March 6-First Day of Tour-

March 19, 2020

After the Intensive Interpersonal Training was over, I had scheduled tours with Green Olives Tours. Green Olive Tours is a social enterprise tour agency whose mission is to provide informative tours that cover the history, culture, and political geography of Palestine and Israel. The tours provide benefit to the indigenous population through hiring and training tour guides, overnight stays with families and small guest houses. The agency produced a booklet of information from which I supplemented my notes for this blog. My notes were my scribbling from the -information provided by the well-informed tour guides. The first three day-tour was an individual tour--just me with the tour guide driving. My guide was an Israeli citizen (Jewish).

We are traveling out of Nazareth toward the Jordan Valley throught the Jabla desert that is all in bloom and green right now. Rotem says that for about one month it will be all green and then slowly turn yellow and then brown.

This picture is actually from a climb that we too at the end of the day, but it is a view that we saw a good bit of the day.

In the vicinity of Mt. Nebo, the bible verses say that Moses was buried. This is the Maqam El-Nabi Musa, which is the designated grave for Moses. It is located south of Jericho, one of the oldest cities in the world and about 12 miles east of Jerusalem.

We drove up a steep rugged road above the Musa so we could have these breath-taking views of the surrounding wilderness and down at the Dead Sea. The Jordan Valley is along the Syrian-African Rift in which birds, animals and humans migrated

Heading to the Sea of Galilee, we stopped at an old phosphate refinery where the deposits were taken near the Dead Sea. There was also a salt plant. This is a huge pile of salt. At one time the entire area was covered by the Mediterranean Sea so mineral rich and primarily sedimentary rock.

We then drove to Qumran National Park located on the NW side of the Dead Sea. It is famous for the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls. The Essenes arrived in this part of the desert around 2nd century BCE, it was abandoned after an earthquake but they returned around 4 BCE and rebuilt the town. In 1947 some Bedouins shepherds found some ancient scrolls in the cave shown below. Then a team of French archaeologists excavated the area between 1951 and 1956 and found more scrolls and early sturctures. The scrolls were hidden in jars for nearly 2,000 years and preserved as a result of the area's arid climate. They include books of the Old Testament, the Apocrypha and the Essenians own works. There were 15,000 fragments that when pieced together formed 350 scrolls.

The Essenes were ascetics and paid great attention to ritual bathing and purity. They lived a communal life ina a settlement constructed to make them self-reliant. The settlement had halls, a central dining room, a kitchen, ritual baths, pottery workshop, and a Sciptorium-writing room- with desks and inkstands where the Essenes scribes wrote most of the scrolls found in the adjoining caves.

There are/were five desert monasteries. One is St. Geronimo Greek Orthodox Church

According to the Greek Orthodox, Mary is sleeping. She didn't die. Jesus is looking down from above in this picture.

Bet She'an is the remains of an ancient Roman city destroyed by an earthquake in the 700s. It is situated 394 ft. below sea level. It was closed so we couldn't walk through it.

This picture is the Yardenit "Baptism" --really tshuva (sacred cleansing of sins, atonement) site of Jesus by John. Situated on the Jordan River and border of the country Jordan. It was occupied by Jordan for a number of years so Israeli government moved Jesus' baptism to the southern area of the Sea of Galilee. No reason to lose tourist dollars