Touring around Amman

  Around Amman, Jordan
Thursday, June 19, 2008

Today was a day full of interesting visits. After a hearty breakfast, we left the hotel at 8:00 to start the touring. Our bus, loaned to us (we're covering costs) by the Amman Baccalaureate School is driven by a very pleasant man named Nabil. The Amman Baccalaureate School, where Matthew and Mary-Anne Bates have been working for a year as volunteers on behalf of the United Church of God, is the premier private primary and secondary school in Amman. The students come from many of the most accomplished and wealthy families of Jordan study there. So it is helpful to travel in one of their buses.
 
Our first destination were the ruins of the palace built by Herod the Great (the one who killed all the boy babies around Bethlehem to try to kill Jesus) at Machaerus, now known as Mukawir. The place is now known by the Jordanians as Qala'at al-Meshneq (the castle of the gallows) because according to the historian Flavius Josephus it was here that Herod Antipas (the "Great" one's successor) had John the Baptist imprisoned after John condemned his marriage to his brother's wife Herodias. It was also here that the daughter of Herodias - Salome, after her enticing dance, and at her mother's bidding, asked for John's head. Local legend has it that John was imprisoned in one of the caves that dot the mountainside on the way up to the palace, and Josephus says it was here that he was beheaded and his head presented on a plate to Salome.
 
Before leaving the bus in the parking lot, I asked the group to review the notebooks containing quotes from various Bible dictionaries, and historical sources, which we had distributed to them the night before.

Machaerus: ruins of Herod's palace

We read together from the Bible several passages about John and his death, and then we walked up onto the mountain to take in the view and look at the ruins of Herod's palace. The Dead Sea can be seen very clearly below and the arid hills all around provide quite a stunning view. PHOTO_ID_L=100_3722.jpg]  
After we all had a look around, David Baker discussed with everyone some lessons from the life and death of John.
 
On the way down, we had a look at several of the caves in the mountainside, several of which had been divided up into different chambers and did in fact look like they could serve as prisons. Was it some place like this where John, of whom Jesus said a greater man had not been born of woman, spent his final hours and was perhaps beheaded? The scene was quite thought provoking.
 
Our next stop was not far, it was the town of Madaba, which is nearly one third Christian in a country overwhelmingly Muslim.

The map mosaic at Madaba

It is famous for its 5th century map mosaic on the floor of the Orthodox Church of Saint George (which was built over a Byzantine church in the 19th century). The mosaic is a map of the Holy Land dating from around the mid 500s and includes around 150 biblical sites labeled in Greek. Only about 1/3 of the map remains, the rest was destroyed and lost. We looked at the various sites we could recognize including Jericho, Jerusalem, the Dead Sea (which was larger in 500) and even the Nile delta. It was quite amazing to look at this 1500 year-old map.

Jerusalem on the Madaba map

 
We found a little falafel restaurant, just around the corner, for lunch. Falafel sandwiches, made of chic peas and ground sesame seed (tahine) in pita bread, are a staple food in much of the Middle East. Shawerma was the other sandwich choice; this is made of roasted and spiced lamb in pita bread.
 
After that pleasant and refreshing pause, we re-boarded the bus and headed for our third destination of the day: Mount Nebo.  We stopped briefly at an artisanal mosaic center and observed women producing mosaics with small pieces of rock clipped off in small sized.

The mosaic production center

The work was quite beautiful and impressive, and beyond the budgets of us all. Still it was quite interesting to see the techniques involved in such creations.
 
Mt Nebo is mentioned in the Bible as the place God allowed Moses, just before his death, to view all the land that was going to be given to Israel on the other side of the Jordan River. Though Moses himself could not enter, he was allowed a miraculous vision that included the Mediterranean Sea and other places too far away to be viewed by normal human eyes.

The group on Mt Nebo

The Bible says that after viewing all this, Moses died and God himself took the body and buried it in an unknown valley in the area. We mused on all this as we stood on top of the mountain and looked westward as Moses did some 3500 years ago.
 
Then we drove down into the Jordan River valley for our last visit of the day: Bethany beyond the Jordan. This small site on the East side of the Jordan is where John the Baptist was baptizing when Jesus came to him to be baptized Himself (John 1:28-34). Some of the infrastructure of the site, which is privately owned, was funded by USAID, the outreach arm of the government of the USA. We found it a bit ironic that US citizens pay quite a bit more than Jordanians to visit a site whose development they already funded with their tax dollars. Still the visit was interesting. We saw the customary site where Elijah rode up to heaven in a whirlwind, and then came to the archeological dig marking the site of several ancient churches which are deemed to confirm the site where Jesus' baptism took place.

The dig at the traditional site of Jesus' baptism

The Jordan of course is a mere shadow of its former strength, so it doesn't look all that impressive today, but what happened there was of great importance. After viewing the traditional site, we walked on along the banks to a place where the "river" was only about 20 feet wide if that, and an unusual shade of green. There is a site set aside there for modern pilgrims who want to be baptized in the Jordan.
 
We had told the YC volunteers they could take a brief dip if they wanted to and several did. 

Our group "braving" the Jordan

We didn't baptize anyone, just watched alongside the friendly Jordanian soldier armed with an automatic weapon (this is the border and Israel is only meters away...) as several dipped their feet, while other went for a brief swim. We had warned of the possibility of agricultural runoff, but one or two volunteers decided to duck their own heads under the water 7 times in honor of Naaman who dipped 7 times in the Jordan and was cleansed of leprosy (2 Kings 5:14). I jokingly asked them if they had declared leprosy on their Youth Corps health forms before coming, and they replied with respectful cheekiness that they had had faith that they would be healed!
 
It is oppressively hot in the Jordan Valley, especially as near as we were, just a few miles from the Dead Sea, the lowest place on the face of planet Earth. The surface of the Dead Sea is somewhere around 408 meters (around 1200 feet) below sea level and falling every year by another 18 inches due to the water not being replenished. There is simply too much demand for the fresh water of the Jordan and other tributaries to allow it to flow into a Dead Sea. In any event we were relieved and happy to climb back up to Amman, which at 850 meters (2700 feet) above sea level, compared to the Dead Sea had quite a pleasant climate.