Masada and Qumran

November 1, 2009--Sunday
Last night, we watched Israel’s version of Survivor on TV. They did a challenge like on our version, but at the end, they talked among themselves and left two guys behind, I suppose for elimination, but the show ended there. It did show clips from next week with one of those guys in it.

One thing really different, at commercial breaks they had a hostess with four Survivors who had been kicked off. They talked about the other contestants and showed clips, and did funny things like playing the theme music from the show Friends, showing guys hugging each other, arms on shoulders together and such. It was pretty funny,.

At the end, they had the kicked off Survivors voting on whom they thought would get kicked off.
We drove to Masada this morning, leaving at about 7:30 and traveling back the way we came last night. We only saw a little of the town and of the Old City and the golden Dome of the Rock. Jerusalem is on top of a high hill, and that is why they always say in the scriptures that they “…went up to Jerusalem.”

We passed some Bedouin sheep camps on the way out with the traditional tents but also some shanty-like one-room houses made of plywood, plastic and tin. Jerusalem is a modern city so it was odd seeing young men riding donkeys along the roads here and there. They were all Palestinians or Bedouins; I don’t Israelis ride donkeys these days.

While we were driving near a place called the Samaritan Inn, Stephen Rona, our tour guide, related a different interpretation to the Parable of the Good Samaritan. He said that the Savior was not trying to show the priest and the Levite as bad men. In their tradition, they could not touch a dead person or go through a cemetery or they would be defiled and could not participate in the temple ordinances. Perhaps to their view, the Samaritan was dead or nearly dead. They chose to avoid him than be defiled.

Stephen said that a Jew can break any religious law to save a life. They can go into a burning house on the Sabbath to save a life, but they cannot put out the fire if no one is in the house. Stephen said he believes the Savior was trying to show that they were being good for the wrong reason. Their action was legal, but they missed the higher law of compassion.

We stopped at a gas station, and along with a souvenir shop, there was a guy there with two camels, selling rides I assume. Marla bought some fresh dates, and they are the best we’ve ever eaten.

We again passed the same gas station we passed last night, and the camel was there again, ready for a ride.

We passed En-gedi where David cut off part of Solomon’s coat when he went into a
cave to “cover his feet,” or use the restroom.

As I mentioned before, much of Israel is desert. You have to wonder why the Lord would bring them here after they’d traveled in the wilderness and desert for 40+ years. As I read somewhere, “Forty years of traveling, and we came to the only place with no oil.” Our guidebook (which provides all the tour information about all the places we are going) points out that the Lord didn’t bring them here to tame the desert, but for the desert to tame them.
Masada was an incredible fortress. It is out in the middle of nowhere on top of a mesa. We rode up a cable car up and could see how sheer that side was. Herod the Great left two of his wives there while he went to Rome to get his commission. When he returned, they were nearly starving, so he made Masada a great fortress, that actually was used at one time by the Romans as a place for R&R. He built a palace on the north side of the mesa, partway down the side. Although most of Masada was destroyed over the years, some of the bases of the walls for the rooms and quarters are there, and they have rebuilt some of the walls with the existing rocks. The commandant’s quarters still has some color on the walls, as does the bath house, which the Romans built.

The Jews living there at the time needed bath areas there for ritual washings so there are succeeding baths or fonts. The Jews did do immersion; they wouldn‘t call it baptism since that is a Christian word. The guide said they immerse people who want to join their religion.
For the daily ritual bathing, they needed pure water, rain water, and flowing water. This was in short supply, so the rabbis decide they can use part of the pure water to purify a tub of regular water.

There was a tannery there, so they had animals all the way up there.
To get water, they had a system of cisterns dug into the side of the mountain that were fed by rain water from the surrounding hills that was caught by small aqueducts, like the one we saw in Petra. It was quite ingenious. In one place, there was evidence of carbon and charcoal, and the guide said they filtered their wash water into a cistern so they could use it again. When the Romans laid siege to Masada, they bucketed their water from the springs of En-geni. (En means spring, and gedi means a type of deer.)

