In 1966, the English scholar Derwas J. Chitty located 25 monasteries in the Judean desert east of Jerusalem, many known only from then-recent explorations.1 Today the number exceeds 60.2 The past decade has witnessed a veritable revolution in the study of these Judean desert monasteries. This is the result mainly of the work of a cadre of younger Israeli archaeologists who have surveyed the area and conducted a number of important excavations. This revolution includes not only a dramatic increase in the number of known monasteries, but also a far better understanding of their archaeology and consequently of the way of life of the devout Christians who lived in them, principally in the Byzantine period (fourth to seventh centuries).
The title of Chitty’s work was indeed apt. He called it The Desert a City, paraphrasing Cyril of Scythopolis (Beth-Shean), the great sixth-century biographer of leaders of the monastic movement. Chitty described the conversion of the desert into a city as a result of the monastic movement.
Although Christian monasticism began in Egypt, perhaps as early as the late third century, it soon spread to Palestine. A monk named Hilarion, who was born in Gaza, was active as early as 308 C.E. and is often considered the 030proto-monk of Palestine and the founder of Negev monasticism.
The founder of the Judean desert monasticism was probably Chariton, who was born in Asia Minor and arrived in Palestine at the beginning of the fourth century. His first monastery, Pharan, was established in about 330 C.E. near a perennial spring, about six miles northeast of Jerusalem. An equally important figure, whom some would consider the real driving force behind Judean desert monasticism, was Euthymius, who came to the Judean desert from Armenia in 405 and remained there for 70 years, establishing three important monasteries, one after the other.
The development of Judean desert monasticism can be divided into three chronological stages: The founding stage during the fourth century, the expansion in the fifth century and the zenith, from the end of the fifth to the beginning of the seventh century. The Arab Conquest in 638 marks the beginning of a process of decline. Palestine was then cut off from the Byzantine empire, and as the security situation deteriorated many of the monasteries were simply abandoned.
Monasteries usually began when a monk withdrew from the world to live in a cave or hut. In time, other monks would join him, eventually creating a community. The founder would usually serve as the leader of the community.
In most cases the monks arrived as pilgrims, coming to pray at the holy places in Jerusalem and elsewhere. Eventually many of them went down to join one of the communities of monks in the desert.
In the Byzantine period Jerusalem was a very cosmopolitan city. Christians arrived from all over the empire. As a result, the monastic community too was decidedly cosmopolitan. Each of the monasteries customarily included monks from most of the provinces of the empire, from the west as well as the east. This society was noted for its tolerance and openness. Historical sources tell us that the monks of the Judean desert created a pluralistic society, quite moderate, viewing extreme asceticism with reservation, and well organized. This is consistent with the archaeological finds, which reflect not only a well-organized society, but also one of considerable wealth and with an appreciation of beauty, both natural and man-made.
Two distinct types of monasteries co-existed in the Judean desert, the laura and the coenobium.3 In a laura, each monk lived an isolated, contemplative life in a 031separated cell. A laura monastery was therefore spread over a wide area, sometimes dozens of acres. Paths connected the various cells and, more importantly, the cells to the central buildings, the principal one being a church where the monks came on Saturdays and Sundays for communal prayer (during the week they prayed alone, seven times a day) and for the distribution of food for the coming week. The monks would also receive their weekly supply of any materials they needed for their handicrafts, mostly basketry and rope-making. (It was said that in his youth the famous monk Sabas made 50 baskets a week.)
The name laura comes from the paths that connected the cells to the church and to each other. In Greek laura means lane or path.
The church was not the only building at the core of the laura. Other buildings included service structures such as a bakery (bread was the staple of the monastic diet) and storehouse, as well as residential rooms for the monastic father, the monastery treasurer, the church priest and his aides.
A laura thus consisted of two elements, the widely spread cells of reclusive monks and the central church with its associated utilitarian structures.
The second type of monastery is the coenobium. In a coenobium monastery the monks led a communal life. The Greek koinos bios means just that. The monks were coenobites rather than recluses. They shared a strict regimen and daily routine of times for work, prayer and communal meals. The living quarters of the monks, however, were within the central buildings, which were usually arranged around a courtyard and enclosed by a generally square wall, giving the appearance of a fortress or at least of a well-fortified estate.
To date, 19 lauras have been found in the Judean desert and 44 coenobia.
