For centuries travelers have been drawn to the stunning and mysterious Dead Sea and Jordan River, a region which is unlike any other on earth in its religious and historical significance. In this exceptionally engaging and readable book, Barbara Kreiger chronicles the natural and human history of these storied bodies of water, drawing on accounts by travelers, pilgrims, and explorers from ancient times to the present. She conveys the blend of spiritual, touristic, and scientific motivations that have driven exploration and describes the modern exploitation of the lake and the surrounding area through mineral extraction and agriculture. Today, both lake and river are in crisis, and stewardship of these water resources is bound up with political conflicts in the region. The Dead Sea and the Jordan River combines history, literature, travelogue, and natural history in a way that makes it hard to put down.
For centuries travelers have been drawn to the stunning and mysterious Dead Sea and Jordan River, a region which is unlike any other on earth in its religious and historical significance. In this exceptionally engaging and readable book, Barbara Kreiger chronicles the natural and human history of these storied bodies of water, drawing on accounts by travelers, pilgrims, and explorers from ancient times to the present. She conveys the blend of spiritual, touristic, and scientific motivations that have driven exploration and describes the modern exploitation of the lake and the surrounding area through mineral extraction and agriculture. Today, both lake and river are in crisis, and stewardship of these water resources is bound up with political conflicts in the region. The Dead Sea and the Jordan River combines history, literature, travelogue, and natural history in a way that makes it hard to put down.
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Overview
For centuries travelers have been drawn to the stunning and mysterious Dead Sea and Jordan River, a region which is unlike any other on earth in its religious and historical significance. In this exceptionally engaging and readable book, Barbara Kreiger chronicles the natural and human history of these storied bodies of water, drawing on accounts by travelers, pilgrims, and explorers from ancient times to the present. She conveys the blend of spiritual, touristic, and scientific motivations that have driven exploration and describes the modern exploitation of the lake and the surrounding area through mineral extraction and agriculture. Today, both lake and river are in crisis, and stewardship of these water resources is bound up with political conflicts in the region. The Dead Sea and the Jordan River combines history, literature, travelogue, and natural history in a way that makes it hard to put down.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780253019592 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Indiana University Press |
| Publication date: | 03/21/2016 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 304 |
| File size: | 4 MB |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
About the Author
Barbara Kreiger is Creative Writing Concentration Chair and Adjunct Associate Professor in the Master of Arts in Liberal Studies program at Dartmouth College. Her other publications include Divine Expectations: An American Woman in Nineteenth-Century Palestine. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, Boston Globe, Smithsonian Magazine, and other publications.
Read an Excerpt
The Dead Sea and the Jordan River
By Barbara Kreiger
Indiana University Press
Copyright © 2016 Barbara KreigerAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-253-01959-2
CHAPTER 1
Some Early History, Travelers, and Myths
The drive down to the Dead Sea from Jerusalem is a plunge of more than 4,000 feet in the space of twenty miles, and the sensation it creates is that of landing in an airplane, ears stopped and voices muffled. If one can reach the bottom of the valley before the sun shows itself over the eastern Moab Mountains, one will catch the pink wash that is thrown briefly on the western side. One drives south along the shore, with the lake stretching out on the left and separated from the road by bare, rocky beach, a few scrappy bushes scattered among the stones. Immediately to the right is the line of cliffs whose contours the road will follow most of the length of the sea.
The Moab Mountains, just a few miles across the lake, are veiled by a dusty haze, and the entire southern portion of the sea is barely distinguishable from the sky. The shore is outlined by a line of froth created by little waves stirring the edge of the water. The two-lane asphalt road winds as the coast does, a black ribbon imitating the thread of white foam.
It is still early, this late winter day, yet the sun is high enough for the morning to feel full. As the road swings up, the shape of the shoreline becomes apparent, and one can also see whitecaps on the now active sea. Breezes pick up at either end of the day, with the heating or cooling of the air, and the waves may increase, then die down, only to resume in the evening. The lake seems to breathe with a life of its own, and one comes to feel its rhythms, often agitated in the morning, placid in mid-afternoon.
The haze begins to lift, but even on clear days it may hang for some hours over the sea. From lake level, one notices that it is not resting on the water but is suspended over it. Beneath it the lake is cobalt, perhaps gray, later turquoise with patches of green and purple. From earliest times, observers have remarked on the ever-changing colors of the Dead Sea. Nineteen centuries ago, the Jewish historian Josephus digressed from his account of the Jewish war against the Romans to describe the lake, saying that "thrice daily it alters its appearance and reflects the sun's rays with varying tints."