The Jews held out while the Romans built a siege ramp on the back side. You could still see the remains of the Romans’ siege camps and part of the ramp. When they got it mostly built, the Jews started lobbing round rocks at them with catapults. There were still some of the round rocks left there in Masada that we saw. The Romans backed off, and then hauled Jewish slaves from their capture and destruction of Jerusalem, and used them to build the ramp--correctly believing that the Jews wouldn’t throw rocks at their countrymen.

When the ramp was complete, the Romans moved up their guys with battering rams. The shock wave produced by the battering rams knocked rocks out of the opposite side of the wall. To counter this, the Jews put up wooden beams with dirt between them and the wall to hold the rocks in place. Soon, the Roman brought their siege tower up the ramp to burn the wooden beams. The wind turned on them and almost burned their siege tower down.

The leader of the Jews gathered his people on the last night because they could see the Romans building ladders to scale the walls. He knew their time was up. He made a speech saying it was better for them to die than to be made slaves by the Romans and to have their wives and children abused. In their religious belief, it was worse to be a slave to anyone else but God than to die. He proposed that the fathers kill their wives and children in what he thought was the most humane (and sacrificial way) by cutting their throats. Then ten men would be chosen to kill the men the same way. One man would be chose to kill the rest and then fall on the sword, so technically, only one person committed suicide at Masada. The rest killed rather than have their families become slaves.

He also proposed they burn all their equipment and belongings, but not their food. They wanted the Romans to know they sacrificed themselves for their religious beliefs rather than for lack of food. And so they did.

One of the rooms we saw was the Room of the Lots. Here, they found ten pieces of pottery with the names of men written on it, possibly the ten who were selected by random to kill them men. One of the names was the leader of the group.

During the excavations, they found a synagogue there. It was a room with like bleacher seats on two sides and an enclosed room in the back. When their scriptures become damaged or too worn to use, they honor them by burying them, as you would do to honor someone who died. In that room, they found parts of scriptures buried and one complete chapter of Ezekiel--chapter 37. While this does talk about the stick of Judah and of Joseph, the guide believes that chapter was there because of the scriptures about the field of dry bones--and their belief in an eventual resurrection.

From there, we drove to a café for lunch and then for a swim in the Dead Sea. The Dead Sea is about 47 miles long and 16 miles wide. It is receding two feet a year because more of the water from the Jordan River, which feeds it, is being used. A British explorer in the 1800s marked the shoreline, and not the remnants of that line are to the west of the highway that parallels the Dead Sea, and the sea is 400 or 500 yards from the highway.

Marla and I and one other guy were the only ones in our group to swim in the Dead Sea. Some of the others waded in it. It was a rocky beach. Marla floated in the water first while I took her picture while she read a book. Then she took mine. We were holding the Book of Mormon.
From there, we went to Qumran. We saw the stone wall remains of the society there. They had a kitchen, pottery, scriptorium where they wrote the scrolls and other rooms. Our guide said that even though they were communal, their living quarters were separate. They found them by metal detecting for the tacks used in their sandals that fell out.

The Romans conquered them, too, but not before they hid their scrolls. We will see some of them in Jerusalem at a museum. A part of every book of the Old Testament except Esther has been found in the scrolls, as well as the complete Book of Isaiah, the oldest copy of it.
The Essenes who built Qumran did so to be alone and to worship their God in purity. They were Ascetics. You have to admire them for living out in a desert place and enduring its hardships for their religion. They understood the importance of purifying yourself and your life, to make yourself ready to meet God.

We are traveling north now to the Sea of Galilee where we will spend the night in a hotel run by a kibbutz. The kibbutz don’t just do farming these days. They are into other industries. One makes creams and facial products from the mud and minerals of the Dead

We passed a sign saying that the traditional place of Jesus baptism was to the right in the Jordan River. We did not stop.

There are more farms here and towns. It is greener.