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National Geographic – Geographical Twins A World Apart – Review

When I think of “twins” as this article speaks, I think of the obvious. Lakes that are salty. I know enough about geography and religion to point out a few other things. I was very surprised at some of the other details listed in this article.

  •  A hypersaline lake (Dead Sea / Great Salt Lake)
  • A Jordan River
  • A Freshwater Lake (Sea of Galilee / Utah Lake)
  • A Holy City Nearby (Jerusalem / Salt Lake)
  • A Holy Temple Nearby (Solomon’s Temple / Herrods Temple / Salt Lake Temple)
  • A major religion in the region (Jews / The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints)
  • A major religion led by prophets (Jews / The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints)
  • Desolate Promised Lands
  • Similar climates

The less obvious similarities

There are probably a lot of other similarities not mentioned.

I found this paper that lists even more parallels. Parallels Between Utah and Palestine

National Geographic Issue – Full download

It makes it pretty hard to deny that God had a hand in guiding his people to these lands. In the LDS Church we believe that the Book of Mormon is a parallel to the last days. We also believe that one day we will see the hand of God in all things. I think the parallels are a witness of the hand of God.

As a side note: the Jews are a peculiar people that follow a law that would appear peculiar to those outside the religion. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is also a peculiar religion that doesn’t follow the norms of Christianity. It’s just one more way in which the LDS church mirrors the ancient Jews.

By David S. Boyer, Foreign Edition Staff, National Geographic Magazine

With photographs by the author

Same Scenery, Same Trees, Even the Same Name–Jordan–for the Rivers, Yet One Is in Utah, the Other is in the Holy Land Two rivers here illustrate an intriguing parallel between lands on opposite sides of the world. One waters the Great Salt Lake Valley in the western United States; the other nourishes the Jordan Valley in Israel and the Kingdom of Jordan.

Which is which? Only the Arab’s red checkered headdress provides an obvious clue. Nature offers none. Each scene shows a smooth-flowing stream aid background, weed-fringed riverbank, and a fore-ground framed by the leaves of a eucalyptus which is native to Australia.

Man-made objects provide little help; the two boats, for instance, might be the work of one builder that the name of the craft at right unmistakably sets the scene is not the best Latin it says: “Holy Land.”

Ten years ago I drove down out of the hills from Jerusalem to the Jordan Valley in the Holy Land, and what I saw that day has haunted me ever since.

Several times I have gone back. And between those visits, I have returned to my native Great Salt Lake Valley in Utah. Each time I have told myself, “Someday I will take a set of pictures so that people can see what I saw.” For geography reveals astonishing tricks of duplication in these two places a world apart.

What I saw that day was the snakelike Jordan River and the Dead Sea, salty and glistening, against the baking mountains of Moab. Yet this must have been almost the same scene that my Mormon pioneer ancestors saw in 1847 when they came down Emigration Canyon by covered wagon and looked out over the treeless plains stretching away toward Great Salt Lake.

These religious refugees from Illinois named their winding river after the Jordan of the Bible; this barren land became their Canaan.

Some 2,000 years before Christ, Abraham came from Mesopotamia to Canaan, the ancient land of the Jordan, and founded the nation of Israel. In those days, archeologists say, thriving farm villages dotted the entire region, even in today’s parched Negev.

Now the Jordan and its tributaries rush unchecked and little used from the mountains of Lebanon and Syria, Israel and the Kindom of Jordan, to waste themselves in the Dead Sea. They await only the genius of modern engineers-and political peace-to turn this forsaken area once more into good farmland. What Abraham’s nephew Lot saw may again be true: “And Lot lifted up his eyes, and behold all the plain of Jordan, that it was well watered everywhere… even as the garden of the Lord…” (Genisis 13:10)

Early dwellers in the Holy Land understood irrigation. And the ruins of vast canal systems in the southwestern United States indicate that prehistoric men in that part of America practiced the art long before the time of Columbus.