As the sun climbs, the blue of the water intensifies, and the surface of the lake is flecked with points of light, as though tiny crystals had been strewn and remain afloat to catch the light. It is hardly any wonder that over the centuries for every traveler who disparaged the sea, there were others who found its beauty unsurpassed. What one found "dreary and dismal," another described as "a shining lake, whose immense and silvery surface reflects the rays of light like a mirror." The Dead Sea, rich in historical and legendary associations, had power to impress beyond that of even more spectacular natural phenomena. Almost without exception, travelers projected their moods onto the sea, often investing it with the specters conjured up by their imaginations.
The shores of the Dead Sea are regions of contrasts. One has simultaneous impressions of disparate qualities, and at times it is difficult to draw those perceptions into line to define time and place. Coming down to the valley from the west, one is aware of extraordinary depth and fantastic height. The lakeshore itself is arid and infertile, but it is interrupted by spring-fed expanses of reeds and rushes. There is one place where pools of spring water rest next to the lake, separated only by a yard-wide stretch of beach. Where the shore is barren, the fields of a kibbutz enrich the monotone. The green expanse lies with the royal blue of the sea, with multi-toned brown cliffs behind and purplish mountains across. A visitor may squint from the sheer intensity of this multiple juxtaposition of colors.
Then there are the wadis: the dry river beds that have carved their way down to the lake with winter floods, inviting a wealth of plant and animal life. And water, the fresh, cool waterfalls of some of the gorges, splashing into clear pools not half a mile from the sea. This shore, lifeless and gloomy one has heard, is vitalized by overwhelming beauty and irrepressible life. The saltiest water in the world, and some of the sweetest; naked beach and rich canyons; plants, animals, and birds winging their way between steep walls; colors running the length of the spectrum. Opposites mingling, as they always have here, in a lasting symbiosis.
By late afternoon there is not a ripple on the sea, and soon the entire western side is in shadows. The sun is so bright that the glare turns the lake and eastern mountains into a pastel rendition of the midday landscape. The whole scene is muted, suffused in light, the brilliance of a few hours ago attenuated as the sun sinks. But once it has settled behind the mountains, the day clears again, as though having shaken off a late afternoon lethargy. The Moab Mountains are rose in the setting sun, their shade spilled into the sea in pools of pink and purple light that seem to float on the slate blue water. The hiker who has spent some time here knows that this unexpected visual delight is just one more surprise of beauty from the valley's store.
* * *
In the days of the Exodus of the Israelites from Egypt, given roughly as the thirteenth century BCE, the western side of the Dead Sea was in the province of Canaan. At around the same time the eastern side became settled by the kingdoms of Moab and Edom. When the Israelites entered Canaan, the tribe of Reuben and the Moabites both occupied the lake's east bank, while the west belonged first to the tribe and then to the kingdom of Judah. Such was the status of the Dead Sea environs for the next several centuries. In the sixth century BCE, the Jews were exiled to Babylonia, and around that time the eastern shore was conquered by the Nabateans, a people from southern Arabia. The western side was divided between Judah and, to the south, Idumea, settled by the Edomites when they were pushed from the east to the west side of the valley.
Given the long history that has been enacted on its shores by many nations, it is not surprising that the Dead Sea has had various names. Its oldest is Yam Ha-Melah, the Salt Sea, that name first appearing in the Bible in the books of Genesis, Numbers, Deuteronomy, and Joshua, where it usually serves as a geographical landmark. To the Greeks it was Lake Asphaltites because of the lumps of asphalt that were periodically thrown up from its depths, and that name persisted in the texts of medieval writers. Christians of the Middle Ages also knew it as the Devil's Sea, and their Arab contemporaries referred occasionally to the Stinking Lake, presumably because of the smell of sulphur emitted from several places along the shore. But the names that appear most frequently in Arab texts are commemorative of the cataclysm that engulfed Sodom and Gomorrah. They called it simply The Overwhelmed, "from the cities of Lot that were overwhelmed in its depths," or the Sea of Zughar (i.e., Zoar), after the town that had escaped destruction and flourished in the Middle Ages. Likewise the Jews, who sometimes referred to it as the East Sea, to distinguish it from the Mediterranean, or the Sea of the Aravah, referring to the valley in which it lies, but more often called it the Sea of Sodom. Except for the little used Arab name Al Buhairah al Miyyatah, the Dead Lake, the notion of lifelessness is not reflected in Arab and Jewish names, though Mare Mortuum, the Dead Sea, had appeared in early Roman texts. (In Tacitus' History we also find it called the Jewish Sea.) Today the Arabs call it Bahr el-Lut, the Sea of Lot. To Jews it is still Yam Ha-Melah.
