Tuesday, October 5, 2010
Today we went to see the center where the Dead Sea Scrolls are believed to have been written and preserved. We started out by touring the center and seeing all the different rooms, Ray shared a lot of history regarding these amazing people known as the Essenes. It was incredibly challenging to see the level of sacrifice and dedication this group had to preserve the oldest known copies of the Bible. I believe he said one cave thought to be their library, contained 400 scrolls! I always wondered why it took so long to find the caves, he explained that the cave entrances appear to have been hastily covered, possibly they were covered when the Roman army came through and burned the center. The cave we saw where scrolls were found actually had more then one room in it. This is likely our last desert experience…not that I’ve heard anyone bemoaning the fact!
On our way to Galilee we went into occupied territory, (territory on the West Bank), and yes, it was rather creepy. Israel requires that you take a guard for this, but it truly sounds much worse then it really was. In this territory the bus took us to the top of a very high mountain. It is likely we were standing where Lot and Abraham were, when their herdsmen were quarreling and they were viewing the land and Lot chose to go towards Sodom and Gomorrah. We had a rather lengthy drive to Galilee…Lord willing we will be in this motel, the Nof Ginosar for five nights.
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