The Land of Milk and Honey
We crossed the Jordan Valley as did Joshua and found the Jordan River a muddy and
disappointing stream. We stopped at the ruins of Jericho and dug out kernels of charred
grain which the archaeologists tell us undoubtedly belonged to an ancient household of
this ill-fated city. We looked at the Promised Land as it is today, 3,000 years after
Moses described it to the Israelites as a "land flowing with milk and honey." We
found the soils of red earth washed off the slopes to bedrock over more than half
the-upland area. These soils had lodged in the valleys where they, are still being
cultivated and are still being eroded by great gullies that cut through the alluvium with
every heavy rain. Evidence of rocks washed off the hills were found in piles of stone
where tillers of soil had heaped them together to make cultivation about them easier. From
the air we read with startling vividness the graphic story as written on the land. Soils
had been washed off to bedrock in the vicinity of Hebron and only dregs of the land were
left behind in narrow valley floors, still cultivated to meager crops.
In the denuded highlands of Judea are ruins of abandoned village sites. Capt. P.L.0.
Guy, director of the British School of Archaeology, has studied in detail those sites
found in the drainage of Wadi Musrara that were occupied 1,500 years ago. Since that time
they have been depopulated and abandoned in greater numbers on the upper slopes.
Captain Guy divided the drainage of Musrara into 3 altitudinal zones: The plain, 0-325
feet; foothills, 325-975 feet; and mountains, 975 feet and over. In the plain, 34 sites
were occupied and 4 abandoned ; in the foothills, 31 occupied and 65 abandoned; and in the
mountains, 37 occupied and 124 abandoned. In other words, villages have thus been,
abandoned in the 3 zones by percentages in the above order of 11, 67, and 77, which agrees
well with the removal of soil.
It is little wonder that villages were abandoned in a landscape such as this in the
upper zone near Jerusalem. The soil, the source of food supply, has been wasted away by
erosion. Only remnants of the land left in drainage channels are held there by cross walls
of stone.
Where soils are held in place by stone terrace walls, that have been maintained down to
the present, the soils are still cultivated after several thousand years. They are still
producing, but not heavily, to be sure, because of poor soil management (fig. 3)
FIGURE 3. This is a present-day view of a part of
the Promised Land to which Moses led the Israelites about 1200 B. C. A few patches still
have enough soil to raise a meager crop of barley. But most of the land has lost
practically all of its soil, as observed from the rock outcroppings. The crude rock
terrace in the foreground helps hold some of the remaining soil in place.
Most important, the soils are still in place and will grow bigger crops with improved
soil treatment. The glaring hills of Judea, not far from Jerusalem, are dotted with only a
few of their former villages. Terraces on these hills have been kept in repair for more
than 2,000 years.
What is the cause of the decadence of this country that was once flowing with milk and
honey As we ponder the tragic history of the Holy Lands, we are reminded of the struggle
of Cain and Abel. This struggle has been made realistic through the ages by the conflict
that persists, even unto today, between the tent dweller and the house dweller, between
the shepherd the farmer.
The desert seems to have produced more people than it could feed. From time to time the
desert people swept down into the fertile alluvial valleys where, by irrigation, tillers
of soil grew abundant foods to support teeming villages and thriving cities.
They swept down as a wolf on the fold to raid the farmers' supplies of food. Raiders
sacked and robbed and passed on. Often, they left destruction and carnage in their path,
or they replaced former populations and became farmers themselves, only to be swept out by
a later wave of hungry denizens of the desert.
Conflicts between the grazing and farming cultures of the Holy Lands have been
primarily responsible for the tragic history of this region. Not until these two cultures
supplement each other in cooperation can we hope for peace in this ancient land.
We saw the tents of descendants of nomads out of Arabia. In the seventh century they
swept in out of the desert to conquer and overrun the farming lands of Palestine. Again in
the 12th century nomads drove out the Crusaders. They with their herds of long-eared goats
let terrace walls fall in ruin and unleashed the forces of erosion. For nearly 15
centuries erosion has been washing the soils off the slopes into the valleys to make
marshes or out to sea.
In recent times a great movement has been under way for the redemption of the Promised
Land by Jewish settlers. They have wrought wonders in draining swamps, ridding them of
malaria, and planting them to thriving orchards and fields. These settlers have also
repaired terraces, reforested desolate and rocky slopes, and improved livestock and
poultry.
Throughout our survey of the work of the agricultural colonies, I was asked to advise
on measures to conserve soil and water. I urged that orchards be planted on the contour
and the land bench-terraced by contour plowing. We were shown one orchard where the trees
were planted on the contour, the land was bench-terraced, and slopes above the orchard
were furrowed on the contour and planted to hardy trees.
By these measures all the rain that had fallen the season before, one of the wettest in
many years, had been absorbed by the soil. After this work was done, no runoff occurred to
cut gullies down slope and to damage the orchards below. We were told that the man
responsible for this had learned these measures at the Institute of Water Economy in
Tiflis, Georgia, in Transcaucasia. .
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