Books in Brief

020

Egeria’s Travels to the Holy Land

John Wilkinson, editor and translator

(Ariel Publishing House: Jerusalem, 1981) 354 pp., $25.95

In the ancient world, Jews and Christians alike made pilgrimages. But Jews went at special times, Christians to particular places. Here was one of the great divergences between mother and daughter religions. “Judaism is a religion of time aiming at the sanctification of time … Judaism teaches us to be attached to holiness in time …” said Abraham Heschel.^a The major annual pilgrimage festivals were, of course, Passover, Shavuot and Sukkot.

Christians, on the other hand, have always wanted to visit sites, particularly sites in the Holy Land. Accounts of visitors to the tomb of Jesus (a cave in Jerusalem) and to his birthplace (a cave in Bethlehem) date from as early as the second century A.D. But such reports are very rare. Visits to holy sites were not an element in the piety of Christians during the first three centuries A.D. Despite the models of pilgrimage available in the Old Testament and in later Judaism, even Christians in Palestine did not generally visit holy sites at this time.

The Emperor Constantine made the pilgrimage a permanent part of Christianity. In accordance with Roman custom, he expressed his reign and authority by building great monuments; since he was a Christian emperor, he frequently built churches. In the Holy Land, Constantine built three major edifices—marking Jesus’s nativity (in Bethlehem), his crucifixion and resurrection (on Golgotha) and his ascension (on the Mount of Olives). These and other holy sites soon drew visitors from across the Christian world.

Egeria made one of the longest trips of any pilgrim, coming from an Atlantic coast somewhere in western Europe or beyond. She lived in Palestine from 381 A.D. to 384 A.D. and wrote in detail about what she saw and did. Hers is the first extended pilgrim narrative.

After having been lost for 700 years, a copy of Egeria’s Travels was found in Italy in the late 19th century. Only the middle portion of the manuscript, about 50 pages, had survived. Despite its brevity, this partial copy of Egeria’s Travels is an important source of information about fourth-century A.D. Palestine. In this second edition of his Egerias Travels to the Holy Land, John Wilkinson provides a translation of Egeria’s text, extracts from the accounts of other early travelers to Palestine and a wealth of supplementary material.

Fifty years before Egeria, an anonymous pilgrim from Bordeaux wrote a much less ambitious account; much of it is no more than a list of staging posts on the way to Palestine and back, like an auto club trip-map. But from the writings of this Bordeaux pilgrim, of Egeria and of such church fathers as Eusebius, Cyril of Jerusalem and Jerome, we learn about the increasing attraction of the Holy Land after the “triumph of Christianity.”

The earliest Christian travelers had concerns different from those of the pilgrims. The first Christian visitor to Palestine of whom we have a record is Melito of Sardis, who came toward the end of the second century in search of an accurate list of the books of the Old Testament (Eusebius, History IV.26.14). That was odd, since his hometown of Sardis boasted a powerful and well-educated Jewish community. (Their synagogue, which dates from the third century A.D., is the largest ever found [see Hershel Shanks, Judaism in Stone (Harper & Row, 1979), chapter 12].) Presumably, the Jews of Sardis would not aid Melito after his anti-Jewish preaching, so he headed for Palestine. Whether he consulted Jews or only Christians there is not clear, but, in any case, his trip was nothing like a “pilgrimage to holy sites.”

More Christians visited Palestine in the third century. The great theologian and teacher Origen settled there, in Caesarea. But these Christians were not pilgrims in the usual sense. The pilgrims did not arrive until Constantine’s reign.

Constantine had traveled through Palestine as a young soldier in 296, but it was the church historian Eusebius who ignited in him a concern for the holy places. Eusebius was no pilgrim. Palestine was his home; he was born probably in Caesarea and was bishop of Caesarea when he met Constantine, now emperor, at the Council of Nicaea in 325. The emperor translated the bishop’s enthusiasm for holy places into an ambitious program not merely to build churches, but to eradicate every trace of pagan piety in the Holy Land and to display Christianity as victorious—under a victorious emperor. The emperor’s mother and mother-in-law both went to Palestine, and the emperor himself came in 335, to preside over a council at Jerusalem and to dedicate the church on Golgotha.

Egeria describes the post-Constantinian Holy Land. Her interests are those of a religious professional, concerned to convey something of her experience to her “sisters” in her home religious community far to the west. Pilgrims normally sought out four areas: Galilee, Neapolis (Nablus), Jerusalem-Bethlehem, and southern Palestine, around Hebron. Egeria visited all these and traveled far beyond, to Sinai, to Egypt as far as Thebes, and northward to Antioch, Edessa and the martyrium of St. Thecla in Isauria.

What attracted her attention? The buildings surely, but frequently her description centers on the ritual associated with them, the weekly liturgies and the major annual festivals. The account of Lent, Holy Week and Easter is particularly vivid and detailed.

Egeria also sought out spiritual heroes of her own day, the hermits and monks who spent most of their lives in desert retreats. This form of heroic piety had begun a century before; by the time of Egeria the sanctity of these ascetics and their feats of endurance were attracting visitors in distressingly large numbers.

