it had no name, the houses were without provision for roofs …
… they were built along a dry river bed that would have been inundated every winter …
… there are cylindrical stone piles at irregular intervals…
and there is no discernible reason for establishing a settlement at that location. And that’s just the beginning of the enigma. There is what could be a pagan shrine complete with sacrificial alter …
… and most intriguing, three hundred meters away is a mosque with the kibla oriented to due east while Mecca is south east. What’s going on?
Yehuda Nevo came up with a theory. He was an autodidact historian, archaeologist, Quranic scholar. He came to Sde Boker in the 1980’s to investigate the Haluqim site, he produced a couple of books in which he argued that Islam was not born in Mecca, it came from right here in the Negev Highlands and the evidence is scattered on the ground in at the Haluqim junction off Route 40. At the Haluqim site Yehuda observed the transition from paganism to Islam. He claimed to have found the embryo of a new religion being formed which he calls ‘’proto-Islam. Inscriptions of imprecations to ‘Allah’ with no mention of Mohammad, and remains of a house of worship which is built like a mosque but with an orientation patently pagan: Islam absent Mohammad, absent Mecca.
Of course Nevo’s findings are rejected by practically all scholars and the Israel Antiquities Authority will have nothing to do with the site. In fact in the 1990’s a consortium approached the Israel Land Bureau to buy the site in order to build a resort, and the Antiquities people gave them the green light. If you remove a blade of grass from an archaeological site in this country, the police come knocking on your hotel door, but at the Haluqim site it is OK to bring in bulldozers and pour concrete. It’s a strange business.
In the event the project was cancelled because the kids at our high school demonstrated and the story was reported in the national press. The reason our local children protested had nothing to do with Yehuda’s work, it was because they all knew this site and were frequent visitors from kindergarden to high school. They called it ‘lost city’, it was their own mystery playground and they loved it.
In fact it is a charming nature walk especially in the spring when the wild tulips (among many other flowers) are in bloom.
How to get there
This is a 5 minutes drive from the guesthouse. Drive north in the direction of Kibbutz Sde Boker, turn left following signs for Beer Sheva (this is called Halukim Junction). Right after the turn, on your left hand side, you will see a covered lookout called the Hagai Lookout.
The parking is on the right side of the road. Be extremely careful when you cross the road are cars are passing at full speed.
Look for the green mark and start walking straigth
You only want to follow the first green mark as the path will take you along the road and if you might see some flowers (less though), you will miss the archeological remnants if you follow it. So just start walking straight ahead and go down a hill.
This is where you end up.
Keep walking straigth for as long as you feel like it (getting to the mosque which is the last remnant will take about 20 minutes), but you can walk on the hills much further
without fearing getting lost as being on a hill, you will always be able to see the kibbutz and road 40.
If you don’t have a car waiting for you at the parking lot, you don’t even have to come back. Keep walking in a straight line. Walking back to the house will take you about 2 hours.
N.B.: If anyone wants to know more about Nevo’s work I will be glad to show them around.
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I love your posts Marion. Well done. If anyone should have started such a literary journey it should be you or John. Thank you for giving me great material for my guests.
Thanks Kelly. I am glad you and your guests can find some use from our posts. Just so you know, unfortunately, the button enabling us to indicate whether I wrote the post or John has disappeared. So unless I find someone more technologically savvy than myself (shouldn’t be too hard), from now own, it will look like I wrote everything. But in this specific case, it is 100% John’s doing. I am solely responsible for the ibex though!