Exploring the Christian Quarter

In order to further orient ourselves, we were assigned yesterday to explore one of the quarters of the Old City. We were asked to pair up with a person of another nationality, a 'buddy,' and then group with another pair to form a 'family.' My buddy was Kate, an Australian farm girl, aged 20; the other pair in our family were Ben, an Australian Anglican pastor, aged 32, and Chuck, an American from Wyoming, aged 72, I believe. So this is my 'family' for the next two weeks, and I couldn't have a better one.

We were assigned the Christian Quarter with a number of tasks to perform between 10 am and 5:3o pm: discover a high place and vantage point; discover a low place with perhaps an archaeological dig; find the neighborhood's principal site; find another religious shrine; talk to a local about what it is like to live in the Old City. However, we were asked to perform two special tasks: discover the joys and sorrows of the quarter, and bring back a small token to symbolize the quarter. Although I've been exploring the Old City for two weeks, now, this provided some real impetus to dig deeper into the lives of the people.

So we set out, entering the New Gate on the northwest corner of the Old City and walked along Latin Patriarchate Rd toward Jaffa Gate. It was not long before we found a door with a stone-cut sign reading "Issa Is the Name, Basketball is the Game." I pointed out that "Isa" is Arabic for Jesus, so Ben inquired within. Our came a delightful seventy-some odd year old Arab Christian man, who explained that he had made the sign and set it in the wall for his son, named Issa after Jesus Christ, who loves basketball. At this, we received a healthy dose of Middle Eastern hospitality: he invited us into his home to show us around and tell us a number of stories about his family.

He introduced himself as Annus and his wife as Georgina. He'd worked all his life as a stone mason. I found this particularly interesting since Jesus himself was a tekton, which we translate 'carpenter' but is more of a general construction worker who would have used stone building materials in first century Galilee. Here was a man that was living the life of the Christian Quarter. He brought us back to one of the inner rooms that was the original room in the house which he has since turned into his bedroom and living quarters. He added to that in order to have a workshop, which functioned as the foyer in his retirement.

In particular, he told us an amazing story about renovating the back room when he turned it into his bedroom. At the top of the dome was the keystone, which had to be removed for the reconstruction process. As a dome, the keystone had an upper side that remained hidden from view. On this upper side, he discovered an inscription placed there by the original builder (almost inevitably one of his ancestors): a cross with the Arabic words "Allah Masia," or God is the Messiah! So he did some metalwork with an old lamp that he turned into a hanging display so the keystone could be mounted on the wall above his bed. He has never taken it out of the room.

After a while we excused ourselves to continue on our journey. After a short while we came across a very nice restaurant at which we figured we might have lunch later on, so we stopped in. The owner was a Syrian Orthodox Christian who knew St. George's well; apparently the staff at the college often take their lunches at his establishment. A priest, the former dean of St. George's, died two days ago, so we talked about this, and he showed us pictures of the man and a joint Gregorian Catholic and Julian Orthodox calendar he had worked on for years. His work on ecumenism had also touched the priests at the Armenian service the night before, who were very sad at his passing; he had been schedule to participate in the liturgy there.

Anyways, the owner proceeded to give us a full history of the Syrian Orthodox Church, including its breakaway from the orthodox church catholic when it rejected the Council of Chalcedon in 451. They believe that Christ is fully divine and fully human in one person, however, they do not believe he has full divine and full human natures; the natures have merged (called monophysitism, or 'one nature-ism'). Orthodox Christianity (all of us) believe that this threatens the unity of God, since if Christ has a new merged divine-human nature, then is his nature the same as the divine Father's? Can we still speak of one God, or a 'binity' of the Father and Holy Spirit and a separate, second God-man Christ? Probably not, but the Syrians have backed away from their strict formulation.

He also told us that in the east there are two specific monastic traditions, as in the west you have Franciscans, Benedictines, Jesuits, Dominicans, and a host of others. Here, there are St. Anthony's monks, whose communities are traced back to St. Anthony of Egypt, and the communities of St. Ephrem the Syrian, whose communities are largely found in the Syrian Orthodox Church. St. Ephrem defended the formulation of Christ as one fully divine, fully human person at the Council of Ephesus through his poetic songs praising Mary as the Theotokos, the God-bearer (the heretic at the council, Nestorius, refused to call her this and only Christotokos, the Christ-bearer, since for him there were separate human and divine persons). The hymns continue to be sung and memorized, without being written down for a thousand years, today; and it was this emphasis on the unity of Christ's person against the heretic Nestorius that led to the Syrian church's own heresy of over-emphasizing the unity of Christ's natures at the next council, Chalcedon. As with most heresies, it is pushing a truth too far; the road of orthodoxy is the narrow road.

For those actually wondering about my day, yes, we did end up eating lunch there, and ended up with an absolutely terrible picture of all four of us. However, the beef and chicken kebabs were delicious.

So to get to our high point I led the group back to the tower on the Evangelical Lutheran Church of the Redeemer, which everybody thoroughly enjoyed. Kate is a tad claustrophobic and thus was walking very slowly down the narrow stone steps in the tower, so I decided to take a rest in a window sill. Then I decided to see if I could climb in it...
...and she decided it was worth the picture.

Well, that was our very busy day yesterday. It was sort of a free, but more a day of taking in the city- for the first time for some, and in a whole new way for me. For our tokens, we brought back the receipts from climbing up the tower, since that was our chance to give a small amount of money to the church and our opportunity to view the whole of the Old City from one central vantage point. Joys and sorrows? The sorrow of hearing how the Syrian Orthodox Christians are cut off from their patriarch in Damascus because of the continued political situation between Syria and Israel. But what a magnificent joy of meeting Annas and hearing his nigh-magical story of the keystone.

Beginning at St. George's College

So this past weekend I got settled at St. George's College, across the court yard from the Pilgrim Guest House where I've been staying. I moved in Saturday afternoon, and am almost used to it now.

The course called the Palestine of Jesus has begun, where I'll be for the next two weeks, touring the land in a much more intellectually engaging and in depth way than before with AIT. The night I moved in an Australian group arrived, now totaling just over twenty people, and later a group from Wyoming arrived. In total it's the Anglican group from Australia, one Catholic priest coincidentally from Australia, the Episcopal group from Wyoming, one solo Episcopal lady from Iowa, and me. Thus far it's a very good group of folks, although there's only one other person my age, a twenty year old girl from Australia named Kate.

So last night we had dinner and introductions. Our course guides are Andrew, the principal lecturer and priest; Louis, the chaplain; Steven, priest and dean of the college; and Ben, the young Byzantine studies enthusiast whose job is to keep the group in order. This morning we were more properly oriented, both to the course and its schedule and to the city of Jerusalem. To the end of the latter, we took a bus up the Mount of Olives to view a similar site as the one the AIT group got our first evening in Jerusalem, but a bit to the south to give us a view of the Old City's quarters.

