Water in the Land of El and Baal
We left the Jordan Valley sometime at the end of the Chalcolithic period, namely at about 5000 B.P. (3000 B.C.), and concentrated our attention on the evolution of the hydraulic society of Mesopotamia. We learnt that in about 4000 B.P. (2000 B.C.), a wave
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Water Shall Flow from the Rock Hydrogeology and Climate in the Lands of the Bible
With 51 Figures
Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg New York London Paris Tokyo Hong Kong
Professor Dr. ARIE S. ISSAR Water Resources Center The Jacob Blaustein Institute for Desert Research and the Department of Geology and Mineralogy Ben Gurion University of the Negev Sede Boqer Campus, 84993 Israel
ISBN-13: 978-3-540-51621-7
e-ISBN-13: 978-3-642-75028-1
DOl: 10.1007/978-3-642-75028-1 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are reserved, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in other ways, and storage in data banks. Duplication of this publication or parts thereof is only permitted under the provisions of the German Copyright Law of September 9, 1965, in its version of June 24, 1985, and a copyright fee must always be ·paid. Violations fall under the prosecution act of the German Copyright Law.
© Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 1990 The use of registered names, trademarks, etc. in this pUblication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. 2132/3145-543210 - Printed on acid-free paper
To Margalit, my wife, who "followed me in the desert through a land unsown. tt
Preface
Many times when the author saw the bedouins of southern Sinai excavate their wells in the crystalline rocks, from which this part of the peninsula is built, the story of Moses striking the rock to get water came to mind. The reader will, indeed, find in this book the description for a rather simple method by which to strike the rock to get water in the wilderness of Sinai. Yet this method was not invented by the author nor by any other modem hydrogeologist, but was a method that the author learned from the bedouins living in the crystalline mountains of southern Sinai. These bedouins, belonging to the tribe of the Gebelia (the "mountain people"), live around the monastery of Santa Katerina and, according to their tradition, which has been conftrmed by historical research, were once Christians who were brought by the Byzantine emperor, Justinian, from the Balkans in the 6th century A.D. to be servants to the priests of the monastery. They know how to discern places where veins of calcite fIlled the fractures of the granites; such places are a sign of an extinct spring. They also know how to distinguish an acid hard granite rock, and hard porphyry dike from a soft diabase dike. The latter indicated the location at which they should dig for water into the subsurface. In Chapter 9, the reader will ftnd a detailed description of how they used this knowledge to extract water from the rock. The moral of this story is that when the Sheik of the Gebelia Abu-Heib was asked to explain how water is found in a rock, his answer was "min Allah," which, literally translated, means "from G
