From Jerusalem to Bethlehem

I didn’t mean to quit writing for more than a week. I caught the disease that was going around our group and for a long time dragged through the days. Better now. So much has happened that last week seems like three months ago.

Monastery of the Temptation

Our group went to Bethlehem on Monday, then to Jericho, Qumran, and the Dead Sea on Tuesday. In Jericho we went to visit the Greek Orthodox Monastery of the Temptation, which is perched high on a cliff overlooking Jericho. You could see way across the Jericho valley from there. It was a mystical place. We took a cable car up and still had a climb to make. The site dates from the fourth century, when Constantine’s mother Helena identified it as the location of Jesus’ temptation in the wilderness. A monastery was founded there in the sixth century. There are thirty or forty caves on the cliff face where monks used to live, but the present monastery dates only from the nineteenth century. 

Wednesday was a free day, and Thursday the group went to visit the Dome of the Rock and Al-Aqsa Mosque with Mustafa Abu Sway, and then Jane and I had lunch with him, his wife Eman, and their daughter Rana and grandbaby Amin. It’s always very good to spend time with them.

Friday morning early we took the group to the airport, and then Taleb brought me back in the bus to Beit Jala, next to Bethlehem, to meet Andreas Kuntz, who runs the tour guide program for Dar al Kalima College. I spent Friday, Saturday, Monday, and Wednesday afternoons teaching Bible to a small group of first-year Palestinian students studying to be tour guides. 

Marcel, Salma, Mirvat, Fadi, me, and Noor

It was fascinating. Most of them are Muslim, all are young, and there were definitely a few cultural gaps. I had to get used to class starting fifteen to forty-five minutes late, with a few trickling in even later. Though I had sent reading assignments way in advance, preparation for class was spotty. But we read some Psalms and discussed them, we read the book of Ruth, and we read and compared parts of Proverbs and Job. On the last day we had a pretty vigorous discussion of Job. Every once in awhile someone would jump in and explain things in Arabic when they felt someone was misunderstanding.

I also learned from them. I learned that in the Qur’an Job (or rather Ayyub) is a righteous prophet who was afflicted and finally healed by God. I am not convinced that the students liked the biblical story as much as the Muslim traditions about him. But we did have some good debate about whether a story should represent God in the way that this biblical book does.