OCR SAMPLES FROM 4017 Booklet

harbored, not only bandits and fugitives, but
prophets and founders of great religions.

After bringing down a terrible famine upon
his sinful people, the great prophet Elijah fled
into this wilderness and lived on food brought
by ravens. Jesus spent forty days and forty
nights in this burning, treeless desert praying
and wrestling with the temptations of the devil.
No one will ever know what inspiration these
great leaders received from this lonely waste—
no one will ever know how much of our present
Christian ethics was formulated in the wilder-
ness of Judea.

SCENE 1. This curious, moon-like landscape
exhibits a great alkalinity of soil — witness the
salt-like crusting of the foreground. Only the
hardy thorn-bush thrives all year around on
this porous limestone. Strangely enough, often
for a brief period in springtime, the Wilder-
ness of Judea blooms into a riot of colorful
wildflowers, some found nowhere else on earth.

SCENE 2. We are standing on the edge of the
Wilderness of Judea looking out across the
Dead Sea at the purple Hills of Moab in Trans-
jordan. To the left, out of the picture, where
the Jordan thrusts its delta out into the Dead
Sea, one of the largest potash works in the
world harvests the chemicals from these min-
eral-laden waters. 'The Jordan River pours
6,000,000 tons of water each day into the
slowly-rising sea which has no outlet, but the
tremendous heat of this tropical basin so far
below sea level evaporates most of it. The
waters of the southern end cover the probable
site of Biblical Sodom and Gomorrah.

Despite the deadly properties of the water
that causes the fish from the Jordan to be cast
up mummified on its shores, the Dead Sea is as
blue and sparkling as Loch Lomond or the
Lakes of Killarney. Two pleasure resorts along
the lakeside exploit the curious powers of the
water, especially its ability to float the human
body like a cork.

SCENE 3. From the ruins of ancient Jericho
we look up at the Mount of Temptation, whose
summit is still 200 feet below sea level. A
Greek monastery is cut into the face of the

cliff about halfway up the mountain, and on its
top are the ruins of an old church surrounded
by the wall we see. Tradition says that it was
to this mountain that the devil carried Jesus
during his forty days in the wilderness.

The earth mounds between which we look
are the ruins of Biblical Jericho. Seventeen
layers of civilization have been found at this
site, the first dating back to the Neolithic Age,
about 5000 B. C. The scene of desolation we
now look upon was not characteristic of Jeri-
cho through most of its history. When Moses
surveyed the Promised Land from Mount Nebo,
across the Jordan, he saw here a walled city in
an immense palm grove surrounded by gardens.
The walls of Jericho "came tumbling down"
when the invading Israelites blew their rams'
horns and shouted. This Biblical story is con-
firmed by archaelogical discovery of toppled
walls and of an earthquake at about that time.
The 7000 years of history of this city is filled
with dramatic incident such as its being pre-
sented by Marc Antony to Cleopatra, who
rented it Herod the Great for so many talents

etc etc