As a baptized atheist with a history of Sundays in churches and Sunday schools, I always retain a fascination with the Bible, that brilliant storybook of my youth. I am not a passionate atheist. When you become fanatical, it immediately becomes a religion again. I keep far away from that. I think all stories of all faiths are just great stories.
The Valley of the Shadow of Death. As a little boy, my imagination took me to a dark place, where flames shot out of the ground and oppression fell clammily over you like a blanket smelling of sulfur—the original nightmare.
I was unaware that the location of this Biblical nightmare had an actual location.
But it involves a real valley, between Jerusalem and Jericho, in the middle of the Jerusalem Desert, also called the Desert of Judea: Wadi Qelt, as the valley is called in Arabic.
We start the trail early in the morning with our guide, Malak Hassan, at Ein Qelt, the spring at the base of Wadi Qelt. The sun peeks over the ochre-colored hills but immediately makes the lazy sweat bubble up. Looking closely, you can see fragments of an aqueduct against the hills. “A Roman relic,” Malak knows.
When we have descended a few hundred meters, we pass an old building and whimsical bunkers. “That building is an old British police station from when Palestine was under British rule. The bunkers were either built by the British or the Jordanians to guard the water source of Ein Qelt and the police station,” Malak explains. “They were built to look like the jagged limestone rock formations from the air.”
With temperatures often well above 40 degrees Celsius during the summer months, without an actual visit, it is easy to understand that the valley’s name could come from its extreme climate. But is this true?
We walk a little further down. The air fills with the scent of water. It ripples slowly and thinly, but it ripples. Date palms and jojoba bushes rustle gently in the light desert breeze. Parakeets sing their twittering songs—a veritable green oasis. Two young Bedouin children play in the water. Their elder brother sits on a donkey on the bank’s slope, father quietly watching. His name is Maher Njoom. He asks where we are from. “From Holland? What are you doing here?” he asks in despair. With Malak’s help, I explain that the grass is always greener on the other side and what that expression means.
Through the trees, we see a large mansion. “It is the Husseini family’s house, but we are looking after it,” Maher explains. “The house has been in their possession since the days when the Ottoman Empire ruled here.”
We walk on and come to a green gate, a roundabout of the old Roman viaduct. The upper stones are ancient, while concrete pillars covered with plants and moss provide strength. Jets of water trickle along the greenery, forming mini-waterfalls. I dive under for a moment. It almost seems like the entrance to a magical realm.
It all feels lovelier than the name Valley of the Shadow of Death suggests. The term seems to come from the valley’s reputation as a dangerous place for travelers who wanted to take a shortcut on the road between Jerusalem and Jericho.
Wadi Qelt is a long narrow gorge-like valley full of caves where it is easy to get lost. Floods from the highlands of Jerusalem carved the wadi through the desert. The gorge was mostly a dry riverbed, and although walking in it was much easier than climbing over the rocky hills, it was still a treacherous ravine. Streams of water, descending from Jerusalem to the depths of the Dead Sea some 1,000 meters, could overtake travelers in an instant if it rained in Jerusalem. Moreover, bandits and wild animals hid in the caves and gorges of the wadi.
The New Testament brings another Biblical character to the Wadi Qelt, the Good Samaritan. The fact that Jesus used this rough, dangerous road to set his parable about an injured, ambushed traveler makes perfect sense.
Treacherous or not, people regularly traveled on this road between Jerusalem and Jericho. The latter was a bustling economic center and thriving desert oasis, while Jerusalem was already a religious center.
Then suddenly, we see a cross standing out against the blue sky. A sign for pilgrims that they are on the right path to the monastery of St George. Standing by the cross, we see similar crosses in all directions. In the green gorge below, we can already see the old buildings of St George’s monastery, built against steep stone walls.
We descend the path via steps carved into the rock. We see windows and doors that give access to caves in the rock face above and around the monastery. “These rooms house monks who live in seclusion and go to their brothers in the monastery only on Sundays,” Malak explains.
It was in such a small cave that the monastery’s history began, dating back to the Byzantine era in the 4th century. “This monastery was built around the cave which, according to the Old Testament (Kings 1), was the cave of the prophet Elijah when he lived in exile and was fed by ravens. Around 480, a monk named John of Thebes created a monastery for the monks in these caves,” says Malak. “At the end of the 6th century, George of Choziba joined the monks. All the monks were killed during the Persian conquest of the Holy Land. Except for George, the monastery was subsequently named after him.”
After being allowed to fill our water bottles at the monastery, we started climbing the slope on the other side of the ravine where Wadi Qelt ends.
Wadi Qelt is a paradox, as so much is a contradiction in this land called Holy. The Valley of the Shadow of Death? Exciting stories. That’s all.
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