Hard necessity required the Mormon pioneers to be the first modern Americans to establish irrigation on an extensive scale. Today water runs fresh and clean down the gutters of Salt Lake City streets, recalling the days of Brigham Young, who laid out the “Heavenly City.” Along the sides of the streets he had his men dig ditches and turn into them streams from the mountains to irrigate their thirsty fields. Thus these settlers transformed their own bleak Jordan Valley into a garden.

New Canal to Water Southern Israel

On a recent visit to the Holy Land, I watched steam shovels on the Israeli bank of the Jordan River digging a canal designed to carry 115 billion gallons of Jordan Water Annually to the arid plains of southern Israel.

Within shooting distance across the canyon, Syrian farmers were digging their own canal, as a gesture of protest, for Syria disputes Israel’s right to the water. They labored with picks and shovels. When they had excavated a few feet of ditch, they unwalled the water behind them to see whether it would flow, and not too fast.

If they could only cross the guarded river into Israel, I thought, perhaps they could use the device Utah pioneers employed. Standing on a hill, the Mormons sometimes sighted across a dish of water, making a level route on the far hillside.

Ten Years after the conflict that divided Palestine, a technical state of war still exists between Israel and her neighbors. Part of Israel’s Jordan River canal, still being constructed, was dug under fire.

Climates of the two Jordan Vallys across the globe have changed little in 5,000 years. Dry years and wet come and go.

It was drought in the time of Joseph that sent the tribesmen of Cannan into Egypt. Joseph, sold into bondage by his brothers, had been carried to the land of the Nile, where foreign conquerors, the Hyksos, ruled. There, by his extraordinary abilities, he rose to become prime minister, second only to the Pharoh in power.

Joseph brought his famine-stricken people into Egypt. There they settled with their flocks in the land of Goshen, along the eastern fringe of the lush Nile Delta.

Migrating Quail Saved the Israelites

Finally, the alien Hyksos were driven out. The new Pharaohs “knew not Joseph” or his people and forced them into slavery. To satisfy Paraoh’s desire for great buildings, their lives were made bitter “with hard bondage, in mortar, and in brick, and in all manner of service…” (Exodus 1:14).

Then a great leader emerged among the Israelites. Every Sunday-school student knows the story of Moses, and of the plagues the Lord called down on Egypt, forcing Pharaoh to let His people go.

The Israelites began the long Exodus with their flocks into the wilderness of the Sinai peninsula. United by persecution, a cohesive nation for the first time under Moses, they sought the land promised by God.

Hungary and homeless in the desert, the children of Israel remembered in Sinai how good Egypt seemed by comparison. They complained bitterly to their leader. But the Lord spoke to Moses: “At even ye shall eat flesh, and in the morning ye shall be filled with bread…. And it came to pass, that at even the quails came up, and covered he camp…” (Exodus 16:12,13)

Dead Sea or Great Salt Lake? Both Offer Swimmers a Liquid Armchair This buoyant foursome plays bridge in the waters of the Great Salt Lake, which acts as an immersive evaporator, receiving fresh water and retaining salts. Six times brinier than the ocean, the lake supports swimmers with head and shoulders above the surface. As Horace Greeley observed, “You can no more sink… than in a claybank.” Terraced cliffs reveal levels of prehistoric Lake Bonneville, which covered most of western Utah and parts of Idaho and Nevada. Salt Lake is a vestige of Bonneville.

Bather Primps during a dip in the Dead Sea. Smaller than Great Salt Lake, the Dead Sea is equally saline, giving swimmers the sensation of wearing life jackets. Both bodies of water yield valuable potash for fertilizer and by virtually identical methods. Engineers pump the brine into shallow pans that retain the salts after evaporation. For centuries Arabs knew the Dead Sea as Bahr Lut, the Sea of Lot.

Utah – from Utah Lake to Great Salt Lake

appeared in the morning. Yet it reflects an interesting ornithological fact. Every year great migrations of quail wing their way across the Mediterranian and Red Seas en route between Europe and Africa. Even today Bedouins of the Sinai peninsula catch the exhausted birds after their long flight over the water.

A similar incident is recounted in the histories of the Mormon pioneers. The last refugees to leave Nauvoo, Illinois, crossed the Mississippi River in late September of 1846. Sick and without shelter, they subsisted for 10 days on parched corn.