This was a new element in ancient religion. Holy places made sense to Romans; their religion expressed itself in spatial terms. A cave or spring or grove could have a divinity to it, a palpable spiritual presence that they called numen. The Palatine Hill in the center of Rome had this quality. In a sense the entire city did, and Romans even under great pressure refused to abandon their city (see Livy, V.50–52). The violation of this sacred space when the barbarian Alaric briefly held the city in 410 A.D. shook Romans deeply, whether they were pagan or Christian.

Living spiritual heroes were another matter. There were some pagan and Jewish examples, but the great majority were Christian ascetics. What Egeria sought in her Holy Land pilgrimage was thus a Roman-Christian amalgam: locations sanctified by their connection with Biblical heroes and living heroes made holy by their extremes of devotion.

(In the Middle Ages, these two kinds of spirituality would merge in the cult of relics. [Relics are parts of the bodies of saints or objects associated with them.] A relic could be housed in a building or transferred, sometimes by theft, from one place to another; its presence gave a location a kind of numen because of the sanctity of the person associated with the relic.)

In the Holy Land, this mixed Roman-023Christian piety created problems. The monks felt the pressure. Some fled further into the desert to preserve their isolation. It was hard to be a hermit when that attracted crowds of the faithful and the curious to you.

The abbot Hilarion, a pioneer of Palestinian monasticism and a native of the Holy Land, visited Jerusalem only once, for a single day (Jerome, Letter 58). He came to show that he did not disdain the holy places, but he visited only once because he realized the dangers of excessive attention to such sites.

Holy places and holy people had become genuine tourist attractions. Contact with them was enough for many visitors, who had come on what Wilkinson terms “a combined search for edification and pious entertainment.”

But there could be a deeper pull, still evident today: the opportunity to use the Holy Land as a way into the mythic realm of Bible times. Egeria makes much of the way the Bible texts read in a service in Jerusalem or Bethlehem connected directly with the location of that service. Word and site interacted; together they had the power to make one present in that awesome time of the great events of the Biblical story.

Languages function in a similar way for many students of the Bible: translations are not good enough, not because translation is impossible, but because the strangeness of the Hebrew and the Greek texts has the power on occasion to return us to that timeless time from which later times draw their congruence and meaning. In every century since Egeria, believers have made the trip east, just as believers have mastered the Biblical languages, often at great effort and cost, to make a journey backward in time.

Wilkinson has concerned himself with the varieties of pilgrim piety for more than a decade. His Jerusalem Pilgrims Before the Crusades (1978) picks up where the first edition of Egeria’s Travels (1971) left off, but her account remains his centerpiece. In this new edition, it is surrounded with historical, geographical and archaeological information of great accuracy, all of it fitted into a sympathetic account of the liturgy and theology—the piety—of Holy Land pilgrims. Other early texts are appended: extracts from the account of the anonymous Bordeaux pilgrim, Eusebius’s description of the fourth-century buildings on Golgotha, a later account by Peter the Deacon in the 12th century.

Unlike Peter the Deacon, Wilkinson knows the Holy Land sites from direct investigation. His wide familiarity with today’s Middle East contributes to making the book a delight both for armchair pilgrims and for those en route to the region.

Readers will do well to consider a double theme that appears frequently: on the one hand, the early Christians owed a great debt to Judaism (see especially the long note on Jewish influence on the Jerusalem liturgy, new to this edition); but on the other hand, they quickly made the Holy Land—its sites, its Old Testament heroes—a Christian province. With considerable ease, devotion to New Testament heroes could turn non-Christian Jews into villains.

A book for all thoughtful pilgrims, whatever their Biblical roots.

Jawa—Lost City of the Black Desert

Svend W. Helms

(Cornell University Press: Ithaca, 1981) 270 pp., 121 figures, 46 photos, $37.50

Readers of BAR who have been intrigued by articles in earlier issues concerned with water systems in Israel during the second and first millennia B.C.^b should be equally fascinated by the water-support complex of Jawa, a late fourth-millennium B.C. town in the eastern desert of Jordan.

Jawa is situated in a bleak stretch of stony volcanic land called the Basalt Barrier or the Black Desert. This basalt region, which stretches southeast from Damascus to the deserts of Saudi Arabia, was formed mainly by the once-active volcano of Jebel Druze (the Biblical “mountain of Bashan,” mentioned in Psalm 68:15). The region is larger than Israel and half the size of Jordan. The location and antiquity of the town of Jawa pose a series of When, How and Why questions that should captivate all who are interested in man’s early struggles with hostile environments.

Svend Helms, a young, British-trained archaeologist, adopts a chronological framework to recreate the story of Jawa. The possible prehistory, rise and demise of the town are imaginatively reconstructed, with many hypotheses interwoven to explain the data retrieved in a series of surveys, soundings and excavations conducted at the site and in the 064general area by the author and a small staff from 1972 to 1976.

