Leaving Tiberius, we have Morning Prayer and Glen prepares our day by reading 1 Samuel 31 where King Saul and his son Jonathan have fallen in battle to the Philistines at “Beth Shan”, a place we’ll be visiting today.
As well, Glen reads 2 Samuel 2:17-27, David’s beautiful lament for Saul and Jonathan.
Duke adds to our Morning Prayer experience with his ever present guitar.
We drive through the Jordan Valley and see old bridges from the time of the Via Maris, the ancient trade route. This is also an important farming area.
We come to Bet She’an National Park, the site of Israelite battles, with King David eventually taking it and King Solomon making it an administrative centre. The Romans renamed it Nysa-Scythopolis and built magnificent public buildings, engraved with inscriptions and adorned with statues. Today, it’s a major archeological site.
The bathhouse structures at Bet She’an are quite elaborate and in their heyday had hot and tepid bathing halls and a heating system. We walk down “Palladius Street” and “Silanus Street” and get a feel for what a major Roman city of 70,000 was like. Public lavatories that had running water almost 2,000 years ago and a large theatre were a couple of the stops along the way. It’s a fabulous archeological treasure, very complex and the engineering behind it is impressive.
This was a pagan city in Roman times, we stop at a temple to Marcus Aurelius, with huge pillars that collapsed during an 8th century earthquake. The inside part of the temple is very small as the “worshippers” do not go inside the temple.
Travelling through the West Bank, we see sophisticated see through wire security fences that are patrolled by Israeli soldiers in vehicles. The purpose of the security fence is to control access and the potential of suicide bombers. Our guide, Tom, thinks this is working as suicide bombings have been reduced greatly since the fence went up.
The Jordan valley is a dry wilderness, with many place names we would recognize from the Bible. Nablus is biblical Shechem. Sodom and Gomorrah are at the south end of the Dead Sea. Gilgal, a place Joshua conquered, is where the prophet Elijah goes up to Heaven. We pass by Jericho – where “the walls came tumbling down” a very long time ago. We look over at the other side of the Jordan at “Bethany Beyond-the-Jordan” – the place where John the Baptist baptized Jesus. We’ll be stopping there next week when we come back through Jordan.
In sight of the Dead Sea we stop at Qumran National Park, where the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered. A break away sect called the Essenes made scrolls of the Old Testament, the Apocrypha and their own works. Hidden in jars in a cave for almost 2000 years, scholars are now able to plumb their magnificent legacy. The Essenes were ascetics and paid great attention to ritual bathing and purity. They lived a communal lifestyle and the location included ritual baths as well as a Scriptorium – the writing room – where as many as 10 copies could be made at one time.
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