The last-quarter Moon stands like a signpost in the morning sky, beckoning us forward in our road around the Sun. You can see that the Moon, with its bright face looking down toward the Sun, is near the point in the sky marked as “Earth’s direction of travel.”
See the end note about enlarging illustrations.
The Moon has only just passed its descending note across the ecliptic, so this Libra-Virgo area of the sky is where two of the year’s eclipses happen, as shown in this part of the Moon chart in Astronomical Calendar 2023.
Sublunary Department
Jericho is in the news because Israeli forces have killed Palestinians there. Not the first time this city, said to be the oldest in the world, has been a target of violence, since Joshua and the Israelites knocked its walls down some time around 1200 BC.
When I lived in Arab Jerusalem, we sometimes took the road down to Jericho. From the shoulder of the Mount of Olives, the road plunged zigzagging down the tangled slopes of what was anciently called the Wilderness of Judaea, to below sea level in the Jordan valley.
The first time, we were driven by friends, and I became car-sick and had to ask to be let out by the roadside for a moment. It was beside this road that the traveler in the parable was left for dead and rescued by the compassionate Samaritan. We learned that there was a plan to drive a new straighter highway down instead, and someone remarked to me: “That would just let the Israelis drive down if they invade, and cut the country in half.” And that was what happened in 1967.
Outside St. Stephen’s Gate of the old city of Jerusalem, vehicles stood waiting to collect passengers, and the drivers would shout:
“Arîhâ!”
That’s the Arabic form of the name of Jericho; I thought it was related to the word for “wind,” but apparently it means “fragrant.”
But a driver would shout it repeatedly and rapidly –
“Arîhâ-rîhâ-rîhâ-rîhâ!”
– so that it came to sound like:
“Harry-Harry-Harry-Harry-Harry-ha!”
When the driver started off, having enough passengers, one of them would call out:
“Fii wahad!”
This means “There is one” – there was yet one more person hoping to catch the bus. But it’s delightful. Fii is classical Arabic fî-hi, “in it.” This is the way of expressing “there is.” Incidentally, the h in wahad and in Arîhâ should have a dot under it, to indicate that it is the “emphatic” or throaty consonant made in the pharynx.
And we would look out of the back window and see wahad come running, the skirts of his robe flying.
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Thank you Guy for these memories, a little visit to a time and place I will never experience.
“The Jericho Road” reminded me of this quote from Reverend Martin Luther King’s speech “Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence” delivered at Riverside Church in New York on April 4, 1967, two months before the Six Day War:
“On the one hand we are called to play the good Samaritan on life’s roadside; but that will be only an initial act. One day we must come to see that the whole Jericho road must be transformed so that men and women will not be constantly beaten and robbed as they make their journey on life’s highway. True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar; it is not haphazard and superficial. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring.”
That is profound, Anthony.
I have another memory of the Judaean wilderness at Other paths > Life in the form of a maze > Mar Saba