We got the later part of the afternoon free but it was recommended that we go the Armenian Cathedral of St. James in the Old City at 5:00. This week is the week of prayer for Christian unity; participating churches include the Latin Catholic Church, the Melkite Greek Catholic Church, the Greek Orthodox Church, the Armenian Orthodox Church, the Coptic Church, the Ethiopian Tewahedo Church, the Anglican Church, and the Lutheran Church. Basically, that includes everyone that has a space at the Holy Sepulcher plus Lutherans and Anglicans. Seems we're moving up in the world into the big league, and that makes me happy.

The service was mostly in Armenian with snippets of Ge'ez (liturgical Ethiopian), Coptic, and English. However, at the end, the benediction was given by the separate priests, archbishops, and patriarchs in Armenian, Coptic, Greek, Ge'ez, Arabic, Latin, English, and German. It was the most amazing experience to hear all the great tongues of Christendom come together like that: a small taste of heaven, as the liturgy should be. Afterward, the various priests mingled about in the reception room, and I can't help but post not one but two photos of these blessed men and their marvelous hats.
That's Armenian, Lutheran, Catholic, Orthodox, Coptic, and Armenian again!

Mar Saba

Today I finally made it to Mar Saba. It was fairly simple actually: took the 124 Arab bus to the Bethlehem checkpoint, walked though, and took a cab directly to the site.

Mar Saba is a monastery in the Judean desert that has been in continual operation since the early centuries of Christianity. It was founded by the Desert Father par excellence, St. Sabas. Also, in keeping with its isolated location and Eastern Orthodox tradition, the monks seem to have lost their minds.

Don't believe me? Let me replay the scene:

-I approach the thick wooden door in the giant stone wall and knock. I hear a voice from inside-
Guard monk: What you want?
Me: I'd, um, I'd like to see the monastery...
Guard monk: Why??
Me: Um... I know a little something about St. Sabas, and because the monastery is... a treasure of Christendom?
Guard monk: ... Where you from?
Me: America.
Guard monk: You alone?
Me: Yes?
-The guard monk peaks out the door, looks around like I might be part of a raiding party or something-
Guard monk: Ok, you come inside.
-Here I am directed to 'hurry quick quick' down the stairs, where a monk from Greece is talking to two Spanish dudes who happen to be there-
Guide monk: You miss beginning of my talk, but I catch you up: in the beginning, Jesus Christ the crucifixiated and raised began the Orthodox Church, one holy catholic and apostolic. He was first martyr, and the skulls of martyrs are here.... Are you Orthodox?
Me: Uh... no...
Guide monk: Protestant, maybe?
Me: Lutheran.
Guide monk: Ugh... so you dont believe in relics. Well, today, we make you Orthodox. Look here...
-He turns on a crank-powered flashlight-
Guide monk: You see this behind me?
-I look, and low and behold, there is something behind him-
Guide monk: That's corpse of St. Sabas!
-Ack!-
Guide monk: You look here, look, look, he still has some skin! Seventeen hundred years, and still some skin! It's a miracle! Maybe you dont believe in miracles because you Protestant, but here, miracle, and now you see St. Sabas our founder here has skin, because he is baptized Orthodox and takes in his mouth body and blood of the crucifixiated One.
-Ok.... So he shows me the skulls of the monks they have collected in a church built around the cave of St. Sabas, which was cool, and points to one specific skull-
Guide monk: See, see!
Me: Uh, no?
Guide monk: Skull come together with lines. one line across ear to ear, and then line back from middle. But look, see?! The line goes from eyes to neck! It is not a T, it's a cross! A miracle! Doctors can't explain!
-And indeed, there is a skull where the line separating the parietal bones continues forward to bisect the frontal bone-

Now, there's everything to be said for a simple faith, but it was just so funny the way he put things!

Dig for a Day

On Sunday I went down to Beit Guvrin, almost an hour south of Jerusalem, to participate in the Dig for a Day program.

I figured with my interest in archaeology I had to get my hands dirty at some point, and that's exactly what Dig for a Day offered. The site near Beit Guvrin, called Tel Maresha, is mentioned four times in the Bible. Its people were Edomites, or Idumeans, who were forcibly converted to Judaism by the Hasmonean King John Hyrcanus in the second century BC. Among those forced converts was the grandfather of a later Israelite king, Herod the Great.

Large sections of the city were underground, carved out from chalk rock. In these caverns were the industries, and that's where we were digging. I arrived by taxi at 9:30 and was introduced to the guide and other visitors, a family from Brooklyn. A little while later we were crawling through caves underground, getting good and filthy.

We were given a dirt bucket and a find bucket, and told to just start digging. The excess dirt was put in the one, and as we dug, pottery just seemed to be everywhere. Eventually, I had about six dirt buckets filled and half a find bucket that included pottery, animal bones, parts of an oven, and charred date pits. As it turns out, I'd discovered a kitchen.

After the buckets were taken to the surface, we poured the dirt through wire mesh sifters in order to find the small pieces that digging doesn't get. That turned out well enough, with a few more charred date and olive pits in the middle of it all. After being eaten or crushed in an olive press in order to produce oil, the leftover pits were used as coal for winter heating.

We had to give up all the pieces we'd found at the end, naturally, so that it could be properly dated at a lab. One kid didn't want to give up a jawbone with teeth he'd found, but as the guide told him, "the State of Israel calls that antiquities theft." After much prying and crying, he finally did. As it turns out, we got to keep some pieces that had already been dated and examined, anyway. I got a pottery shard that looks Athenian but actually a Phoenecian knockoff!

Shabbat Shalom(?)

The past few days have been fairly uneventful. I've explored the city some more. Today was interesting, though.

First of all, today was the day to move out of the Pilgrim Guest House and across the courtyard to St. George's College, where I'll be throughout the Palestine of Jesus course that starts on Tuesday. It's really quite nice: a common room with free coffee and tea at all hours, a stocked library with everything I could ask for, and, I know this sounds lazy, an elevator. It just felt odd, not having been in one for weeks.

Most interesting, though, are the dorms of the third floor. Rather than numbers, we have names that correspond to biblical and archaeological sites. As you go down the hall, the names go from north to south and back again. At the 'north' of the hall are Golani and Galilean sites like Banias and Gamla. I'm in the Jordan River room down at that end. The rooms continue down to the other end of the hall where you find Jericho and Bethlehem. Very cool. I'll take pictures when it's light out.

Well, I walked toward the Old City today and decided to take a detour, it being Shabbat. I wanted to see what the usually-hopping Ben Yehuda St. looks like on the sabbath. And let me tell you, it was dead. Out of fifty restaurants, one was open, and it was Chinese (not to worry, I got lunch in the Christian Quarter). Even five out of six ATMs were shut down, and wouldn't you know it, the one in operation was the last one I tried.

The public payphones work, however, and that's where it got interesting. A couple of people were talking on them when up walked this strict Orthodox fellow absolutely wailing that it was Shabbat. He proceeded to scream bloody murder into their receivers; the people paid him no mind, apparently used to it. For me, that was a most interesting experience.

