To the Museum

Fifteen minutes till departure, I thought I would summarize Friday.

Friday we left Galilee for the south, travelling along the Jordan River to a large extent in West Bank territory, as I've mentioned. Our first main stop of the day was at Jericho, almost to the Dead Sea. This is a Palestinian controlled city. My initial impressions were that this was a tourism starved city, although it does have a rather large new casino.

Jericho is not a big tourist stop unless you're an Old Testament or Hebrew Bible professor, I suspect. We took a picture of an old sycamore tree (think Zacchaeus), and someone phoned ahead to warn the shops at our next stop. The beginning of approaching ware salesmen commenced, often difficult for Americans when things are being shoved in their faces by adults and children for the sympathy vote.

High on the hill is the "traditional site" of Jesus' wilderness temptation, a Greek Orthodox controlled place with cable cars to boot.

Then we arrived to camel rides and overpriced shopping, but there was also some very nice fruit.

The archaeological site of Jericho itself was irritating, almost a waste of time if it weren't for sentimental reasons. Here were some of the notorious failures of early archaeology. The science was infantile at the time, and Garstang blew through massive layers of stuff, disgarding everything as he went until he could find the Jericho of Joshua's day. When he thought he had finally found it, we now know he was at about 7000 BC. He had removed the Joshua time layer way above it in the process. So the tel as it now stands is about twenty feet lower than it was a hundred years ago.

Kathleen Kenyon continued the dig in the 50's I think and did much to improve the way archeology is done. The current majority view is that there was no city there at the time of Joshua, but you couldn't prove or disprove it because cursed Garstang threw away the evidence a century ago (maybe a little less). !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Well, I'll continue with Qumran later. Got to go.