Barbara S. Kreiger

Selected Publications

• The Dead Sea and The Jordan River (Third edition, expanded, Indiana University Press, 2016).

  The Dead Sea is not only the lowest place on earth, it is the lowest by far, and is so saline that it can’t support life. The site of Sodom and Gomorrah, the lake was reviled by centuries of travelers who associated it with the sins of those cities millennia earlier. This book examines the myths that kept travelers away, and the scientific curiosity that compelled others to investigate.

  Following the signing of the Peace Accord between Israel and Jordan, the Dead Sea, a shared body of water, took on new significance. But in recent years the Dead Sea environment has been tragically altered, and the other half of the environmental disaster is the Jordan River. Both the river and the lake are threatened with extinction, and the challenge in the next years is how to halt the devastation and create new terms for cooperation and peacemaking.

   

• Divine Expectations: An American Woman in 19th-Century Palestine (Ohio University Press, 1999).

  Divine Expectations is the story of Clorinda Minor, a charismatic American Christian woman whose belief in the Second Coming prompted her to leave a comfortable life in Philadelphia in 1851 and take up agriculture in Palestine.

  Following a failed prophecy about the End of Days, Mrs. Minor  announced that her mission was to teach the poverty-stricken Jews of the Holy Land to work the soil. Her farm was a unique settlement where Christians, Muslims, and Jews labored alongside each other, but tragic events prevented her work from expanding.

   

            

• “The Search for Herod’s Tomb,” Smithsonian Magazine (August 2009).

  http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/finding-king-herods-tomb-34296862/...