Modern day Moses drills for water
TEL AVIV (UPI)—In the Sinai Desert, Israeli hydrologists and Bedouin laborers are today doing the hard way what the Bible saves Moses did the easy way—producing water from rock in the wilderness.
According to the Book of Exodus (Chap. 17, Verse 6) God commanded Moses to strike with his rod the rock in Horeb. He did, and sweet water poured forth to slake the thirst of the Israelites as they wandered the Sinai wilderness after their flight from bondage in Egypt.
Today, in the same area, the Israelis and their Bedouin helpers are doing the same thing. But their rods are drills and the going is tougher. It took them 189 days, drilling and hacking down at the rate of 10 inches a day, to reach water at 158 feet in solid granite.
The modern day Moses is a team of technocrats, headed by hydrologist Dr. Avrahman Melamed, head of the Tel Aviv consultant engineering firm of Tushia (resourcefullness in English).
In an interview, Melamed said the first well sunk through the granite near the ancient monastery of St. Catherine, yields 3,200 cubic feet of fresh water a day and another being completed nearby promises to be six times as productive.
Melamed is now in charge of 15 similar strikes for fresh water in the southern part of the Sinai desert.
The Israeli government sponsored the surveys and the drillings in the barren and hostile land which Israel captured from Egypt in the 1967 Middle East War.
Only Bedouin, the Arab Nomad tribes, used to roam this huge wasteland which stretches from the sand dunes along the Mediterranean, across the sandy plateau known as El Tin, to the barren mass of crystalline rocks known as Jebel Katherine, which rises 8,652 feet into the sunlight.
But since the six-day war that left hundreds of burnt-out Egyptian tanks, armored cars and artillery all across its reaches, Israeli soldiers patrol the Sinai Desert and tourists flock by plane and by car to tour the wilderness.
The St. Catherine Monastery is set in a vale atop the 7,497-foot Ebel Moussa, traditionally identified as Mount Sinai, where Moses received the ten commandments.
One of the world's oldest and most sacred Christian shrines—it was built by Byzantine Emperor Justinian in the 6th century A.D. in memory of an Egyptian Christian martyred in Alexandria two centuries before—the St. Catherine Monastery lies on the traditional site of the burning bush, in which God appeared to Moses.
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Nearby is biblical Horeb and it is in this wilderness that the Israeli teams are at work.
"We made painfully slow progress," he said. "Only 10 inches a day."
He said his people were drilling, mostly by hand, other wells around the St. Catherine Monastery. One of them, he estimated, would yield 19,200 cubic feet a day.
miles south of St. Catherine, have yielded saline water, which easily can be sweetened through a recently developed Israeli desalination process.
Keffiyen (Arab headress) wearing Bedouins hacked their way down through 158 feet of solid
granite rock to find water, Melamed said.
"We now have more water than either the Monastery or tourists to the area, need." Melamed said.
He said his firm was drilling for water in another 10 sites in the southern Sinai Peninsula. Four of them, in the Red Sea fortress of Sharm-El-Sheikh, 52
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