Word: negeb
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Most students of Bible history believe that the Negeb, Israel's southern desert, was an uninhabited wilderness when Abraham (a middle Bronze Age man) came to Beersheeba about 1500 B.C. One short reference puzzled them. The book of Genesis (14:6) refers to Horites (cave dwellers) who lived "by the wilderness" and were smitten by Chedorlaomer, King of Elam. But until the fall of Perrot's man, no trace of the Horites had been found...
...pounding of warriors and nomads, the ancients' brilliantly intricate system of water conservation disintegrated. Hulagu Khan- and his Mongol hordes rode out of Central Asia, smashed Mesopotamia's elaborate crisscross of canals and dehydrated the Garden of Eden. The waiting Bedouin nomads advanced into the Sinai and Negeb like locusts when Roman and Byzantine authority declined. They demolished vaults, run-off canals and 300-ft. reservoirs. Their goats and camels pushed over terraces, broke fencing, ate the water-hugging groves of trees and stunted tamarisk, and sent the area back to desert. Silt choked the irrigation canals, sand...
...cooperate "directly or indirectly" with the Israelis. Iraq sent word to Johnston not to bother to come (but later shamefacedly invited him). Only the Israelis were polite to President Eisenhower's emissary. They did not much like his scheme either (since it would bring no water to the Negeb), but decided they might as well let the Arabs bear the onus of saying...
...wanted to cut Israel's share of Jordan water from one-third to one-fifth.) The Israelis proposed to double the amount of available water by piping Lebanon's Litani River (which skirts Israel) into the scheme, and give all the increase to Israel to irrigate the Negeb...
...give-and-take agreement with the Arabs. The Arabs abandoned their alternative proposal. Johnston, in return, agreed to: 1) their demand for additional dams on the Yarmuk, and 2) their insistence that the Jordan waters be used "only within the Jordan basin" (which rules out irrigating Israel's Negeb...