Investigators also found what they described as "a chapel" apparently made by McAfee on top of a rocky desert ridge outside the town of Mitzpe Ramon. He had cleared a circle-shaped area of stones and used a bicycle tool to carefully flatten the sand.
"He seems to have been doing all kinds of ceremonies that we don't really understand," said Raz Arbel, one of the leaders of an all-volunteer search team that has been looking for McAfee, whose bicycle, hiking boots, camera, and wallet were discovered but not his phone nor his passport.
The biblical clues have led the search party to suspect that McAfee may be suffering from Jerusalem Syndrome, a well-documented mental phenomenon where visitors to the Holy Land suffer psychotic religious delusions, including the belief that they are figures from the Bible.
Israel's Health Ministry records around 50 cases a year where a tourist's delusions are so strong that police or mental health professionals are forced to intervene.
"I have never met this man [McAfee] but from the reports that he was involved in some kind of religious experience in the desert, it certainly sounds like it could be a case of Jerusalem Syndrome," said Dr Moshe Kalian, the former district psychiatrist for Jerusalem and an expert in the condition.
"Jerusalem Syndrome is not a mental disease by itself but is usually superimposed on top of a background of mental distress or disease that a patient has. Their psychotic ideas often lead them on a mission to Jerusalem," he said.
McAfee had struggled with depression in Britain and spent much of 2017 travelling, partly as a way of coping. He cycled through Europe and then went to Mexico on a charity mission before arriving in Israel in late October. He had planned to return to Essex, where he lived, on December 1.
When he did not return his friends raised the alarm and contacted police on Christmas Eve. McAfee was last seen on November 21, by an American tourist.
