Jordan Bedouin Experience

This past weekend I was in Jordan learning about the desert Bedouin way of life that was lived by the patriarchs. The place is a gorgeous desert environment that is a nature reserve called Wadi Rum. This picture was taken from the visitor's center before we really got started. The mountain is called the Seven Pillars of Wisdom.

Although sometimes stubborn the camels can be a lot of fun.

We rode little Toyota trucks back to the site.

When we first arrived we found out that a baby goat had been born just ten minutes before. This is her first attempt at standing up.

The next order of business was dinner. This poor fella was the chosen beast.

Here is the same sheep about twenty minutes later. I will spare you the pictures in between. I have to admit the slaughter was pretty dramatic with a knife to the throat.

Dinner was cooked in a below ground steel drum. A wood fire was built in the bottom with lots of coals the food was loaded in and in two and a half hours it was all done.

After the rice goes the sheep.

A blanket keeps the sand out.

The sand keeps the heat in. In the desert wood is often hard to come by so fuel conserving cooking methods like this are important.

Some women making flat bread in the traditional way. They stretch out the dough like a pizza crust and then throw it on this hot steel dome. They are really good at the whole process, turning the dough with their bare hands and not burning themselves.

A view of the desert from high in the cliffs.

Sunset at Wadi Rum.

A Bedouin breakfast of olives, goat cheese and flat bread.

Galilee and Beyond

Hello everyone! I apologize that it has been so long since I have posted. The end of the semester has brought many multi day field studies and lots of papers and assignments to keep up with. As an added bonus my computer locked up and I was afraid I had lost all of my data but a computer company here in Israel was able to recover my files and reformatted the hard drive. Crisis averted but I still am out a bit of cash for the whole ordeal and now am the proud owner of an external hard drive which is busily copying all of my files and pictures as I am typing to you. The semester is drawing to a close and I think that I will be ready to come home when the day arrives. I have had a great experience and look forward to sharing more of it with all of you when I get back. In the above photo I am standing on an extinct volcano called the Horns of Hittin. You can't see the mountain from this picture but the crater of the volcano has eroded to the point where there are now two peaks giving it the appearance of having "horns." In the background you can see the sea of Galilee at dusk.

This is the waterfall at a place called Banias. It is just downstream a bit from the site of Biblical Dan. Dan is in the very north of the land and is used by the biblical writers as the northern most point of the kingdom in the phrase "From Dan to Beer-Sheba" with Beer-Sheba being the southern most point of the idyllic kingdom in the Negev. The spring at Dan is the source of the water for the waterfall. It is an impressive spring, the largest in the Middle East; it is surrounded by a beautiful park with the headwaters area nicknamed the Garden of Eden. These are Eucalyptus trees at the site of Biblical Dan. They are not native to the area and were not present in biblical times but are very common throughout the north today.
In the north Israel has land East of the Jordan and it was laced with landmines by its various enemies I think prior to the 1967 war. Obviously from the sign they are still in place and most of the open land in transjordan in fenced and marked for mines.
This is a typical look at class in action. On the left is Dr. Wright teaching and from left to right is Dan, Jeff and Christina hard at work. The stones on the maps represent Joshua's attack against the northern kings upon Isreal's entrance into the promised land. The northern kings were unified under the king of Hazor which is the city we were sitting on top of. (See Joshua Chapter 11)
The Jordan River north of the Sea of Galilee at its spring high.
This is a look into the Jezreel Valley from Nazareth Ridge, the site of Biblical Nazareth, the home of Jesus.


One of the Herodian Aqueducts at Caeserea by the Mediterranean Sea.
A flower that was in bloom when I was hiking on Mount Carmel over reading week. The southern part of the Dead Sea. This is also over reading week. We climbed to this ridge from the road below. The mountain is completely made of salt from the base up to about one third of the way from the top. Today the southern half of the Dead Sea is used for recovering salt by letting it into shallow pools and then harvesting the salt and minerals once the water evaporated. The pools are visible in the distance.