Quarries on Tatooine

On Tuesday, our last day with Danny, we drove from the Dead Sea to Jerusalem, stopping at a few last historical sites on the way.  Much of our drive was through the Negev desert, a particularly dry region with large changes in altitude that Josh thought looked like Tatooine.

Our first stop was at a Tel Maresha's Caves.  In this area, there is a thick upper crust of rocky soil called the "nari", with chalky, crumbly soft stone beneath.  This made it easy to carve cisterns, using the natural structural integrity of the nari as a roof and the easily carved chalky rock as a quarry.  These rocky passageways and manmade caves have a great acoustic and provided a welcome respite from the blazing sun.  The temperature drop was incredible; this is definitely where I would have hung out back in the day.  My mom agreed, going so far as to say she was probably a quarry manager in another life.  We also got to see the giant underground dovecotes of the Columbarium Cave; doves were used for food, as messengers, for cult purposes, and for their manure (a useful fertilizer in a desert).

In the area of the caves was also a karob tree; its dense and fibrous pod tasted wonderfully sweet when chewed.  It turns out that the karob "chocolate" treats that I used to steal from my dog (sad as that is to admit) are made from the sugar of this plant's husk.  As another fun piece of trivia, the karob seed is thought to be the original measure for karats of diamonds - one seed weighed one karat.

Our cave exploration continued at several other sites, including at the Bell Caves of Bet Gurin-Maresha Park.  These caves were quite large and hosted both a large family of bats and some ancient carvings of both crosses (from the Crusaders) and the name of Allah in Arabic.  Our other stop during the drive was Ephesus Dammim, between Socoh and Azekah - for those who are Biblically illiterate, like me, that's where David killed Goliath.  I never realized before that Goliath was supposed to be nine feet tall.  My childhood imagination had always made him about 50 feet tall.  The story also includes a lot of bad mouthing of David by his brothers and other fluff.  The things you learn from dramatic Bible readings, right?

At long last, we arrived in Jerusalem.  Due to the ever-present traffic, we had plenty of time to admire the various public buildings, from the Knesset (the Israeli parliament building) to the elaborate YMCA (designed by the same guy that did the Empire State Building) to the tiered graves on the Mount of Olives.  Jerusalem is a gleaming city, with every building built of or faced with Jerusalem stone (locally quarried limestone).  This was the style of building in ages past, and it is now law, so the architecture of past and present meld almost seamlessly.  That said, the current city has far outgrown its old boundaries (a tall wall). While the old, walled city is about a square mile, the current area of Jerusalem is at least nice times that size (a rough estimate from looking at a map) and boasts a population of one million people.

Given the amount of history beneath our feet, we counted ourselves lucky to have five days to immerse ourselves in all that is, and was, Jerusalem.

Spotted: Bedouin settlements.  Some are legal, some are illegal (and unrecognized).  Those that are illegal often use windmills and solar energy to generate electricity independently and stay off the Israeli grid.  Who knew rebels were so green?