From Shepherd to Archaelogist

Pesach Bar-Adon and His Discoveries

Pesach Bar-Adon (above) was probably more at home in the Judean wilderness than anywhere in the world, especially at the end of his long life. Born in Poland, the son of a rabbi, Bar-Adon studied the Talmud as a boy in a yeshiva (a traditional school for Jewish religious studies).

At the age of 17, in 1925, Pesach Bar-Adon immigrated to Palestine. For a year, he worked as a laborer in the rapidly developing Mediterranean city of Tel Aviv. Then he enrolled in Oriental studies at the new Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Each evening he pitched his tent on the campus, and every morning he took it down.

Bar-Adon soon decided that his life lay outside the campus. He presented himself to the sheikh of the Zinati tribe to ask for acceptance into the Bedouin tribe as a shepherd. The sheikh granted his request, and for about a year Bar-Adon lived and dressed as a Bedouin shepherd in the Beth-Shean area and near the southern shore of the Sea of Galilee. When the anti-Jewish, Arab riots of 1929 broke out, however, he joined the Haganah, the underground Jewish army.

After the riots, Bar-Adon lived with another 036Bedouin tribe, this time on the Golan Heights. His life there was described in a memorial tribute by Jerusalem Post reporter Abraham Rabinovich: “He lived the hard meagre existence of a Bedouin—enduring the cold and hunger, sleeping in the rain, walking barefoot. He relished the Bedouin’s raw contact with basic emotions.”(Jerusalem Post, April 6, 1985).