The Judean desert monasteries can be divided in two other ways, geographically and architecturally. These two divisions are somewhat related. Some of the monasteries are built in steep areas on rock cliffs. From a distance, they look almost as if they had been pasted on the side of a steep valley wall. In contrast to these 032cliff monasteries are monasteries built on a plain (such as the Jericho plain) or on the top of rolling hills.4
Geographically most, though by no means all, of the Judean desert monasteries are concentrated in two areas: (1) in the wadi systems that extend eastward from Jerusalem, principally the Wadi Qelt, which debouches into the Jericho plain, and the Nahal Kidron, which leads to the Dead Sea; and (2) in the plain between Jericho and the Jordan River. Over 40 monasteries can be found in the first area and nearly 25 in the second. Others, however, have been found as far south as Masada. (Indeed, a monastery was located on Masada itself hundreds of years after Herod the Great abandoned his desert fortress/palace and after the Jewish rebels who held out here for nearly four years at the end of the Great Jewish Revolt against Rome in the first century C.E. took their own lives, according to Josephus, rather than surrender to the Romans.a)
The monks were attracted to these areas in part because of their association with Biblical events. But clearly Jerusalem was the center of interest in the monastic movement. The relationship between the Judean desert monasteries and Jerusalem was integral, both spiritually and physically. Between the monasteries was a well-developed system of paved roads that connected them with one another and with the settlements on the desert fringes. All these roads, however, led to the “Holy City,” Jerusalem. Not without reason was the Judean desert called “The Desert of the Holy City” or simply “the Jerusalem Desert.”
On the other hand, some of the monasteries near Jericho were doubtless located there because of the proximity to sites such as the baptism of Jesus. One cautionary note in this respect, however. One of the most impressive sites in the Holy Land is the monastery known as Quarantal (forty) at the top of the Mount of Temptation overlooking the Jericho plain. This of course commemorates the Temptation of Jesus (Matthew 4:1–11; Luke 4:1–13; Mark 1:12–13). After returning from the Jordan, Jesus fasted for 40 days and 40 nights in the wilderness. Then the Devil tempted him, commanding him to turn stones into bread. Quoting Deuteronomy 8:3, Jesus replied, “It is written, ‘Man does not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God’” (Matthew 4:3). Alas, it was not until the 12th century that two churches were built here to commemorate the event. This marks the first association of this mountain with this episode in the life of Christ. The monastery itself dates only to the 19th century. Although there are remains of an important Byzantine monastery nearby (the laura of Douka, founded by Chariton in 340), it had no known connection with the Temptation of Christ.
The earliest of the surviving lauras is the laura of Pharan, as noted earlier, founded in about 330 C.E. by Chariton (sometimes spelled Hariton), the same monk who ten years later founded the monastery at Douka. The laura of Pharan is a cliff-type monastery on a wall 034of the Wadi el-Fara near the spring known as Ein el-Fara. Only 15 cave cells have been found in a survey of the site; the number of monks in the laura apparently was not more than 20. The central buildings of the laura included two churches and a building constructed with fieldstones that apparently served as a bakery and storehouse.
Churches connected to monasteries are of two types: free-standing buildings and churches in caves. The laura of Pharan, in addition to its free-standing church, had a very impressive cave church on a cliff nearly 40 feet above the ground. It is entered by a rock-cut staircase that leads to a vertical entrance tunnel 12 feet long. The cave itself is quite spacious. A prayer niche was carved into the eastern wall, the customary orientation of Christian churches. A depression in the floor before the niche is evidence of the altar table that once stood there. Adjacent to the cave church are three monks’ cells, the eastern-most one apparently having served as the cell of the head of the laura.
If the laura of Pharan was the earliest of the laura monasteries, perhaps the largest and certainly the most famous of the Judean desert lauras was known simply as the Great Laura. Today it is known as Mar Saba, after its founder, St. Sabas. It is still in operation, but as a coenobium rather than as a laura. One’s first view of Mar Saba, on the heights of the Kidron Valley (Nahal Kidron) east of Bethlehem, will be an indelible memory.
We learn a great deal about the Great Laura, as about other monasteries, from hagiographical sources, lives of saints written by the monks themselves. These often charming literary creations contain a wealth of details about monastic life. More than ten detailed biographies of the most important desert monks have survived. The largest number (seven) were written by Cyril of Scythopolis in about 560.5 In addition, in about 620 a monk named John Moschus collected dozens of anecdotes describing the simple life of the monks.6
According to Cyril, Sabas founded the Great Laura in 483 after living in a cave as a hermit for five years. As the number of his disciples increased, he formed the laura with 70 monks. Within a few years, however, the number grew to 150. Scores of the monks’ cells on both sides of the Kidron have been surveyed and mapped in recent years.7 At the core of the laura were two churches, on either side of a central courtyard. One was created within a large, expansive cave. The other had a spacious courtyard in front of it where Sabas was buried in 532, after having established nine other monasteries in his lifetime. His grave there is venerated to this day.