Then, says the History of Brigham Young, “the Lord sent flocks of quail, chich lit…upon the ground within their reach, which the saints, and even the sick caught with their hands until they were satisfied.”

The quail “in immense quantities had attempted to cross the river.” another Mormon writer added, “but it being beyond their strength, had dropped… on the bank.”

When the pioneers reached Great Salt Lake Valley, Utah Indians were gathering crickets for winter food. These crickets, almost as dark and baleful as the locusts that invaded Egypt at the invocation of Moses, brought near ruin to the Mormons. Armies of the descended on the first ripened grain.

Great Salt Lake Valley bestrides the 60-mile-long Jordan River between fresh-water Utah Lake and Great Salt Lake. Early settlers claimed a territory that included all or part of nine States. Their claim, reduced by four-fifths, became the State of Utah in 1896. The map has been inverted for comparison with the Holy Land (opposite)

The Holy Land from Sea of Galilee to Dead Sea

This time clocks of seagulls saved the settlers. By tens of thousands, they few from islands in Great Salt Lake to the grain fields. For days the gulls gobbled up crickets.

I recalled tall this one day as I stood in the Jordan Valley in the Holy Land and watched swarms of locusts sweep across the hills, devouring every blade of grass. If only there were rookeries of seagulls around the Dead Sea. I thought, they might protect this land from its insect scourge.

Watching the pathetic figures of Bedouin children, barefooted and herding goats on the scorching Jordan hills, I wondered if they would be roasting the locusts that night in their tattered black tents. From ancient times, nomads of this area have turned locust plagues into a food supply.

Locusts are not the Holy Land’s only plague. Much of its misery and desolation can be attributed to the ravages of the common goat. Overgrazing has left the hills of Canaan barren. Topsoil gives way easily, and rains bring flood and erosion.

Modern Israel is achieving amazing results in reforestation. Grazing is carefully restricted. Trees and grasses are planted by the square mile. Israel is determined to restore the fertility of Bible times. The Bible itself helps Isreal determine what to plant, for a tamarisk was was the first tree Abraham planted in Beersheba. He chose wisely. Isreal has set out 2,000,000 tamarisks there, and they have thrived for they can live on less than six inches of rain a year.

Jordan River Valley stretches 65 miles between the fresh-water Sea of Galilee and the Dead Sea. The valley and the Mediterranean Sea border ancient Canaan, shared today by Israel and Jordan. Only in altitude do Great Salt Lake and the Dead Sea differ widely: they lie respectively 4,200 foot above and 1,286 feet below sea level.

Black Rock Cave near Great Salt Lake yields Indian relics estimated to be 40 centuries old. Archeologists believe this cave sheltered man 10,000 years ago. Prof Elmer Smith of the University of Utah examines the site where he helped unearth a skeleton judged to be 4,000 years old.

Caves at Qumran, on the Dead Sea, unlock secrets of the Essenes a pre-Christian Jewish sect whose copies of Old Testament books are the earliest known in Hebrew, Gerald Lankester Harding and Father Roland de Vaux painstakingly sift rubble for shreds of the Dead Sea Scrolls.

The modern State of Israel plans to plant 200 million trees. Israelis alive today hope to see the fulfillment of Ezekiel’s prophecy: “And they shall say, This land that was desolate is become like the garden of Eden…” (Ezekiel 36:35)

Great Salt Lake Valley, too, had to learn the same hard lesson. I remember the flash floods of years ago, when rivers of mud and rock poured down from the Wasatch Range, Only after Utahans restricted grazing in the hills and practiced reforestation did these tragedies cease.

The route of the Exodus through the Wilderness of Saini not the mountains of Sinai follows a track that was ancient even in the time of Moses. Since 3000 B.C. countless labor gangs had trudged this road, sent by Pharaohs to dig copper and turquoise in Sinai’s blinding heat.

Both Areas Yield Riches in Copper

“for the Lord thy God bringeth thee into a good land… a land whose stones are iron, and out of wholse hills thou mayest dig brass” (Deuteronomy 8:7, 9).

Thus, in part, did Moses describe the Promised Land. Brass, in the King James Bible, meant copper.