An aside for those of you that were on the tour: the reason we couldn't take pictures on Shabbat wasn't because the clicking of the photo was considered 'work,' per se. It's because activating electronic devices constitutes 'lighting a fire,' which is more specifically forbidden. So, at least that's cleared up.

Anyways, I proceeded from there to Muristan, the market center in the Christian Quarter between the Holy Sepulcher and the Evangelical Lutheran Church of the Redeemer. I'd read that the view from the tower is spectacular, so paid the 5NIS (a buck fifty?) to climb to the top, and man, had I read right:
As I said, it's just by the Holy Sepulcher, so it's the best view of that building-strangled church you'll ever get:
You can sort of see the how the church sticks out in the shape of a equal-length cross. Back when it was built under Constantine the Great, it was far larger, shaped like a traditional cross and stretching beyond the right side of the picture down through Muristan. Unfortunately, that structure was destroyed and then rebuilt by the Crusaders, who gave us the less impressive building we see today.

My camera doesn't quite capture it at the height of the Redeemer tower, but the buildings that sprung up around it conform roughly to the shape of the original Constantinian Sepulcher. With some imagination, you can see it very roughly here:
To really imagine it, though, you have to triple the distance between the primary dome and the tree on the right side of the image. And that was the Sepulcher of Constantine.

The Citadel

On a much lighter note, I finally made it to the Citadel yesterday.

The Citadel is a complex of buildings near the Jaffa Gate, on the western side of the Old City. It began life as Herod the Great's palace complex, guarded over by three towers. These three towers, named Phasael, Hippicus, and Mariamne after his brother, friend, and second wife, respectively, still form the basis of the Citadel today.

Over the centuries, the Citadel has been reconstructed by successive occupiers of Jerusalem, including the Romans, Crusaders, and Ottomans. The extensive archaeological excavations within allow the visitor to see more than two thousand years of history in successive digging layers. These include Hasmonean (Maccabean) era walls, the base of the Phasael tower of Herod, Crusader battlements, Mamluk improvements, and, of course, the Ottoman-era walls. The Citadel as an actual fortress dates from the Crusade era, from whence it takes its name.

The rooms within the walls are today a museum. The exhibits, like the Bible Lands Museum I mentioned earlier, are presented chronologically. They take the visitor through Canaanite, First Temple, Second Temple, Roman and Byzantine, Early Islamic and Crusader, Ottoman, and modern Jerusalem, showing how the city has changed hands and peoples over time. I thought the presentation on Islamic and Ottoman Jerusalem, held inside a room that was once the Citadel's mosque, was particularly fair.

As a finale to the museum, a model of nineteenth century Jerusalem displayed at the 1873 Vienna World's Fair is available for viewing. For whatever reason the Haram al-Sharif (the temple mount) is not raised any higher than the rest of the city, giving the appearance that the two shrines atop are on ground level with the Western Wall Plaza. Otherwise, it's a superb model.

I also had a curious encounter on my way back to St. George's via the Damascus Gate. I'd never entertained the possibility of Muslim street evangelists, but I encountered a pleasant young man who, trying so hard to speak English, wanted to tell me about the unity and supremacy of Allah. He gave me a free booklet which talks about Islam, points out contradictions in the Old and New Testaments, and poses questions for Christians to answer about the Trinity (an easy target for our un-catechized, anti-intellectual culture). I took the book and chatted with him for a bit, although, sad to say, I didn't engage in any extended argument because it was beginning to rain. But if anyone wants to know:

Apparently, the truth is that Muslims walk in circles around the Kabba.

Hebron and Dheisheh

This past Thursday I went with the Alternative Tourism Group on a day tour to Hebron and Bethlehem. ATG is an organization directed and run by multinational Palestinians who want to take tourists to sites you don't get on sterile tours of the holy and historical sites. I wanted to take this tour because while I am very supportive of Israel, I couldn't come here for three months and not see the situation on the ground. Hebron, in particular, was eye-opening; Dheisheh, on the other hand, was troubling in a very different way.

We met across the street from St. George's at the Olive Tree Hotel, where I'd stayed with America Israel Travel. After waiting for people who never showed, we headed out for the checkpoint and through Bethlehem to pick up our guide Samir, who throughout the day was very informative.

From there we headed south, past the Herodian (the fortress-palace where the old king's tomb was recently discovered) to Hebron. Hebron was, particularly, the goal of my tour, as it is the second holiest city in Judaism and contains the Cave of the Patriarchs. Atop this cave Herod the Great built the structure that still serves as the central frame of the sanctuary today. The 'tombs' one sees are not actually tombs at all; they are cenotaphs, memorial structures to commemorate those buried deeper below the surface. Most remarkable of all, however, the structure that stands today is both a synagogue and a mosque (the famous pulpit or minbar, brought by Saladin, and the eastern niche or mihrab, are pictured right), now with a dividing wall between them.

The dividing wall was put in place after the 1994 Baruch Goldstein massacre. The eponymous Jewish settler, a radical Orthodox militant belonging to groups founded by the terrorist-rabbi Meir Kahane, went into the mosque section, dressed in his army uniform to give the appearance of being an on-duty reservist, and began shooting Muslims at morning prayer. About forty were murdered.

The Jewish settlers in Hebron are ultra-Orthodox radicals. They are not economically motivated like many (perhaps most) settlers elsewhere, and they are not normal religious settlers who have a desire to live within the bounds of ancient Judea and Samaria (today the West Bank). They are driven by an ideological commitment to retake the land for Jews and Judaism. As a result, they have placed their settlement within the confines of the Palestinian city. In order to prevent interaction between Jewish settlers and Palestinian locals- the sort that has ended in the Goldstein massacre and an earlier killing of Jews returning home from Shabbat in 1980, the Israeli government (under Netanyahu) and the Palestinian Authority negotiated the 1997 Hebron Agreement. This divides Hebron into two strict zones and established a Temporary International Presence in Hebron (TIPH), foreign troops meant to patrol the zones. We saw zero TIPH troops while there.

Israeli police are primarily responsible for manning checkpoints that divide Jews and Palestinians, with predictable results. In some places, settler homes and facilities are built directly atop indigenous sections. To the right, you can see the open air market has been covered with a net. This net was placed here by the locals because the settlers living in the stories above the market routinely dump garbage and human waste- urine and feces- into the marketplace. You can see the filth in the nets.

This is hardly the extent of what native Hebronites are made to suffer. We had tea with a shopkeeper whose establishment is almost entirely surrounded by Israeli checkpoints and settler-only areas. He cannot serve Palestinian locals, only foreign tourists like ourselves who can pass between H1 and H2. Samir was only able to join us because he holds an American passport.

We also visited what must be the most tragic case in the city, a widowed Palestinian woman with eleven children whose two-story house has come to be entirely surrounded by settler establishments. Her lower floor is accessible from the marketplace, but her second floor peaks up into what the settlers consider their territory. The picture to the left illustrates how intrusive the settler presence has become, with her home to the left, and a settler establishment to the right.

