The Dead Sea and the Jordan River

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Barbara Kreiger. The Dead Sea and the Jordan River

THE. DEAD SEA. AND THE JORDAN RIVER

CONTENTS

PREFACE

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

A NOTE ON USAGE

PART ONE. This Strange Water

ONE. Some Early History, Travelers, and Myths

PART TWO. Nineteenth-Century Exploration

TWO. Three Sailors and a River

THREE. Along the Briny Strand

PART THREE. Origins and Evolution

FOUR. The Life of a Lake

PART FOUR. Further Exploration

FIVE. A Gentleman from Siberia

SIX. A Lake Divided

PART FIVE. The Twenty-First Century

SEVEN. The River and Lake in Distress

EIGHT. Reclamation and a Vision of the Future

SOURCES AND NOTES

1. SOME EARLY HISTORY, TRAVELERS, AND MYTHS

2. THREE SAILORS AND A RIVER

3. ALONG THE BRINY STRAND

4. THE LIFE OF A LAKE

5. A GENTLEMAN FROM SIBERIA

6. A LAKE DIVIDED

7. THE RIVER AND LAKE IN DISTRESS

8. RECLAMATION AND A VISION OF THE FUTURE

Books and Scholarly Papers

Articles, Press Releases, and Opinion

INDEX

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THE

DEAD SEA

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“By God’s grace,” wrote the twelfth-century Abbot Daniel, “the situation of the Laura of St. Sabbas is a marvelous and indescribable one. A dry torrent bed, terrible to behold, and very deep, is shut in by high walls of rock, to which the cells are fixed and kept in place by the hand of God in a surprising and fearful manner. These cells, fastened to the precipices flanking this frightful torrent, are attached to the rocks like the stars to the firmament.” The blue-domed monastery is stitched to the walls of Wadi Kidron, and today a handful of monks studiously maintains the complex while performing the same isolated devotions that St. Saba observed fifteen centuries ago.

The Dead Sea was as much a catalyst to the literary imagination as it had earlier been to the religious one. Half a century before Mark Twain traveled there, Sir Walter Scott had found in the Dead Sea region (which he never visited) the setting he required for his novel The Talisman, A Tale of the Crusaders. As his knight crossed the desert of the Dead Sea in the book’s opening page, he forgot all his privations as he recalled, “the fearful catastrophe which had converted into an arid waste and dismal wilderness the fair and fertile valley of Siddim, once well watered, even as the garden of the Lord, now a parched and blighted waste, condemned to eternal sterility.

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