Alright, so last week I got sick again for the 3rd time this semester - mind you, the semester has only been a month long thus far - and I ended up missing all my Wednesday classes. Anything that was lectured on about our field study, I missed. Meaning that, when we began our venture into Benjamin, I had no idea what we were doing, where we were going, or what I had gotten myself into.
We started our morning at a lovely little mountainous area in the wilderness. Whoever says that there's no beauty in the desert, needs to come here. The sun had just risen, and the land was still cool from the night. The ridge that we were studying on looked out over the expanse of the vast and dry hill country between Jerusalem and Jericho, towards the Dead Sea and the Rift Valley. Our professor asked us to be silent for a few minutes and listen to the stillness that was out there. I have to say that after spending a month in Jerusalem where the city is louder than New York City 24/7, that this silence was quite attractive. Now maybe if I was wondering through something similar for 40 years, it may feel suffocating. But when I'm surrounded by constant Israeli concerts, never ending traffic and car horns, and people singing and dancing and yelling all the time... It was quite peaceful in comparison. It's certainly someplace special to go if you want to spend some time with God.
Our next stop was the Ascent of Adumim, which is the Ridge Route following the Wadi (dry river bed) Qilt between Jericho and Jerusalem. Little did I know, that we were going to walk the whole thing. In the middle of the day. From 9-11. Just as the land was beginning to be hot. A mountainous cliff on my left side and a dry bottomless river bed to my right. It was one of those paths where one wrong step could lead to an untimely death or at least many broken bones and injuries. The whole thing was horrifyingly terrible. It wasn't necessarily physically challenging. The whole path slowly descends and there are only a few places that are uphill, and it is a path so it's not like I was rock climbing or anything. It was just so hot and stuffy. When we started reaching the end of the road, the strata of limestone in the sides of the hills had started tilting from erosion so that they appeared to be moving diagonally up instead of from right to left. One look at that and I thought the world was tilting, which gave me vertigo. Because that's what I needed when I was soaked through with sweat, hot, and cranky (that's sarcasm, by the way. I didn't need it).
Once we reached New Testament Jericho - which is where the road led - we were to go to one of Herod's palaces that he built over the Wadi Qilt. You know how Herod likes his desert palaces. There was an easier but longer path that stretched around the palace and up inside of it. But our professor decided it would just be easier to scale the steep hill, over the barbed wire fence, and into it. By the time I got into the palace I was dizzy, tired, cranky, hot, and felt like I was going to faint. I was literally fighting off tears and anxiety. It was the worst moment of my life, no exaggeration.
Next we went to Old Testament Jericho, which would have been a lot more enjoyable had I not still been dizzy. I think the most fascinating thing that I learned at Jericho was that when they were excavating it, they found a base rock wall with a second wall on top made of mud brick. Well the mud brick part of the wall seemed to have been destroyed from the inside of the city out. Which doesn't make any sense. If someone were attacking a city, they're most likely on the outside pushing the wall into the city. But this wall looked as if it toppled forward, creating a ramp over the stone wall into the city. This all sounds like what we have in the Bible - Joshua 6:20 "So the people shouted, and the trumpets were blown. As soon as the people heard the sound of the trumpet, the people shouted a great shout, and the wall fell down flat, so that the people went up into the city, every man straight before him, and they captured the city." Pretty fascinating stuff. Jericho is also in a place where earthquakes can certainly happen. And who's to say God didn't create an earthquake at the exact time that the Israelite shouted? This is the kind of story that illustrates how the people completely relied on God to help them. Pretty cool stuff.
After eating lunch and drinking an ice cold Diet Coke, I was feeling a lot better and ready to tackle the next several hours. We made our way up the Eastern Plateau of Benjamin which is the home of places like Geba and Ai. Just minutes after we got there, it started raining! Which was the best part of my day! Sadly, our lecture got cut short there because it was raining so hard.
The last place we visited was Gezer, which is between Raamah and the coast of Israel. This was my favorite stop of the day. We sat inside the gate of the city, which had been fortified by Solomon:
1 Kings 9:15-17a "And this is the account of the forced labor that King Solomon drafted to build the house of the Lord and his own house and the Millo and the wall of Jerusalem and Hazor and Megiddo and Gezer. Pharoah king of Egypt had gone up and captured Gezer and burned it with fire, and had killed the Canaanites who lived in the city and had given it as a dowry to his daughter, Solomon's wife; so Solomon rebuilt Gezer."Basically, Solomon had a bunch of wives. One of them was one of the Pharaoh's daughters. When she married Solomon, the Pharaoh gave her the city so that she would be taken care of if anything happened with Solomon. Gezer is very close to the coastline, and so acted as a buffer/alert city for the Western front of Jerusalem. If any enemies came down the coast to attack Jerusalem, Gezer could warn Jerusalem. Solomon, the wise man he was, fortified Gezer with a 6 chambered gate and casemate walls. So, inside the gate are 6 chambers. If anyone were to enter the city, the elders were there to watch. Kind of like an ancient version of a check-point. And if battle fell upon the city, extra soldiers were put into the chambers and could attack any enemies that may enter the city. The casemate wall is basically a wall that's built around the city wall, leaving a small gap in between the walls. So if an enemy brought down the first wall, they still had to bring down the second one, and they could put an army in between the walls for when if it came down. Until then, it was used as storage. I'm sure it also helped that the sun was finally setting and we were about to go home. So it was really nice outside. A nice Mediterranean breeze blowing through the air and cooling things down.
Obviously, when we got home Sunday night, I was exhausted, but I had a two page paper due the next morning, along with a test and another one page paper. So I was up late trying to at least get my two page paper done, only to get to class and discover that he decided not to take it up till Wednesday. In between classes, I had to write my one page paper and study for my test. That Monday night I had to work through 40 pages of my Hebrew textbook and get done with 5 exercises. Tuesday I started work with my Field Education organization. A nice place called Musalaha that woks on reconciling Christian Palestinians and Messianic Jews. I'm really excited about working with them. It turns out that they need a lot of office organization work done, which is something I love doing. I get to reorganize their entire filing system! And that excitement is not sarcastic. The problem was that I couldn't remember where their office was, so I ended up walking 3 miles to get there. On the way back, every time I tried to flag down a bus the drivers would smile, laugh, and wave back. I didn't find it that funny. So I had to walk the whole way back, too. Yesterday, I was so tired that I didn't do a thing. All that to say that this week has been really busy and I apologize for the delay in updates.
This coming weekend we'll be gone for three days in Judah, the Shephela, Philistia, the Negev, and the Dead Sea. So we'll be going to places like the Sorek Valley where Samson was from, the Elah Valley where David fought Goliath, Timnah, Socoh, Azekah, and Engedi where Matsada is at - one of Harod's desert fortresses, a place that David ran to when he was running away from Saul, and where the Jews took their last stand during the revolts in 70 AD. I'm pretty excited. I'm bringing my computer with me, but I don't know what the internet situation will be like for updates.
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