Of course, if their presence were peaceful, this would not be a problem. Palestinians may grumble that 'the Jews' have moved in to their territory, and militant radicals would likely violently harass the settlers as they do elsewhere in the West Bank and, formerly, Gaza. Yet even assuming that the settlements themselves are legal (and there is a strong assumption in international law that they are not), these particular settlers are committing actual crimes. They have routinely invaded her home by walking across from their roofs to hers, using it as an illegal passageway into the market place. In the picture to the right, you can see Samir pointing out a door without a handle or lock; this is because the settlers have invaded her home and shot out the lock. Her attempts at remuneration in court have proved fruitless; the court ruled that although she is entitled to a two-story property, the only lock to which she is entitled is on a single room where she and her eleven children sleep.

Settlers also shoot holes in or puncture the family water tank, which, as in both Israel and the West Bank, is kept on the roof. This causes her family to be without household water until it can be repaired on replaced. The open-air staircase leading down from the roof and second story to ground level also requires a protective netting because, as in the market place, trash and human waste are thrown down from the neighboring roofs. These repeated attacks on her home have, most tragically, caused her two miscarriages; one attack by Molotov cocktail actually resulted in the death of a newborn infant. In that particular case, the Israeli court found the settler guilty; the punishment, however, was house arrest.

This is not characteristic of settlements throughout the West Bank, but it is a clear example of a protected group trying to drive someone from their home through continued violent harassment. And that's the situation on the ground in Hebron.

After lunch, we headed north back toward Bethlehem to see Dheisheh refugee camp. Dheisheh and a score of camps like it were established in the West Bank, then part of Jordan, following the Israeli War of Independence in 1948. The background runs essentially thus: In 1947, the United Nations issued a resolution calling for the partition of the British Mandate of Palestine. Rioting followed under the direction of the Grand Mufti (chief Muslim religious figure) of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini, who had previously led anti-Jewish riots in 1936-1939, and the day the British withdrew the surrounding Arab nations invaded in order to prevent the creation of a Jewish state (al-Husseini was likely to become head of the resultant Palestinian state).

Things did not go quite as planned. Rather than creating a Palestinian state and preventing the establishment of a Jewish one, the Arab invasion ensured that today, sixty years later, a Palestinian state has yet to exist. The Jewish population of the Mandate, with no supporting army, opposed by the British, and themselves largely refugees of the Holocaust (only two years past, with many just then leaving Allied rehabilitation camps), organized around several militias, including the Haganah, the primary armed force of the Yishuv (Jewish population of Palestine) under the leadership of David Ben-Gurion. The Jewish Agency proclaimed the independent state of Israel the day of the British withdrawal and were recognized (much to everyone's surprise) by U.S. President Harry Truman, eleven minutes after the declaration of independence.

Rather than becoming an independent Palestinian state, the West Bank was annexed to Jordan and the Gaza Strip was kept under martial law by Egypt until their reconquest by Israel in the 1967 Six Day Way. The Arab population in Israel fled. There can no longer be any denying that radical factions of the Israeli armed forces engaged in massacres of Arab villagers, such as at the village of Deit Yassin. Many others were uprooted and relocated in order to keep them away from invading Arab armies in order to deny the enemy the aid and comfort their Palestinian compatriots would likely extend. These massacres and relocations then led to a wholesale exodus of Palestinians from the state of Israel, many of them going to Lebanon, Syria, or Jordan- including the West Bank.

Sixty years later, those Palestinian refugees and their descendants remain in these refugee camps. Israel will not allow them to return to Israel proper, because doing so would tip the demographic balance between Jews and Arabs. Palestinians have the highest birth rate of any people group in the world, at 7% (for comparison, the United States is about 2.2%), and the combined population balance of Israel, Gaza, and the West Bank is already set for an Arab takeover in 2015. Combine this with refugees abroad in camps in Lebanon and Syria, and Palestinians living as citizens in Jordan, as well as the knowledge that the Palestinian people elected Hamas in 2006 in a free and fair election, and the situation for Jewish Israelis becomes dire. Neither a united Jewish-Arab state or a return of Palestinian refugees is a viable situation.

Of course, the representative of Dheisheh and Samir himself both advocated a one state solution. In their eyes, both people groups would live side by side, in peace, with equal representation under the law; in other words, the American system. Yet walking through Dheisheh, I couldn't help but notice this mural:
In case there was any doubt about the ultimate goal, that's a Palestinian flag over the whole of Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza. Lets go back: the Palestinian people elected Hamas in 2006 in a free and fair election. No matter how much anyone wants to believe that a Jewish minority would be safe in a Palestinian majority state, the fact is that it's just not realistic. Now, Samir recognized that while a one-state solution is ideal, a two-state solution is the only practical end; of course, he said this with the caveat that this is because of the Zionists, not Palestinian radicals. Yet talking to the Dheisheh representative, one member of the tour group asked 'What about Hamas?'

His reply was that Hamas was pursuing justice in their own way, and was nothing like al-Qaeda. He couldn't condemn them for resisting the occupation, since all occupations are subject to resistance, even if he preferred resistance through education and dialogue.

Wait, what?

How is blowing up a Sbarro's Pizza in West Jerusalem, killing fifteen including seven children, legitimate resistance? How is blowing up a hotel during a Passover seder, ending in the death of thirty, legitimate resistance?

Of course, we all know that it's not. What amazed me, most of all, was that the Alternative Tourism Group, with it's primary goal of putting the best face on Palestinians and the worst face on Israel, couldn't find anyone more moderate or reasonable than this guy. If this is the best they've got, what's the Palestinian on the street thinking?

Back to Dheisheh itself, I'd like to remind everyone that the refugee camps aren't just for the original refugees of 1948. It's also for their descendants. And, mind you, unlike some other camps in history the elderly Jewish population could tell you about, the residents are permitted to leave. From 1985 to 1995 there was a revolving gate placed at the camp that severely obstructed traffic in and out of the camp, but that's just the point: they can leave. So if the Jordanian government has offered citizenship to the Palestinian refugees, and the residents can make a new life for themselves under the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank, why stay?

Two reasons:

First, they're making a political statement. Although they have the opportunity for a new life for themselves and their children, the camp residents are opting to stay in order to bring leverage against the Israeli government during negotiations. Any final status negotiation between Israel and the Palestinian Authority will require settlement not just of issues on land, borders, holy sites, and viability, but, perhaps most contentious, these refugees. If they make a new life for themselves, they won't be an effective bargaining chip against the Jewish state. Moreover, if they leave the camps, they forgo the possibility of ever returning to Israel proper, where their villages no longer exist but to which they have an idealistic attachment.

Second, it's a classic welfare trap. The United Nations Relief and Works Agency provides registered refugees living within the camps (and stateless refugees living elsewhere) with free food, shelter, clothing, health care, and education. Let me break that down: the UN provides these refugees with services many Americans don't have. With all this provided for them, 70% of camp residents don't work, and many spend their time inculcating a radical, ideological hatred for Israel. In one instance, Israeli Defense Forces operating in Lebanon discovered a cache of automatic rifles in the basement of a school! Radical militancy aside, the UNRWA has essentially created a mass of jobless, stateless individuals who could be working toward a better life, but are instead remonstrating about something that happened to their parents and grandparents. Did the Holocaust victims sit in Allied rehabilitation camps for sixty years longing for a return to Germany and Poland? No, they went out and made a state for themselves.