In addition to the two churches, the core of the laura included another prayer cell, a hospital, a bakery, a hospice for pilgrims and water reservoirs. After the Moslem conquest in 638, the monks were gradually forced to abandon their outlying cells and to live in the buildings at the center of the laura. For security reasons these buildings were enclosed within a wall, which is what we see today.
The earliest of the Judean desert communal monasteries (or coenobia) was the Theoctistus Monastery, founded in 411. It is situated on a steep incline of Wadi Mukallik about 12 miles east of Jerusalem. The 036main building was built on a cliff and was buttressed by an extremely solid wall almost 300 feet long that has survived to a height of over 16 feet.
An even more impressive coenobium is the Cosiba Monastery, known today as St. George’s Monastery (see photo at the beginning of the article). It stands on a vertical cliff on the north bank of the Wadi Qelt. Although it was rebuilt in the late 19th century, it is a reliable representation of the original Byzantine monastery. From the original foundations of the monastery, the remains of a gate-house, an entrance courtyard, two churches and three burial caves have survived. Two horizontal rows of niches can be seen on the cliff above the monastery. These were once part of a large upper structure. Between the niches on the face of the rock are remnants of plaster decorated with colored frescoes, reflecting the rich decoration of the monastery at its peak in the sixth and seventh centuries.
The largest monastery in the Judean desert is the monastery of Theodosius, built in the fifth century around the cave Theodosius used for seclusion. Enclosed by a wall forming a rectangle 325 feet by 225 feet, this coenobium includes three churches, the largest of which was built over Theodosius’ burial cave. At one time over 400 monks lived in this monastery. According to tradition,8 the cave under the main church is where the three magi spent the night after leaving Bethlehem. The magi did not return to Jerusalem because they were warned in a dream not to report to Herod the birth of the child whom they had just worshiped, delivering gifts of gold, frankincense and myrrh (Matthew 2:11–12). This cave is four miles east of Bethlehem on the southern bank of the Nahal Kidron and is open to visitors.
All of the monasteries we have looked at thus far have been known to us, at least by name, from the historical literature. We will end this brief survey by looking at a recently discovered coenobium9 that is not mentioned in the ancient sources. Its popular Arab name, however, reveals that it was known to have been a monastery. It is called Khirbet ed-Deir, the ruin of the monastery. Located in the Nahal Arugot, in the southern Judean desert, it was built in a small, narrow crevice and includes a church and refectory (dining room) built within the crevice. In front of the refectory was a courtyard with a basin for washing hands. Above the courtyard was a pergola, or arbor, formed of horizontal trelliswork. A row of small niches in the rock face once supported the pergola trelliswork, which in turn doubtless supported trailing plants and vines. Here the monks could relax after a meal before returning to their labors.
The living quarters of the monks were on the hill above. Below the crevice was a spacious garden where fruit trees and vegetables were grown. The monastery church was built within a large cave and is 85 feet long and half that wide. The main prayer hall was paved with a colorful mosaic containing an inscription with a quotation from Psalms 106:4–5: “Remember us, O Lord, with the favor that thou showest unto thy people. O visit us with thy salvation, that we may share the good of thy chosen ones.”10
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The ruins of Khirbet ed-Deir remind us of another side of monastery life, especially in coenobia. Supposedly the monks renounced the world and retreated to the desert for spiritual elevation. This is true. But there was another side of it, too. Life in a coenobium was secure, often surrounded by beautiful gardens and elaborate mosaics, as well as other expensive materials and fittings. And the food was good, if not elegant.
Moreover, as the literature suggests, the construction of monasteries and the settlement of the desert were points of pride for the monks. They indeed changed the face of the desert.
In many respects, the standard of living in the Judean desert monasteries was higher than that of most people in the Byzantine Empire. The monasteries were not crowded, and it is probable that monks from lower- and middle-class strata of society improved themselves by joining a monastery.
Many pilgrims, euphoric from some kind of religious experience, decided to adopt a monastic form of life—a decision reinforced by many of their countrymen already living in the desert.