As early as Hellenistic times, and through the days of the Roman Empire, geographers and historians wrote about the peculiar nature of the Dead Sea. In the Middle Ages, however, religious attitudes overtook scientific curiosity, and the medieval attraction to the fantastic found a natural subject in the strange lake. Christian pilgrims sometimes stopped at the Dead Sea, either en route from Mt. Sinai to Jerusalem or as an excursion from the holy city. But many were also discouraged from undertaking the dangerous trip, warned off by tales of deadly beasts and poisonous reptiles lurking about on the shore and in the water. "In this country the serpent tyrus is found," wrote a fourteenth-century German pilgrim. "When it is angry it puts out its tongue like a flame of fire, and one would think that it was fire indeed, save that it does not burn the creature. ... Were it not blind, I believe that no man could escape from it, for I have heard ... that if they bit a man's horse, they would kill the rider."
The Dead Sea itself had a reputation that was dreadful and frightening, its vapors thought to be fetid and noxious. "In storms it casts up many beauteous pebbles," this pilgrim went on, "but if anyone picks them up his hand will stink for three days so foully that he will not be able to bear himself." Those who did descend approached timidly, not taking lightly this sea that had opened to swallow the evil cities of Sodom and Gomorrah as brimstone and fire raged out of an angry heaven. As one pilgrim explained, "It is plain that here is a mouth of hell, according to us Christians, because we believe that hell is in the midst of the earth, and that the Holy City standeth on the mountains above it."
For centuries the Dead Sea had inspired this kind of curiosity, awe, and even contempt. As they journeyed to the remote valley, travelers had absorbed the myths of the region, and if they did not add their own to the accumulation, others more sedentary did. The collection of fantastic tales was reinforced by the quite real dangers of the region, and by modern times the lake had become shrouded in superstition. In an attempt to break the intellectual quarantine which had been imposed, one of the first Dead Sea explorers, traveling in 1810, refuted, first of all, the notion "that iron swims upon it, and light bodies sink to the bottom — that birds, in their passage over it, fall dead into the sea." And several decades later, a Frenchman approached the Dead Sea and demanded with temerity, "Where then are those poisonous vapours, which carry death to all who venture to approach them? Where? In the writings of the poets who have emphatically described what they have never seen. We are not yet five minutes treading the shores of the Dead Sea, and already, all that has been said of it appears as mere creations of fancy. Let us proceed fearlessly forward, for if anything is to be dreaded here, certainly it is not the pestilential influence of the finest and most imposing lake in the world." A Dutch contemporary concurred: "In vain my eye sought for the terrific representations which some writers ... have given of the Dead Sea. I expected a scene of unequalled horror, instead of which I found a lake, calm and glassy, blue and transparent, with an unclouded heaven, with a smooth beach, and surrounded by mountains whose blue tints were of rare beauty."
Some of the many explorers who journeyed to the Dead Sea in the nineteenth century were adventurers, others were driven by religious fervor. But the largest number were scientists and geographers, and their combined efforts over the course of the century yielded important finds in the fields of Biblical geography and the natural sciences. The Dead Sea, they would come to discover, is hundreds of feet below sea level and is part of the great Syrian-African Rift. They would discover that it is nearly one third solid; that its salt-encrusted shores had been cultivated by centuries of Jews, Romans, and Byzantines. They did not know that in the caves of Qumran, on the northwest side of the lake, manuscripts were stored that twenty centuries later would be found and become known as the Dead Sea Scrolls. But they did identify Masada, thirty miles south, where the Jewish zealots made their last stand against the Romans in 73 CE. The puzzle would be slowly pieced together, and the image that emerged was rich in detail.
A great deal of attention has been paid to the exploration of the Nile River, where European efforts were more glamorously concentrated in the nineteenth century. The Nile was wrapped in the mystery of a region that had never been seen by westerners, and the race to locate its source was intense and at times bitter. This was not the case with the Dead Sea. There was no compulsion to be the first. No Burton-like expeditions were ever mounted to discover where its strange water came from; it had one major and well-known source, and no issue, thus containing its own mystery in a basin just forty-seven miles long and eleven wide.