I have to admit, though, refugees are cute!

And that's the situation on the ground in Bethlehem.

Mini Israel

Israel is a place of profound contradictions, with realities bordering on the absurd. Jewish pioneers hired local Palestinian laborers to work the kibbutzim; Christian monks fighting each other with brooms over allotted areas in the Holy Sepulcher; Yassir Arafat claiming that Netanyahu wanted to open the Western Wall tunnels in order to make the temple mount collapse. And, with no other discernible purpose than to encapsulate the strangeness of this place, some visionary entrepreneur decided to create Mini Israel.
Yes, Mini Israel, where you too can see 350 (yes, three hundred fifty) of this land's greatest sites built on a scale of 1:25 in the space of eight acres.

Perhaps more absurd is that I walked a mile along a highway to get to this place. In any case, I devoted an entire album on Facebook to this miniature monstrosity, but I had to take a blog entry to show you some of the mini-highlights.
Above is Mini Masada. This gem at the center of the park comes complete with both Jewish defenders warding off the Roman legions and a film crew, capturing the slaughter in Hi Def. Is there a mini-film in the making? How does that work on the big screen? I await with bated breath.
Believe it or not, it's a Mini St. George's! This is the place I'm staying, although I have yet to get up on the roof like these intrepid explorers.
The Mini Damascus Gate, the northern gate of the Old City where I now routinely enter the winding cobbled streets. Unfortunately (or perhaps fortunately), the model fails to portray the absolute bustle of the Damascus Gate area, being the core gate of the Muslim Quarter. Booths, stalls, and itinerant merchants make the outer plaza barely navigable; and just today, I found here for the first time in my life a pleasant young man working as a Muslim street evangelist.
Here is the Mini Western Wall, with Mini Al-Aqsa in the background atop the mount. The best part about Mini Israel is the moving pieces- the taxing planes at Mini Ben Gurion, the soccer players scoring goals at Mini Teddy Stadium, the boats floating about in the Mini Sea of Galilee. Here at the Western Wall, we get the particular joy of watching Mini Jews bobbing back and forth as they pray! If it wasn't a Jewish institution, I'd cry foul.
And at last, the Mini Dome of the Rock, atop the Mini Temple Mount with Mini Al-Aqsa in the foreground, and the Mini Jerusalem Archaeological Park below.

And there you have it, folks. Mini Israel. Highly recommended.

Comment Settings

Just to let everyone know, I think I have finally figured out (read: Maria told me) how to allow all users to comment on blog posts. So, no more of that locking people out nonsense.

Jerusalem Days

This past week in Jerusalem has been interesting enough. I'm going to post separately on Mini Israel and my trip to Bethlehem and Hebron, but lets see if I can get the rest out in one shot.

Waking up the day my parents left, I'd made arrangements to go to church and into Jerusalem with Becky. Her boyfriend, Ambrose, was taking the day down in the Negev to see how farming is done in the desert (he is himself a farmer).

First things first, though: I checked into the Pilgrim Guest House at St. George's Cathedral. What a great place. I've since canceled my reservations at a slightly cheaper place in order to stay here during Maria's visit; it's just that good.

So after church the two of us went through the Old City and out the Dung Gate, just south of the Western Wall Plaza, to the excavations of the City of David. In the times of David and Solomon and during the Herodian period (Jesus' day), this was within the city walls, but the later Crusader and Ottoman walls have moved the Old City north of its original location (Jesus' Jerusalem, built by successive Herods, encompased both Solomonic Jerusalem and the contemporary Old City, and more). The digs there are impressive, though you really have to know what you're looking at. Currently, two major structures are under excavation: the so-called Large Stone Structure and the Stepped Stone Structure. The latter, I believe, is the complex thought to be either a pre-Davidic Jebusite fortress (the one David captured in 2 Samuel 5) or the palace of King David himself. Either way, several houses are built atop the structure, and contrary to popular imagination, the Israeli government isn't just going to bulldoze them despite the cache of information held within.

After crawling through the dry section of the ancient water system, Becky and I made our way west along the southern wall up to Mount Zion. There we went in Dormition Abbey, the Franciscan church commemorating the spot of the Virgin Mary's death and ascension into heaven. The church is very impressive, containing mosaics with designs from nations across the globe; the crypt beneath also has a series of alcoves with unique cultural features. It's a welcome change from the darkness of the Holy Sepulcher or the opulence of some other churches here.

The following day Ambrose had returned, and we linked up with two other remaining members of the group, Ashley and her mother Mayra. I was named the official tour guide for the day (they had gone the previous day to Yad Vashem, the Israeli Holocaust museum, which I have yet to get to but not for lack of trying), so we went to the Jaffa Gate to do the ramparts walk. This walk took us around the northern city walls, from the Jaffa Gate, over the New, Damascus, and Herod's or Flowers Gate, and then back to ground level at St. Stephen's or the Lion's Gate. From where Becky and Ambrose went off to have the day together, and I led Ashley and Mayra to the City of David.

I wanted to do this again because the previous day I had no appropriate swimwear, and the most interesting part of the site is the tunnel of Hezekiah. Ashley was up for it, too. Hezekiah's tunnel is a water channel dug between the Gihon Spring, outside the city walls, and the Pool of Siloam, an essential source of water for the city. Previously, the Israelites had utilized the Canaanite tunnel, the now-dry course that I'd walked the previous day with Becky. However, the Canaanite tunnel was inefficient and now easily concealable. When the Assyrians threatened a siege of Jerusalem, the King Hezekiah ordered the Gihon Spring camouflaged so that the Assyrians could not make use of it or cut off the city's water, and then ordered construction of a deeper, more efficient tunnel (cf. 2 Chronicles 32). Water still flows through it today, and you need to have water shoes, a flashlight, and pants you're willing to get wet to make the 40-minute walk end to end. It was good fun.

That evening, we met up with Ambrose and Becky again for a nice dinner together in the American Colony Hotel. Ambrose was wonderfully generous, paying for that final meal himself.
The next morning I woke up quite alone, but determined to make it to Latrun. Latrun is the likely and traditional site of the biblical Emmaus, toward which the distraught disciples were walking when they encountered the risen Christ in Luke 24. Today, it hosts the educational and absurd theme park Mini Israel and, on a more classical note, the famous Latrun. This was also my first experience with the Israeli bus system, Egged. After being dropped off seemingly in the official Middle of Nowhere, I followed the directions from Lonely Planet and Google Earth toward Mini Israel, a mile hike down the highway. This is the ridiculousness I found:

Pictured: Mini Tel Aviv

With more about that later, I made my way back to the bus stop, across the intersecting street, and up the hill to the Latrun Monastery. To be honest, there really isn't too much to do there, but it's a very nice place operates vineyards known throughout the country.

