Did Hebron Disappear?

aish.com ^ | June 30, 2009 / 8 Tammuz 5769 | by Rabbi Leibel Reznick

[Fred Nerks]

INNOCENTS ABROAD. LINK

for example:

"...We got away from Bethlehem and its troops of beggars and relic-peddlers in the afternoon, and after spending some little time at Rachel's tomb, hurried to Jerusalem as fast as possible. I never was so glad to get home again before. I never have enjoyed rest as I have enjoyed it during these last few hours. The journey to the Dead Sea, the Jordan and Bethlehem was short, but it was an exhausting one. Such roasting heat, such oppressive solitude, and such dismal desolation can not surely exist elsewhere on earth. And such fatigue!

The commonest sagacity warns me that I ought to tell the customary pleasant lie, and say I tore myself reluctantly away from every noted place in Palestine. Every body tells that, but with as little ostentation as I may, I doubt the word of every he who tells it. I could take a dreadful oath that I have never heard any one of our forty pilgrims say any thing of the sort, and they are as worthy and as sincerely devout as any that come here. They will say it when they get home, fast enough, but why should they not? They do not wish to array themselves against all the Lamartines and Grimeses in the world. It does not stand to reason that men are reluctant to leave places where the very life is almost badgered out of them by importunate swarms of beggars and peddlers who hang in strings to one's sleeves and coat-tails and shriek and shout in his ears and horrify his vision with the ghastly sores and malformations they exhibit. One is glad to get away...

Lepers sitting together on a roadside by the Valley of Gihon, Jerusalem, possibly begging money or food from passers by.

PHOTO GALLERY LINK

[wildbill]

Old Mark laying a pox on all their houses back in the 19th century. Good catch.

[Fred Nerks]

Yep. And Netenyahu gave Obama a copy of the book! But I imagine zero would rather play with snakes...than read it!)

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1086234.html

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will be presenting U.S. President Barack Obama with a copy of “Pleasure Excursion to the Holy Land,” from Mark Twain’s book “The Innocents Abroad,” when they meet in Washington today. Netanyahu received the book, along with a newly published version in Hebrew (translated by Oded Peled), from the Kinneret Zmora-Bitan publishing house.

In his travel memoir, Twain describes a 1867 trip to the Land of Israel, which he finds a backward and desolate place devoid of culture or law. “Renowned Jerusalem itself, the stateliest name in history, has lost all its ancient grandeur, and is become a pauper village,” he states, calling it a country where prosperity had died out, a place of lost splendor and beauty where joy has turned to sorrow, and where silence and death prevail in its holy places.

[SunkenCiv]

It can almost be said, “you name it, the Koranimals have vandalized it”.

[wildbill]

And here I was sure that I was the only person in the world that was thinking about Twain’s book and the current situation in the Holy Land.

Now I find out that Netenyahu and of course yourself are into the book too. Just goes to show that great minds run on the same track