Why did so many travelers — dozens in each decade of the nineteenth century — make their way down to what according to some accounts was not just a mouth of Hell, but a fair approximation of the place itself? Why are the pages of the geographic journals filled with reports and articles ranging from the most carefully analytical to the vastly speculative, all concerning this one small lake? What was the attraction? There are probably almost as many answers to these questions as there were explorers. Certainly the Dead Sea's uniqueness and strangeness had a lot to do with it. Many travelers, especially early on, were prompted to verify for themselves the strange phenomena about which they had heard. No doubt also the Dead Sea's connection to the Biblical Cities of the Plain served to attract. More than a few, and they not eccentrics, searched assiduously for the ruins of the ancient towns, and an occasional claim was made that Sodom or Gomorrah had been discovered.
That impulse to bring to light evidence of the Bible's authenticity suggests another reason. One of the most striking shared traits of those who explored the Dead Sea region was their familiarity with the Bible. Having read it all their lives, they felt they knew the territory, were somehow at home there. The routes these modern explorers took had been walked by their spiritual ancestors; the places they visited had been named by them; the events they recalled as they trudged up and down the cliffsides were some of those that defined western civilization. How available it all must have seemed. And yet it wasn't. The events and figures that made the Dead Sea and its environs familiar were two thousand years past, and the familiar had receded into shadow. Exploring in the Dead Sea valley was like cutting one's way through thick underbrush to get to a path marked on the map. No one, not even the most coolly scientific, doubted that the path was there, or questioned that hard work would reveal it.
A well-worn copy of the Bible would be found among the gear of any serious expedition, along with the compasses, thermometers, and barometers. Early in the century one traveler observed that "the manners and customs of the natives of these countries remain unchanged since the days of the passage of the Children of Israel from Egypt into the Land of Promise," and he went on to say that "the Bible is, beyond all comparison, the most interesting and the most instructive guide that can be consulted by the traveler in the East." Such was the universal opinion, and so strongly felt that the author of a popular guide, having devoted years to its compilation, opened by agreeing that "the Bible is the best Handbook for Palestine; the present work is only intended to be a companion to it." No fear of heresy prompted his modesty; all the travel accounts of his day, teeming with Biblical allusions, express the same opinion. So while nineteenth-century explorers of Africa were stepping into darkness, those of the Dead Sea region were walking in a hazy light thrown by antiquity — oblique, but nonetheless considerable.
In the early part of the nineteenth century, it required no small amount of courage to travel to Palestine, let alone to such a remote place as the Dead Sea. The Ottoman Empire was fast coming apart — Palestine was in fact seized by Mohammad Ali, the ruler of Egypt, in 1831 and held for nine years — and the Bedouin tribes who lived in the desert around the lake recognized no outside ruler. The Turks had sole authority to issue firmans (a kind of visa) to those wishing to enter their territory, but Constantinople was far from the Dead Sea valley, and the Turks exercised virtually no control there. The land was divided among the Bedouin much as in Biblical days it had been divided among the tribes of Israel, and the Bedouin did as they pleased, from exacting tribute of European travelers to plundering the villages and farmlands of sedentary Arabs. From time to time the Turks would engage in a bloody show of force, in retribution or capriciously. But for the most part the Bedouin were left to themselves, and their relationships with one another, more than any external influence, determined their lot until late in the century.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Dead Sea and the Jordan River by Barbara Kreiger. Copyright © 2016 Barbara Kreiger. Excerpted by permission of Indiana University Press.
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Table of Contents
Part I. This Strange Water
1. Some Early History, Travellers, Myths
Part II. Nineteenth-Century Exploration
2. Three Sailors, and a River
3. Along the Briny Strand
Part III. Origins and Evolution
4. The Life of a Lake
Part IV. Further Exploration
5. Gentleman from Siberia
6. A Lake Divided
Part V. The Twenty-First Century
7. The River and Lake in Distress
8. Reclamation, and a Vision of the Future
Afterword
What People are Saying About This
When I set out to shoot a CNN documentary on the demise of holy water in the Holy Land, I scoured bookstores and search engines for the best resource material available. A few chapters into Barbara's work, I knew I'd found my definitive source. She kindly agreed to join our production as an expert and guide and from the wadis of Jordan to the top of Masada, we were fortunate to soak up her knowledge and passion. The Dead Sea is a place few people forget but often misunderstand. This book changes that dynamic, empowering explorers and pilgrims alike with insight and context.