The Israelites, however, were not looking for copper; they were seeking good farming and grazing land. For 40 years they wandered, until they crossed over Jordan. It remained for Solomon to exploit the iron and copper ore Moses had predicted-to become, in fact, the mining tycoon of his world.

Several centuries after the Exodus, when most of Canaan had been conquered, there rode great kings in Isreal. King David seized Jerusalem, proclaimed it his capital and make the nation a great power. King Solomon consolidated David’s grians, increased trade and wealth, refortified Jerusalem, and built the city’s magnificent Temple.

At Ezion-geber, on the Gulf of Aqalea, Soloman built the finest smelter in these ancient lands. From it may have come mental to furnish the resplendent Temple-copper for the pillars, for the “altar of brass,” and for the pots, shovels, and basins that were used in the Temple ritual.

Ruins of Solomon’s smelters, buried and lost nearly 3,000 years, came to light only a few years ago. Dr Nelson Glueck, who has spent a lifetime excavating in the land of the Bible, found them in 1937.

Today the spiritual descendants of Moses and Solomon in modern Israel are mining copper near ancient smelters.

Not many years after Brigham Young brought his pioneers into Great Salt Lake Valley, iron, lead, silver, gold, and copper were discovered in the mountains of Utah.

The Mormon leader, however, was not interested in gold or silver or copper: nor did he want his people to be.

When they talked about going to California to mine gold in 1849, he told them: “if you elders of Isreal want to go to the gold mines. Go and be damned.” He believed that “prosperity and riches blunt the feelings of man.”

The Mormons did not go: nor did they work in Utah mines. “Outsiders” developed the deposits. In the Oquirrh Mountains overlooking Great Salt Lake Valley, they opened one of the richest open-pit copper mines in the world.

Today in Utah Mormons and people of other religions work side by side in the mines. At the Bingham Canyon mine of the Kennecott Copper Corporation, they have produced 7,000,000 tons of copper since 1904.

I flew over the famous copper mine last summer. Beyond it lay Great Salt Lake and to the west of it stretched the celebrated Bonneville Salt Flats. Here I used to watch race drivers set international speed records.

Slat Flats Produce Valuable Potash

Thousands of tourists have driven their cars off U.S. Highway 40 to “Try them out” on the salt flats. Few realized that they were driving over salt laid down 11,000 years ago by an ancient Lake Bonneville, an inland sea about the size of Lake Michigan, shrunk now to the comparative puddle of Great Salt Lake.

Even fewer, perhaps recognized the potash industry on the salt flats. Dazzling white and level as a breadboard, the flats spread over 75 square miles. Water from rain and melting snow, sinking into the flats, becomes saturated with salt. Drainage canals capture the brine and channel it to 4,000 acres of evaporation ponds.

Sea of Galilee, which Romans called the Sea of Tiberias, separates the upper and lower Jordan River. Abraham’s flocks may have grazed by the lake: The Bible describes how Jesus walked on tits surface (John 6:19)

Modern Israeli fishing fleets work the waters where the risen Chirst directed his disciples to cast their nets (John 21:6)

This view looks past an Israeli kibbutz, or collective farm, to snowy Mount Hermon, the Mount Sion of the Bible. Like early Utah settlements the kibbutzion hold property communally.

Hot springs on Galilee’s shores were known to pre-Roman inhabitants.

Utah Lake, Source of the American Jordan, Turns Desert Waste to Fertile Farmland

Pioneers faced with thousands of square miles of parched wilderness converted the barren wasteland by irrigation into “Beautiful Zion… clasped in the mountain’s embrace.”

Early settlements adopted strict communal rules, forbidding private ownership of water, timber, and other resources.

This view looks southeast past Saratoga Springs, a resort to the snow-streaked Wasatch Range.

Mount Nebo take its name from the peak where Moses viewed the Promised Land: “And Moses went up from the plains of Moab into the mountain of Nebo… and the Lord Sheweed him all the land… (Deuteronomy 34:1)

Bonneville, LTD.. processes 6,000,000 tons of brine annually, which yields 60 to 70,000 tons of potash for fertilizer.

