Taking a dip in the Dead Sea is not something you do without thought or forewarning, or even with much gusto, like plunging into a pool on a summer day, or crashing into the surf Baywatch-style. It is done slowly and carefully, being mindful of the sharp crystals that can cut your feet as you wade in. Above all it is done with delicacy, making sure that not even a little splash is aimed at your eye.
The Dead Sea is eight times saltier than your regular ocean. It’s not even a real sea, but a lake that is shared by the lower regions of Israel and Jordan, and how it got to be this salty is anyone’s hypothesis. (In the Bible, Lot’s wife turned into a pillar of salt when she turned back to look at the destruction of the original sin cities of Sodom and Gomorrah, which are believed to have been located in the area.) But the high salinity is what gives the lake its morbid name — no living things, plant or animal, can survive in its waters. Its high salinity is also what gives the lake its other special quality — the ability to allow people to float weightlessly just above the surface.
I was midway into my pilgrimage-tour of the Holy Land, and our group stopped for two days at a hotel resort by the Dead Sea, a stay meant to be part educational, part “rest” after six days of intense sightseeing, studying and schlepping around the Galilee area of Israel. On the day of rest, I jumped into my bathing suit and processionally descended into the brine. It’s true, you easily rise to the top like soap scum, and effortlessly float atop like a corpse.
You could read a newspaper, do the crossword and have breakfast on your back — I just wore protective sunglasses and tested my buoyancy on both sides; I tried paddling around, and perfected the method of harmlessly getting back on my feet. I didn’t linger long, because truthfully the water wasn’t all that refreshing and it stung even the most microscopic of wounds. The view of the lake, an oasis with random patches of white crust backdropped by the barren desert, was breathtaking, and many a Russian babushka and her liver-spotted husband lolled around like happy otters, taking in the supposed healing properties of the mineral-rich waters.
Weird creatures were lurking on the beach covered in sea-green slime, swamp things that looked like they’d been festering in the bowels of the lake. They were in fact just resort guests, wrapped in special Dead Sea mud, enjoying an outdoor spa treatment. After buying tons of Ahava — the premier Dead Sea bodycare brand — as pasalubong, I tried out for myself a mud wrap at one of the spas. The mud, as it was slathered on, was warm and squishy, and there was a pleasant sensation of being suspended in cement after the therapist wrapped plastic sheets and a thick blanket around me. Rendered immobile in a darkened room, I imagined myself buried underneath a primordial mudslide, with only the faint smell of seaweed and barnacle dust to remind me I was still breathing. I have no idea what the mud wrap does for the body, but at least it got rid of that dry calcified feeling after emerging from the Dead Sea, where the powdery and almost bitter taste of the water a-salts your sight and senses.
Scroll Space
Another Dead Sea must-do is to visit Qumran, the place where the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered. Story has it that in 1947, a shepherd boy was up by the mountains trying to recover some errant goats by tossing a rock into a cave, when he heard a smashing sound. He went into the cave and saw that the rock had broken a jar, inside which a scroll was found. The scroll turned out to be a complete copy of the book of Isaiah, older than any previously discovered manuscript. Our tour guide, a Zionist Jew, said that this was perhaps the most important discovery ever to affect the world, because it proves that the Bible as we know it today is real, having a historical predecessor more than 2,000 years old — the Bible in actual biblical times.
Around 900 manuscripts were discovered in 11 caves, but it was only in the 1990s that the scrolls started to receive widespread academic attention, thanks to the Internet. All the books of the Old Testament were found, except for Esther and Nehemiah; the other scrolls were copies of Apocryphal books (like Enoch and Tobit) and non-biblical texts, which had to do with the community life of the Essenes, a cloistered tribe of religious men who lived in the Qumran site from about 150 BC to 68 AD.
The Essenes were a Jewish sect whose members subscribed to a mix of ascetic, zealous and messianic beliefs, the kind who waited impatiently for the end-of-days. They ritually bathed, stayed away from women, and spent most of their time in the library. They believed they were purer than everyone else, the “sons of light” against the sons of darkness, and they longed for the rapture to come. The dust of history has covered much of their tracks, save for some artifacts and pieces of pottery.
The dry conditions of the desert caves helped in part to preserve the scrolls for two millennia, yet most of them were found in fragmented pieces and various states of deterioration. The original Isaiah Scroll, which used to be on display in the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, is now hidden in a top-secret place after several different groups tried to break in and steal it. This resurrected scroll, more that just a moth-bitten piece of parchment, is a testament to generations of faith and belief, and its importance, as well as its controversiality, cannot be overstressed.
While the Dead Sea is slowly disappearing in its own brackish hole, the Dead Sea Scrolls continue to shed burning light on what we know, and don’t know, of history and our religions. They actually raise a lot more questions, and fierce and divisive scholarly debate still rages on along with conspiracy theories, alternative interpretations, and specious speculations over the meanings of the texts. However, for the state of Israel, which just turned 60 years old, uncovering the past is an endeavor of national security, and archeological evidence like this shows that the land once belonged to the Jewish people, who believed in the God of Israel.
Thanks to Rabbi Keith and Jeannette Shubert of the International Graduate School of Leadership, who organized the tour and brought us safely in and out of the wilderness.
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E-mail me at audreycarpio@yahoo.com.