After realizing that I hadn't used my voice the entire day and had encountered no native English speakers, I was relieved that the following day I was scheduled to meet Vlad on Ben Yehuda St. Vladimir Fefer is a great friend from high school. We did a lot of theater and choir together, and he did improv comedy for D.C. for awhile. For the past four years, he's been here in Jerusalem studying at yeshiva (Jewish seminary), learning Torah and Talmud. He's also hilarious.
Lunch with Vlad was exactly what I needed. Plus, it gave me the chance to find Ben Yehuda St, a centrally located marketing district that's a fifteen minute walk from St. George's. We had a nice leisurely lunch for a couple hours, talking life and religion- he filled me in on the details of some first and second century Jewish sages whom I find fascinating- until he had to get back to yeshiva for seder. Unfortunately, that probably won't be happening again, as he's almost always under lock and key there, and had to make a special exception to come see me. That, of course, was doubly nice of him.

At that point all the sites were closed, and I've been trying to make it to the temple mount, the Crusader Citadel, and Yad Vashem ever since with no luck. In fact, just this morning I waited for the bus to Mt. Herzl, the national cemetery adjacent to Yad Vashem, only to be told about six different things by two bus drivers. I'll try again tomorrow. As for today, I'm going to make another attempt at the Haram al-Sharif (temple mount) and the Citadel.

The next day was Hebron and Bethlehem with the Alternative Tourism Group, but as I said, that gets it's own post. The upshot of that, however, is that I met a guy on the tour from Waldorf Maryland named Mark. We ended up spending the evening together as well, and linked up the next two nights as well. Saturday night, we ended up at the Western Wall during Shabbat. What a party! Lets be clear: Jewish Saturday is not Christian Sunday. Every Shabbat is Christmas and Easter in to one. It's a time of joy and celebration at God's upholding of his covenant with Israel and the capstone of his creation (completed at sundown on Friday, the beginning of Shabbat), when the Jewish people can celebrate all the good things Yahweh has given them in his good creation. Just as Shabbat was starting, when cameras are not allowed to be used in the Jewish Quarter (electronic devices constitute making a fire, cf. Ex 35:3), I managed to snap one last photo of congregating soldiers and other young men to capture the atmosphere:
After seeing Shabbat, we headed toward the Holy Sepulcher. Remember the hour and a half line on my previous visit? This time the line was fifteen or twenty minutes into the tomb, and there was no line whatsoever going up to Calvary at the other end of the church. How amazing is that?

A little about Mark: this born-again believer is half Korean, half Indian, and now lives in South Korea teaching English to schoolchildren. Like me he's a solo traveler, going in the opposite direction. Right about now he should be in Amman or Petra. You can imagine he was thrilled to have such a perfect opportunity to get in to the Holy Sepulcher. Anyways, meeting up with him was a huge blessing. We had thought about going to Jericho on Saturday for an organized half day tour, but his time here is limited and he got a better offer for a full day tour to Jericho, Masada, Qumran, and Ein Gedi. I told him to go ahead, since I was planning on going to Jericho on Monday (that didn't happen either because of the weather). No matter; I had a nice relaxing day to catch up on pictures and blog entries, as you may have noticed. We still met up that evening, though, with an Irish fellow named Seamus that he'd met on the day tour. We ate at Cafe Rimon, where I'd had lunch with Vlad, and then said goodbye to Mark, for on Sunday we was off to the Allenby-Hussein bridge.

Sunday was another calm day, with a good church service. Yesterday I made it to the Israel Museum and the Bible Lands Museum. The former is largely under renovation, but the Shrine of the Book and the model of Jerusalem in AD 66, on the eve of the Great Jewish Revolt, are open for visitors. After two hours in the museum, that was clearly more than enough. Moreover, the previous Sunday I'd stopped in the Rockefeller Museum with Becky, which is housing many of the Israel Museum's permanent exhibitions, so no complaints there.

The Shrine of the Book (pictured left) is where the Israel Antiquities Authority houses their most extensive public display of the Dead Sea Scrolls. I've already posted a bit on the site of the discovery, Qumran- its simplicity and austerity- but the displays in the Shrine of the Book really helped the life of that strange, turn-of-the-millennium community come alive. Equally fascinating was the lower level display of the Aleppo Codex, a nearly-complete, thousand year old manuscript of the Old Testament (Tanakh) in Masoretic text. You can read about its tumultuous journey elsewhere, but suffice it to say that this most critical of OT manuscripts has survived many incidents that individual Jews have not.

The Israel Museum also houses the most accurate and extensive model of first century Jerusalem in the world. Built in 1:50 scale, no one picture can do it justice. That's why I took about fifty, with their own devoted album on Facebook. The one to the right, however, is the standard view of the city from the east, atop the Mount of Olives.

The Bible Lands Museum is literally across the street. It's actual collection is hardly worth mentioning- the only piece of any significance that I could identify was a single Ebla tablet- but the displays are remarkable. The museum is arranged chronologically into fourteen sections, covering the whole of the ancient Near Eastern and Mediterranean worlds from Hunter Gatherers to Sassanid (4th century AD) Persia.

From there I made my way back to St. George's through the worst rain storm Israel has seen in two years. Despite the raincoat, I arrived looking as though I'd jumped in a pool with all my clothes on. Alas, I didn't have the presence of mind to take a picture, especially not when I reached my room and discovered that the window had a leak. After not a few towels, I was changed into fresh clothes and online with Maria.
And that finally brings us up to the present.

Jerusalem and Bethlehem

So at last we came to Jerusalem.

Starting from atop the Mount of Olives, we saw the massive Jewish graveyard that covers its western slopes, leading down to the Christian graveyard in the Kidron Valley and, opposite, the Muslim graveyard on the eastern slope of Mount Moriah going up to the base of the temple mount (pictured: rockin' the shades in the graveyard).

We worked out way down the mount toward the Kidron, passing through the Church of Dominus Flevit. Dominus Flevit means "the Lord wept," and refers to Christ's tears over Jerusalem. It commemorates his prophecy of the destruction of the temple, that not one stone would be left upon another. Unlike most tradition Christian churches, the structure purposefully faces west, not east; thus, it faces across the Kidron to the temple mount, bereft of its temple. Through the (again unusually) clear glass behind the altar, the congregation can see the Dome of the Rock.

At the base of Olivet is the Garden of Gethsemane and the Church of All Nations. These are most likely not the actual trees from Jesus' day, for although they can be dated around two thousand years of age, the trees from AD 30 would certainly have been used by the Roman Legio X Fretensis in AD 70 to build their siege works during the Great Jewish Revolt. Nonetheless, it is a serene and majestic place, and the facade of the church is truly magnificent.

The next morning, a Friday and therefore the eve of the Sabbath (called Shabbat here, by the way), we toured many of the Jewish sites around Jerusalem. Notably, we went to the Western Wall (and by the way, 'Wailing Wall' is somewhat disparaging) and then toured the exquisite Western Wall tunnels. The visible and iconic wall is itself called the Kotel, and this is merely the upper half of the entire Western Wall that continued several meters farther below ground and stretches the entire length of the temple mount. It is called the Western Wall because it was the western-facing retaining wall built under the direction of Herod the Great.

