The Dead Sea

An updated look at the wealth of legend and promise centered on one of the world's geological wonders.

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The Dead Sea is unlike any other place on earth. Situated a quarter mile below sea level, so saline it can't support life, surrounded by a desolate, haunting landscape, it is not just a geologic feature but a source of mystery and religious faith. In elegant and vivid prose, Barbara Kreiger re-creates and analyzes the myths and legends surrounding the site and examines both its natural history and its gradual and difficult exploration. But The Dead Sea (originally published as Living Waters in 1988) is more than a detailed and delightful travelogue. It is also an inquiry into the human and political drama that has swirled around this mysterious place for more than 12,000 years. In an afterword to the new edition, Kreiger shows how the sea in the post-Peace Accord era may come to take on a new symbolism: with the perpetual need for water and a thriving mineral industry as common bonds, Israel and Jordan, two traditional antagonists whose border bisects the Sea, may find themselves joining forces to preserve its fragile ecosystem against the threats of technology and tourism. Thus the Dead Sea, whose fate is "inextricably bound up with the social, political, and technological lives of the two nations who share it, " may become the scene where separate national interests are joined rather than divided.