A brief introductory section poses the question of the antiquity of Jawa. Its founding, tentatively placed at the end of the fourth millennium B.C., preceded and possibly influenced the development of urbanism during the Early Bronze Age in Palestine. The second section of the book describes the bleak and forbidding Black Desert and its people and includes chapters recounting the discovery and early descriptions of the site, geological formations and the possible settlement of the area in Neolithic times by the “Old Men of Arabia”—nomads who inhabited the Black Desert during the seventh to fifth millennia B.C. They apparently adapted to the desolate black desert by constructing large, fenced, entrapment areas for hunting, called desert kites because of their shape. The kites are variously shaped enclosures, constructed of low, stone walls, with a wide opening that narrows into the body of the kite. Ancient hunters drove gazelles, antelope or other game between the wide arms and then into the enclosure, where archers and spearmen positioned outside the enclosure walls killed them. Helms and Allison Betts (see Appendix C) are the first to present solid evidence for the Neolithic date of some of these desert kites. Incidentally, desert kites are also known in the Sinai and the Negev.

The desert and its nomadic inhabitants provide the background for an attempt to solve the enigma of Jawa, which the author describes as a “freak phenomenon,” “an accident,” “a paradox,” “an anomaly” and a “brief experimental intrusive urbanism in the desert.” A section titled “The Beginning” probes the possible origins of the town-dwelling Jawaites. Helms believes they came from the north, bringing with them experience of towns and technologies, but the limited artifactual evidence offered in Appendix B for a northern origin is hardly convincing.

The major sections of the book describe the reconstructed architecture and life-support systems of Jawa. A story line of conflict and compromise between Jawa’s intrusive inhabitants and the desert nomads maintains the reader’s interest throughout these technical sections. A series of appendices briefly presents some of the stratigraphical and artifactual data upon which the reconstructed history of Jawa is based.

The most fascinating feature of Jawa is Helms’s elaborate analysis of the hydro-technology employed to divert rainwater and store it in pools and cisterns during the brief rainy season, which sends torrents through the Wadi Rajil, next to the site. Excellent line drawings and graphs explain the water cycle, the runoff process feeding the catchment area of Jawa and the complex system of dams, canals and reservoirs constructed by the inhabitants. Equally impressive are Helms’s artistic illustrations, revealing his background in architecture, which reconstruct the well-preserved remains of the elaborate gate system and the domestic architecture at Jawa.

Unfortunately, the hard archaeological evidence of clear stratigraphy and datable artifacts needed to support fully the author’s various reconstructions is often lacking. Helms admits this basic insufficiency, but the book’s disarming style, quickly moving from conjecture to apparent certainty, overshadows his disclaimers. Most debatable is Helms’s conjecture that two major city walls were constructed in the span of a single generation. The apparent homogeneity of the ceramic forms associated with the construction of the two walls—which led Helms to the conclusion that they were built in a brief span of time—is misleading. The parallels cited for the artifacts span the Late Chalcolithic and the Early Bronze I periods, even allowing for differences in terminology among experts. Dating the pottery from these periods is notoriously difficult. The difficulty is compounded by major regional differences in pottery types. We are hardly in a position to confine any group of forms to a single generation. In addition, the schematic sections show a deep layer of mudbrick collapse and debris between the two walls. This argues against the brief span assigned to their construction. Consequently, the story line of conflict and compromise, which rests upon the quick development of the entire water system by an intrusive “technically brilliant” group from the north, remains weak and unconvincing. Jawa, despite Helms’s brilliant attempt to solve its enigma, retains some of its paradoxical character.

The author discusses only briefly a later fourth phase of Jawa’s occupation, which occurred after a 1,000-year gap. Substantial traces of a Middle Bronze Age citadel remain in the center of the town’s walled area. Helms sees the builders of this complex, too, as intruders in the desert. Since this phase of occupation corresponds with the traditional Age, of the Patriarchs, around 2000 B.C., and since Jawa itself lies on the shortest route between lower Mesopotamia and Canaan, Helms, I hope with tongue in cheek, named the Middle Bronze complex, Khan Ibrahim. The Biblical connection must have been intended to give the study a broad appeal. It, along with other Biblical terminology and alleged connections used in the text, cannot be taken seriously. For example, fourth-millennium Palestine is described as “the Land of Milk and Honey” (p. 11) and “The Promised Land” (p. 64); the story of Jawa and the Jawaites is seen as paralleled by that of Moses and the Exodus (p. 65) and overall considered as “one of many primal Biblical sources” (p. 73).

Still, the alert reader who keeps in mind the tenuous nature of Helms’s hypotheses should be continually stimulated by his challenging approach. His imaginative focus on people and social interaction in the development of towns, supported by extensive technical analysis of environmental factors, deserves applause and, more importantly, imitation.

Egeria’s Travels can be ordered for $25.95, and Jawa can be ordered for $37.50 from: BAR Discount Books, 3111 Rittenhouse Street,N.W., Washington, D.C. 20015.

Egeria’s Travels to the Holy Land

John Wilkinson, editor and translator

(Ariel Publishing House: Jerusalem, 1981) 354 pp., $25.95