This trail in the Judean Hills is new to us, but the scenery is familiar. It’s late spring, almost summertime, and the terrain tells the story of this time of year. Once-green fields have turned golden-white, that iridescent shade that seems to shine no matter the time of day. The trail we follow is now officially a dust path. Gone are the mud tracks of wintertime; no real rain has fallen for a while now.
We stick to the trail as much as we can, though. Sliding in the dust is better than getting thorns stuck in our socks, and the thorns are plentiful now. They make their way through the mesh tops of our trail runners whenever given the chance.
We climb one hill and notice a stone square in the ground near a fig tree – a water cistern, or perhaps a well, a feature so ubiquitous in this landscape that hikers walk past without a second glance. Of course, we’re going to test it out.
My husband picks up a rock, drops it in, and we hear a satisfying plink as it hits fresh water at the bottom. This water source is still fully functional, hundreds, maybe thousands of years after someone dug it.
I don’t think I ever encountered a cistern or a well during my first 20 years of life in the United States. I could hardly have imagined the need to search for water in my swampy, rainy hometown of New Orleans. But here in Israel, wells and cisterns are everywhere – set into hillsides, hidden under fig trees, tucked behind stone walls in ancient agricultural terraces. Sometimes you can see them. More often, you walk right past.
Turning back the pages of history
Turning back the pages of history, wells appear in the Torah from almost the beginning. Abraham dug them in Beersheba, and a well dating back to biblical times still stands at the ancient site. Isaac re-dug his father’s wells after the Philistines filled them in.
Then there are the stories I love most – the wells as romantic meeting places. Rebecca offering water to Eliezer’s camels at the well. Rachel arriving with her father’s flock as Jacob single-handedly rolled the stone away from the well’s mouth. Zipora and her six sisters chased off by shepherds at a well in Midian, only to be defended by a fugitive Moses. Three of the great love stories of the Torah, all set at wells.
The Torah even gives us the timing for the kind of well-meeting that brought Eliezer to Rebecca. When Eliezer arrived, he made his camels kneel “at evening time, the time when women come out to draw water” (Genesis 24:11). This was not a chance arrival. He knew exactly when the women would come. The well was a predictable place, at a predictable hour, where you could meet the women of a town.
Surveying the scenery here, it’s pretty clear why. Rain doesn’t fall in Israel all year long, and there aren’t many above-ground water sources. Come late spring, water for household needs had to come either from a collected source or from deep underground.
While the men were out tending flocks, the women gathered water in jugs in the morning and toward evening, when cooler temperatures made this physically demanding task a bit easier. So these romantic interludes were no coincidence. The well was where you might go to meet a woman, because the well was where the women were.
MY HUSBAND and I pick up our bags and continue along the trail, our own tap water safely tucked into thermos bottles in our backpacks. No well required.
Snapshots of a vanished daily life
As we wander along, I think about something I recently learned in Mishna Pirkei Avot, a tractate traditionally studied during the seven weeks between Passover and Shavuot. The text advises against engaging in excessive conversation with women – a line that has been interpreted in many ways throughout the centuries.
Later commentaries usually read it as a teaching about modesty or focused study. But the scholar Shmuel Safrai pointed out that the original context may have been more specific. In Mishnaic times, there were no indoor ovens. Women of a settlement cooked together in shared courtyards. They had to coordinate the lighting of their fires, share baking duties, and manage the heat through the long afternoons.
According to Safrai, this enforced togetherness made the courtyard a place where information moved quickly – and where the men of the period may have been concerned that their secrets might be shared by their wives.
It’s a snapshot of a vanished daily life. Like the wells, the courtyards were an infrastructure for the women; the place where they spent their days, raised their children, and lived their social lives.
That whole world is lost on modern readers. We live in such isolated, nuclear units that we can hardly imagine the necessity of baking in a communal kitchen, much less gathering our water at a public well at a set hour of the day.
Still, as we hike along, the signs of that older world are everywhere. The wells. The terraced courtyards built into hillsides, where you can sometimes still see the round depression of an old oven, or the worn stone where a grinding mill turned. The paths between settlement and water source, worn smooth by generations of feet carrying jugs.
The trail bends, and the well disappears behind us. Ahead, more golden hills, now lit even brighter and whiter by the hot sun. And among them, hundreds of ancient wells and cisterns are hidden, still holding fresh water in the cool darkness underground.
The writer is the author of From Southerner to Settler: Unexpected Lessons from the Land of Israel, and the founder of Hiking the Holyland.