shows the background link to Jordan River. Masada was the last bastion of Jewish freedom fighters against the Romans; its fall signaled the violent destruction of the kingdom of Judea at the end of the Second Temple period. The tragic events of the last days of the rebels at Masada transformed it into both a Jewish cultural icon and a symbol of humanity's continuous struggle for freedom from oppression.

The Breaching Point and Romans Ram. In the Hebrew month of Nissan, in the spring of 73 or 7 CE, the Romans raised a tower high enough to overlook the wall and bombarded the area, as attested to by the ballista themselves by rolling down large stones on the Romans. After the Romans destroyed the perimeter wall, they burned the wood-and-earth wall the rebels had built to shore it up. Thus, the siege came to an end. From the restored tower you can see the siege wall and the Roman camps.

The first picture shows the Roman camp. The second picture shows the model of Masada built by Herod the Great for his wife after he killed the children.

Peter took these 2 beautiful pictures of a bird drinking water from a water tap and of a mountain rodent near the army camp.

Picture 1 shows one of Masada's quarters. Picture 2 shows a concert stage in the middle of a dessert.

Picture 1 - Peter trapped in between a narrow passage. Picture 2 - Irene on a pile of canon ball stones. Picture 3 - Peter with the missing column of Masada.

Three different views of the Dead Sea from the top of Masada.

Qumran, located west of the Kaliah-Sedom road on the north-western shore of the Dead Sea, had a Jewish population as far back as the eight century B.C.E. Qumran's fame came from a break-away sect, known as the Essenes, who lived and studied here for 2 centuries - from the end of the Hashmonean period, through the great revolt of the Jews against the Romans - and left in the surrounding caves a magnificent legacy, that we now call the Dead Sea Scrolls.

Picture 1 shows the caves where the Essenes lived and studied. The caves that dot that difficult-to-reach slopes and crevices of Qumran had served the Essenes in time of need as hiding places for their library. The scrolls, hidden in jars for nearly 2000 years and preserved as a result of the area's arid climate, included books of the Old Testament, the Apocrypha and the sect's own works. Some of the scrolls are on display at the "The Shrine of the Book" in the Israel Museum which we will visit later. Picture 2 shows the pottery used during that time.

Lesson learnt - the Essenes, though extreme in their ways, were willing to give up a life of comfort to study GOD's Word without distraction and they treated GOD's Word with utmost reverence. As Christians, we have to be worthy to handle GOD's Word and not take HIS Word for granted.