In only one other place in the world is potash produced by virtually the same process. That is on the southern shore of the Dead Sea in Israel.

Before the Arab-Israel war, potash plants operated at both ends of the Dead Sea. With some of the Arabs who destroyed them. I had walked through the burned-out ruins of the northern installations in 1948.

Years later at Sedon in the South. I saw the rotting bargest that once carried potash to the north for shipment by road. This melancholy sight. However, was relieved by the new salt pans, the enlarged plant and the new desert highway Israel has built to revive the industry on the Dead Sea.

Locked between Jordan and Israel, this briny witches’ brew that was once considered useless is estimated to hold enough potash to supply the world at its present rate of use, for 230 years. The Dead Sea is fast becoming one of Israel’s main assets.

This year the Sedom works will almost reach its goal of 135,000 tons of potash annually. And Kindom of Jordan hopes to rebuild the gutted plant on the Dead Sea’s north shore.

Hot Springs Bubbl in Both Valleys

I was glad for the Dad Sea one sweltering afternoon in Jordan in 1954. My clothes were awash with perspiration as I scrambled down from the cliffs where archeologists were uncovering famous Dead Sea Scrolls.

Into the brine I blunged, at a place called Ayn Fashkhah. Later I was even more glad for Ayn Fashkhah. “Ayn” in Arabic means a spring, and here and here flows into the Dead Sea a brook of warm comparatively fresh water, wonderful for washing the salt off the body and out of the hair.

This too, was a reminder of home. Pioneers found hot springs on their first day in Great Salt Lake Valley. Today warm springs at both ends of the valley are recreational meccas for Utahans.

Settlements grew up around hot springs in the Holy Land four millennia before Christ. Jesus himself must have passed many times the most famous hot springs of all, those near Roman Gadara, east of the Jordan, and those of Tiberias on the shore of Galilee.

I lay stretched out on a Tiberias massage table one day listening to high-fidelity music flooding the elegant bathhouse built at these springs by enterprising Israelis. When I heard the proprietors’ plans for even more de luxe accommodations, including a swank hotel in the hills with Tiberia’s hot water piped into private bathing rooms, I concluded that even the pleasure-loving Romans could not have imagined such luxury.

Across the Sea of Galilee from Tiberias lies ‘Ein Gey, a living symbol of the trouble and insecurity of this region today. To a descendant of Utah pioneers, it is a further symbol of a strange and fascinating parallel that runs the length of two Jodan Rivers separated by more than 7,000 miles.

Galilee Fishermen Use Electronic Gear

I took a boat one day across the Sea of Galilee. There, on the beachhead of Israeli land thrusting against the mountains of Syria, I was welcomed by the communal settlers of ‘Ein Gev.

These men and women make a living by fishing the waters of Galilee. Though they net fish from small boats much like those used by the disciples of Jesus, they locate schools of fish in motorboats equipped with electronic sounding gear.

By day and night, they take turns standing guard against attack from the nearby Syrian hills.

Between shifts of fishing and guard duty and work on the pinched circle of farmland they cultivate behind barbed wire. They live like a big family. Everyone eats in a central dining hall. Children grow up in a communal nursery, visiting parents for an hour or two in the evening and on the Sabbath.

Everything is owned in common boats, farm buildings, bouses, and equipment. No one earns pay: expenses are met from a common chest.

The Mormon pioneers set up a similar system after they were established in Utah. They called their communal settlements the United Order. It didn’t last long. Mormons, like other Americans, weren’t built that way.

I don’t know whether ‘Ein Geve will go the way the Mormon communal settlement. But I know it would be hard for a Utahan to visit the Holy Land, look across the Jordan River and the Dead Sea, and not seem to hear strangely ringing in his ears the words of Brigham Young, “This is the place!”

Young Utahans stroll the treeless flats beside Great Salt Lake, largest body of water in the United States west of the Mississippi River. Stansbury Mountains rise beyond the lake.

Jordanian children roam the barren shores of the Dead Sea. The land of the Moabites, bitter enemies of the Israelites, shows on the far shore. Today Jordan owns most of the Dead Sea coast.

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