More than 350 years pass before we hear of another journey into the cave—this time by a monk who came to the Holy Land with the Crusaders. In an inner cave, he found at first only “earth dyed the color of blood”, but when he dug up the earth, “he came upon the bones of the saintly Jacob”, to quote from a contemporaneous Latin description of the monk’s descent into the cave. Then the monk cleared a passage in which he discovered the remains of Abraham himself, and, at his feet, the bones of Isaac-