Spent the day in the Dead Sea area. Visited the ruins of Herod’s palace on top of the fortress mountain of Masada. Stopped in at the ruins of a synagogue at En Gedi (had hoped to hike up to David’s hideout there– in a wet cave–but the threat of flash floods closed the place). Visited Qumran, the home of the Dead Sea Scrolls. And managed to avoid a swim in the Dead Sea, since a cold rain was falling when we got there! Spose this is a good time to mention it has rained pretty much every day we were here. That is extremely unusual in this Mediterranean (like Southern California) climate. But our misery is their blessing. The Dead Sea surface level has gone from about 1280 feet below sea level to about 1377 in the last twenty years. That is how fast the Dead Sea is disappearing, all because the rapidly growing country of Israel uses more water than it receives from the heavens. So the flow of the Jordan River into the Dead Sea has slowed to a trickle.

We ended the day with a visit to "Abraham" in his tent, about 15 miles east of Jerusalem. He explained to us the importance of hospitality in the ancient world and offered to show a lot more to all our friends in the future– for a fee of course! I’ve noticed that Middle Easterners are real good at selling things, whether it is their own skills or the products of someone else’s labors.

Probably the most memorable part of the day was our visit to Qumran, where we came into closer contact with a community of people, who were there in the time of Jesus, who left us a large collection of scrolls, some of which they wrote and others they may have collected. Some of those scrolls were books and portions of the Hebrew Bible (called Old Testament by many). Others included commentaries and selections from the Hebrew Bible. Still other scrolls were religious classics we already knew about. And still others described the community and its beliefs and practices. My wife was especially excited to see the holes in the cliffs opposite the community that were cave entrances were. One of these alone had contained portions of 530 different scrolls.

The religious community at Qumran had abandoned mainstream life out of a conviction that they were approaching the end of the world and that God was calling them to a life of strict purity and carefulness. Some think that John the Baptist spent part of his youth in this community, which was located not far from where Jesus was baptized. We are grateful that their faith resulted in a gift to us of scrolls that illuminate New Testament times and the Scriptures that the New Testament writers used as the basis of their faith.

Tomorrow we will be back in Jerusalem, visiting the "City of David," the original part of Jerusalem that is 3000 years old. Then we will trace the Via Dolorosa, the traditional path of Jesus’ suffering and crucifixion, from the Pool of Bethesda to the Church of the Holy Sepulcher. It is a privilege to be here.