The Western Wall Tunnels were dug out by the Israeli government following the capture of the Old City in the 1967 Six Day War. These tunnels burrow along the length of the wall, allowing for more detailed archaeological work, and eventually get down to the first century street level. Here, archaeologists were able to capture a glimpse of first century life, in particular a water channel running along the wall and adjacent cisterns that supplied the massive amounts of water needed for the temple cultus; the remains of blocks left lying about when the construction was halted either at the beginning of the Great Jewish Revolt (AD 66) or with the destruction of Jerusalem four years later (pictured); and also a nearby quarry where stones lay half cut from the bedrock.

Aside: We were able to exit the tunnels from the other end, entering by the Kotel in the Jewish Quarter and exiting along the Via Dolorosa in the Muslim Quarter. Before 1996, however, visitors had to retrace their steps through the narrow passageway because there was no opening on the opposite side. Benjamin Netanyahu ordered the opening of the northern exit in September of '96, which Yassir Arafat condemned as an attempt to cause the collapse of the temple mount (in order to destroy the precious archaeological remains below?), sparking riots that ended in the deaths of eighty people.

Speaking of Palestinians, we then headed that afternoon for Bethlehem, where we met up with our excellent Palestinian guide. There we saw the Church of the Nativity, which is actually three churches (Orthodox, Armenian, and Franciscan) built atop a cave where it is said Jesus was born. Descending into that cave took about an hour of frantic pushing and shoving. Many in the group disliked the experience; personally, I thought the crowded and hurried environment was an illustrative lesson in what the incarnation was (and is) all about.The Son of God, after all, didn't come to earth to have a personalized, one-on-one spiritual experience; he came taking on flesh, to come from the womb in body and blood, to be tortured in crucified in body and blood, and to rise again to fill us with his body and blood.

From there we went to Beit Sahour, a pleasant Arab Christian town, and to Ein Karem, a suburb of Jerusalem associated with John the Baptist, and back to Jerusalem for the night.

So then came out final day together as a whole group. The day was pretty much the Via Dolorosa, the Holy Sepulcher, and Mount Zion, about two hours of each, ending with the Garden Tomb. Disappointments first: Mount Zion. The Cenacle, or Upper Room of the Last Supper, is obviously not the spot. It was picked arbitrarily by the Crusaders, and that structure was subsequently turned into a mosque. Equally arbitrary is the Zion site of David's tomb; David was most likely buried in the City of David just south of the temple mount, and the spot where he is commemorated is a Christian-Muslim fabrication. The only reason there is a Jewish tomb on the spot is because Mount Zion was the only place once within the walls of Herodian Jerusalem accessible to Jews before 1967.

I'll save a rant on the Holy Sepulcher vs. the Garden Tomb for another time, but suffice it to say, both were highlights as finales for the trip. The Holy Sepulcher (pictured) was amazing, despite an almost two hour wait a crowded line that included a trash tractor buzzing through the church; no matter, the resurrection is meant to redeem the world, not shut it out. Since I think that the Holy Sepulcher truly is the spot where Christ died and was raised, that outshines all imperfections. The Garden Tomb, conversely, is almost certainly not the spot, but we held a final prayer service there that included a communion experience, and that was particularly special because I'd grown so close to each and every member of the tour group.

That night I said goodbye to my parents, because they were leaving at 1:30 in the morning for Ben Gurion Airport. Fortunately, as it turned out, several other members of the group stayed for an additional two days, but that's another post.

The Exodus

I'm well out of Egypt at this point, but I thought that on this leisurely Sunday afternoon, while I'm resting up for a possible hike into Jericho tomorrow, I'd take time to bang out my assorted chaotic thoughts about the Exodus.

So we all know the story: Moses, raised as an Egyptian aristocrat, comes to find himself caring for the enslaved population of Hebrews. Defying his Egyptian way of life, he defends one mistreated slave to the point of killing a fellow Egyptian, and so spends forty years in the Sinai wilderness. There he meets his father-in-law and wife, and, more importantly, he meets the god of the Hebrews, who tells him that he is Yahweh, 'I am who I will be,' revealing this tribal god to be the creator-God of the universe. He is commissioned by this Yahweh to bring the Hebrew slaves out of Egypt, and does so despite personal inadequacies and political opposition.

The dating given in the Torah and Former Prophets (J0shua, Judges, Samuel, and Kings) is somewhat unclear, but it places the exodus somewhere in the second half of the second millennium BC, between 1500 and 1200. The exodus cannot have been any later than 1203, since that is the latest possible date of the Merenptah stele. The pharaoh Merenptah of the 19th dynasty reigned in Egypt from 1213 to 1203 BC, and his stele- a slab of rock prepared for a funeral and placed at the tomb to record the great deeds of the person in question- mentions, among other things, his great victory over an otherwise unknown tribe in Canaan called Israel, alongside victories elsewhere in Palestine.

So by 1203 Israel is already in existence as a power in Canaan, but only as one tribe among many. This is prior to the days of the United Monarchy (which is generally agreed to be about 200 years later), when tribal warlords- out of respect, we call them judges- fought against neighboring powers.

What about the earliest possible date?

The beginning of Exodus makes reference to the city of Pi-Ramesses, where the Hebrew slaves worked with mud-brick building materials (at this point the limestone pyramids at Giza were a thousand years old, so the Hebrews certainly did not work them). The city of Tanis (the later Greek name) was once identified as this site by the archaeologist Pierre Montet, who found inscriptions here labeling the site Pi-Ramesses. Unfortunately, Tanis was built far too late for the exodus, during the twentieth dynasty, and it was thus thought that the reference was merely an anachronism. However, it was later discovered that the building materials at Tanis were taken from a separate site after its destruction, and Montet's inscriptions did not identify Tanis as Pi-Ramesses, but rather the site from whence the building materials had been removed. This was traced to Avaris.

Avaris, as it turned out, was the capital of the Hyksos invaders of the Second Intermediate Period (more on that below) and entered into a new round of construction under the Pharaoh Horemheb. Horemheb, the final pharaoh of the 18th dynasty, reigned 1319-1292 BC, is likely the earliest possible pharaoh for the exodus.

This leaves only five possibilities: Horemheb of the 18th dynasty, and Ramesses I, Seti I, Ramesses II, and Merenptah of the 19th dynasty. Does this make sense?