Tradition has it that the first anchorites in the region were Christians fleeing from religious persecution. After the Edict of Constantine in 313, there was no longer any need to seek refuge in the desert from persecution. But many of the desert-dwellers could not renounce the ideal of martyrdom. They simply transferred this ideal from the public arena to the area of private life. This motivation was quite openly acknowledged and is often mentioned in monastic literature. In addition, the monastery became a means of social elevation as well as a source of economic security.
While their focus was on the spiritual, chiefly prayer and contemplation, the monks also engaged in social work on behalf of the disadvantaged—the hungry, the homeless, the elderly and the sick who could find refuge especially in the large coenobia. In this respect, these monasteries served as a “safety net” for the underclass in the Byzantine period. Such monasteries received large donations from wealthy believers for their charitable work.
In the lauras lived the older monks (who had reached the venerable age of at least 30 years). In the well-organized social structures of the monasteries in the fifth and sixth centuries, monks came to the lauras only after years of preparation in the communal monasteries. Here they lived a contemplative life of prayer and meditation in their cells. The laura monks were also largely responsible for the literary compositions that reveal so much about monastery life. These compositions, together with the new archaeological findings, are bringing the Judean monasteries to life again, if only in the pages of books and articles such as this one.
In 966, the English scholar Derwas J. Chitty located 25 monasteries in the Judean desert east of Jerusalem, many known only from then-recent explorations.1 Today the number exceeds 60.2 The past decade has witnessed a veritable revolution in the study of these Judean desert monasteries. This is the result mainly of the work of a cadre of younger Israeli archaeologists who have surveyed the area and conducted a number of important excavations. This revolution includes not only a dramatic increase in the number of known monasteries, but also a far better understanding of their archaeology and consequently of the […]
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Derwas J. Chitty, The Desert a City—An Introduction to the Study of Egyptian and Palestinian Monasticism under the Christian Empire (Oxford, 1966).
2.
See Yizhar Hirschfeld, The Judean Desert Monasteries in the Byzantine Period (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1992). See also Hirschfeld, “List of the Byzantine Monasteries in the Judean Desert,” in G. C. Bottini et al. (eds.), Christian Archaeology in the Holy Land—New Discoveries (Jerusalem, 1990), pp. 1–90; and Hirschfeld, “Monasteries and Churches in the Judean Desert in the Byzantine Period,” in Yoram Tsafrir, ed., Ancient Churches Revealed (Jerusalem: Israel Exploration Society, 1993), pp. 149–154.
3.
We treat coenobium, unlike laura, as a foreign word because laura appears in most English dictionaries, although it is not always correctly defined. Coenobium does not appear in most English dictionaries, even unabridged dictionaries. It appears in the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, but the definition does not include a type of monastery.
4.
Hirschfeld, The Judean Desert Monasteries in the Byzantine Period—Their Development and Internal Organization in the Light of Archaeological Research, Ph.D. dissertation, Hebrew University (Jerusalem, 1987; in Hebrew).
5.
Kyrillos von Skythopolis, ed. E. Schwartz (Leipzig, 1939).
6.
These hagiographies were later copied in medieval monasteries, usually in Greek. Only at the turn of the 20th century have they been published in critical editions. Until recently, however, many of them remained untranslated, and those that were translated appeared in French. In the 1990s, however, a number of these hagiographies were translated into English. See Leah Di Segni, “The Life of Chariton,” in V. L. Wimbush (ed.), Ascetic Behavior in Greco-Roman Antiquity—A Sourcebook (Minneapolis, 1990), pp. 393–424; Cyril of Scythopolis, The Lives of the Monks of Palestine, translated by R. M. Price (Kalamazoo, Michigan, 1991); and The Spiritual Meadow of John Moschus, translated J. Wortley (Michigan, 1992). These English translations should open the extraordinary world of the monks of the Judean Desert to a much wider audience.
7.
Joseph Patrich, The Monastic Institutions of Saint Sabas—An Archaeological-Historical Research, Ph.D. dissertation, Hebrew University (Jerusalem, 1987; in Hebrew).
8.
Theodorus Petraeus, Vita sancti Theodosii, ed. H. Usener (Leipzig, 1890).
9.
Hirschfeld, “The Cave Church at Khirbet ed-Deir,” in Y. Tsafrir, Ancient Churches Revealed, pp. 244–259.
10.
L.C. Di Segni and Hirschfeld, “Four Greek Inscriptions from the Monastery at Khirbet ed-Deir in the Judean Desert,” Orientalia Christiana Periodica 53 (1987), pp. 365–386.