On the one hand, there is the story of Joseph, who goes before his family into Egypt and establishes himself there. Later, a pharaoh who does not know about Joseph enslaves the resident Hebrew population. To me, this makes the most sense if Joseph's pharaoh and the exodus pharaoh are from different dynasties or, as I believe, different kingdom periods altogether. The Middle Kingdom came to an end with the Hyksos invasions around 1650 BC. The Hyksos were a Semitic people from Asia, like the Hebrews, who wrecked havoc on the established rule in Egypt and ended up controlling the Nile Valley for themselves. This lasted until the beginning of the 18th dynasty, when Ahmose I consolidated the Egyptian people and drove the last of the Hyksos out of Egypt around 1550. However, while the Hyksos were conquered and driven out, Semitic peoples show up as slaves working on mud-brick structures three hundred years later. It seems apparent that if the hated Hyksos were driven out by the Egyptians while the Hebrews were kept as slaves, the Egyptians would have good reason to fear and hate these fellow Semites. And if the Hyksos and their fellow Semites were concentrated at Avaris, where else would one expect to find Hebrew slaves working to rebuild the site?

On the other hand, the 18th dynasty had seen a major upset in the world of Egyptian religion. Thirty years before the reign of Horemheb, the heretic pharaoh Amenhotep IV, known to us as Akhenaten, abolished the pantheon of Egyptian gods and introduced the first monotheistic religion known to the world: Atenism. Notice the change in name: Amenhotep, or Amun-hotep, means Amun, the sun god, is satisfied. Akhen-aten, on the other hand, means 'the effective spirit of Aten,' or the power behind the sun. Atenism looked beyond Amun-Ra, the amalgamated sun god of Upper and Lower Egypt, to the inner force behind. His most famous successor, Tut-ankh-amun (living image of Amun), was originally named Tut-ankh-aten (living image of Aten).

While the priests and the people despised Akhenaten and Atenism, it had to wait until Horemheb, who came to power fifteen years after the former's death, to truly end the monotheist heresy. None of the other pharaohs had been effective enough or lived long enough (remember the boy pharaoh Tutankhamen), but Horemheb was first and foremost a general. He was not technically a family member of the 18th dynasty, and was therefore a transition figure between the family of Ahmose I and his successor, the Vizier Ramesses I. Yet when he came to power, he persecuted Atenism viciously.

So here are the Hebrew slaves, Semites like the hated Hyksos, worshipers of one single god like the Atenists. And here, too, is Moses, an Egyptian aristocrat, and possibly raised as an Atenist, now out of favor with the court? It seems to me that Horemheb is an excellent candidate for the pharaoh of the exodus, placing it somewhere at the end of the 14th century BC. This is enough time for the Hebrews to become established enough in Canaan to be worth mentioning in the Merenptah stele.

Anyways, those are my own musings. If this actually interested anyone, I highly recommend James K. Hoffmeier's excellent books Israel in Egypt and Ancient Israel in Sinai.

Israel: The Dead Sea

After Tiberias we headed south along the Jordanian border toward the Dead Sea. Our first stop for the day was Yardenit, a popular group baptismal site along the Jordan River. While the traditional sites are farther south near Jericho, this site is used for tourists who don't want to go into a Palestinian Authority-controlled area (which our guide did and could not). Mom stayed out because the water was apparently freezing, but dad went in, and I was assigned the role of photographer. One of the pastors on the trip, Dale, was good enough to perform the baptisms; otherwise, people would have been baptizing themselves! So a special thanks to him.

Then we headed a bit farther south, still in Israel proper, to Beit She'an. I wasn't entirely sure I was going to be able to make it to Beit She'an at any point, so I was thrilled we were there. Like Megiddo, Beit She'an is a series of ruins built one atop another, thus forming an impressive tel. The earlier sites date back to the second millennium BC, when it is first mentioned as a conquest by the Egyptian Pharaoh Thutmoses III (whose tomb I'd crawled in to a week earlier). Like Megiddo, it sits at a strategically vital spot, blocking the way to the Jezreel Valley. Therefore, it was rebuilt numerous times in Israel's history, and finally by the Romans. The Roman city is not atop the tel but instead in the plain below, reflecting the empire's militarily superior position. This has allowed archaeologists to examine both the tel and the Roman city without harming either. We didn't go up to the tel for lack of time, but I hope to be able to some time next month while I've scheduled myself a free day in Tiberias.

At this point, it became clear why Dani had adjusted the schedule and packed three days into two: he wanted to get us to the Dead Sea resort before sundown. Unfortunately, during our stop for lunch outside Jericho, we ended up with a medical emergency. Frank, an elderly man on our tour, went into some form of diabetic shock. His wife Mickey was so terribly afraid. Thank God, ambulances from Hadassah Medical Center, the top medical care facility in the Middle East, arrived in excellent time. After stabilizing Frank, the couple decided they would go to the hotel in Jerusalem to rejoin the group later. While they never felt confident enough to go on tour in the city, it was good to see them at the hotel in the mornings and evenings. They were also able to get out on their for a bit on the last day.

Despite Frank's inconsiderate timing, we were still able to make it to the Dead Sea before dusk. On the one hand, it's pretty much what you'd imagine: you are extraordinarily buoyant, and it's impossible to swim, and getting water in your eyes is a terrible, terrible idea. At the same time, your body is totally unprepared for the experience. Evidence this picture:Yeah, it's like that.

Anyways, the hotel was first class, so us younger folks walked around the resort town until we found an open hotel with pool tables. One member of our group who works with Palestinian children had the good sense to strike up an argument with some off duty soldiers, which was fun for those of us watching.

The next day we slowly worked out way back up north. Our first stop was Masada, just a twenty minute drive north of the resort. Spectacular. King Herod the Great built this fortress partially as a defense of the entry route into Israel on the southern end of the Dead Sea, and partially as a secluded, luxurious getaway from the religious zealotry in Jerusalem. The ruins of the fortress today are very well preserved because of the totally dry desert heat, much like in Luxor. We took the cable car up to the top (next time I'm walking) and spent about two hours at the site. Not enough time, really, as we never made the descent to the lower levels. We did, however, get a spectacular view of the Roman encampments and siege ramp (you can see them on Facebook) from AD 72/73, when the empire destroyed the last vestige of the zealot revolt. Infamously, they arrived to the top to find the site of a mass slaughter and suicide, for the Jewish defenders preferred suicide and the killing of their own families to slavery and crucifixion.

From this cheery scene it was on to Qumran, also destroyed by the Romans earlier in the Great Jewish Revolt, c. AD 68. The members of the Qumran community, which called itself the Yahad, were the authors of the Dead Sea Scrolls, found fifty years ago in caves nearby the site (pictured: the famous cave #4). Unlike Beth She'an or Masada, there are no palaces, no bathhouses. The community was simple, almost monastic. They seem to have been founded by priests disaffected by the Hasmonean John Hyrcanus, who declared himself king of Israel even though he was of the priestly line of Aaron, not the kingly line of David. Viewing the temple as impure, they left for the wilderness to escape the 'Wicked Priest,' led by an anonymous 'Teacher of Righteousness.' They practiced twice-daily immersion for purification, and looked for the war of the Sons of Light (themselves) against the Sons of Darkness. This ideology may have had an indirect influence on John the Baptist, Jesus, and early Christianity. Perhaps.

Afterward, we headed toward Jerusalem. After a very brief glace of the city on the road, our driver took us to top of the Mount of Olives for the most spectacular view. I'll post on this and our days in Jerusalem next, but here's a preview for everyone: