Kibbutz and Tel Dan

I'm finally in a place where I can upload pictures! Since there's no way I can get them all on here, I highly, highly recommend going to my Facebook albums and checking out the pictures of the Tel Dan and Banias nature reserves. They're some of the most beautiful places I've ever seen, no kidding.

This will be quite a bit of posting since I've been busier this past week than almost any time on my pilgrimage. But enjoy, because I certainly have.

As I said, after going through Safed I made my way to Qiryat Shmona, a town in the far north of Israel on the Lebanese border. There I was picked up by Libi, whom I contacted through the networking site Couch Surfing. She turned out to be ideally located and a warmly hospitable host (Libi, if you're reading this, remind me to give you a good recommendation on CS).

So after dinner I sacked out on the couch. The following morning she drove me to a junction on her way to work where it was a fairly easy walk to Kibbutz Dan (pictured: "a fairly easy walk"). On the way I passed by the Helicopter Memorial, dedicated to 73 IDF soldiers who died in a collision between two helicopters during military actions against Hezbollah in 1997. It's one of the more tasteful and moving memorials I've seen.

Navigating Kibbutz Dan was fairly easy, since it's all built along a central road that runs from the gated entrance to the northern rear end of the settlement. There sits the Ussishkin Museum, or Beit Ussishkin. The museum serves to orient the visitor on their way to the Tel Dan Nature Reserve, containing exhibits both on the natural history and environment of the Upper Galilee as well as the archaeology of the tel. I think it took me an hour to get through its two rooms. For anyone going on their own to Tel Dan, I highly recommend a visit here first.

Then I got to Tel Dan, which turned out to be one of the unexpected highlights. If Gamla- and Banias and Nimrud- were like stepping in to Middle East, this was stepping into Narnia. The place is like something out of a fairy tale. Numerous springs bubble up throughout the reserve, which feed the Dan River which meets up with the Banias Stream to form the Jordan River. Walking around, one finds centuries-old buildings scattered about the reserve, like the flour mill to the left.

I think I ended up spending about three hours on the reserve exploring the trails and walking past some of the most random and heartwarming oddities, like the Winnie the Pooh Tree (right).

The reason I'd gone, of course, was to see the sites of the Israelite and Canaanite cities that existed here three thousand years ago. The Canaanite city variously called Lashem or Laish was inhabited by the mid-second millennium. It is mentioned in contemporary texts as a trading center, a sort of gateway to the land of Canaan.

Central to the life of any Middle-to-Late Bronze or Early Iron Age city was the city gate. This was the place where people congregated, bought and sold wears, and lifted up their grievances to the chief magistrates. The Canaanite city gate is extraordinarily important as an archaeological artifact. After falling into disuse it was filled in with earth, preserving its greatest treasure for posterity: an arched gateway, a thousand years before the Romans popularized the archway as an engineering staple.

You can see in the picture above the archway that is the same color as the adjacent towers. It is filled in with darker earth, into which archaeologists have carved out a doorway to allow them to explore and excavate the inner gate's courtyard.

After Joshua carved out a place for the Hebrew refugees in the land of Canaan, the Danites settled along the shores between Jaffa and Gaza. They were deeply unsatisfied with this, however, and decided to move north and strike against the unsuspecting inhabitants of Canaanite Leshem. They took the city and rebuilt it as their own.

The Israelite city gate and its plazas have been preserved and restored by archaeologists, although there's a lack of signs which make it difficult to make out everything. One interesting ruin of note, however, is the throne of the king (or magistrate), who would sit at the gate to hear pleas from his city's inhabitants.

However, I thought the other Israelite center was a bit more interesting than the gate. This was the sacred precinct. When Rehoboam succeeded his father Solomon and raised the taxes across the United Monarchy, the populist Jeroboam led a rebellion in which the ten tribes of the north broke off from Judah and the Davidic leaders of the south. However, because Judah controlled Jerusalem, people continued to travel into the southern kingdom on pilgrimage. In order to prevent his people from being propagandized when journeying through the Kingdom of Judah, he set up alternative centers of worship at Dan and Bethel- the far north and south of his kingdom.

Here the sacrificial altar and altar of burnt offerings have been preserved. As you can see in the photo, the site administrators have put up a metal frame to represent the original size of the altar of burning. The steps on the right lead up to the sacrificial plaza.

So after all this, I walked back toward the place where Libi was due to pick me up. Fortunately I called her, and found out that she'd try to call me earlier and tell me that she'd be stuck at the college where she works for another two hours. So I hitched a ride to Kiryat Shmona (hitch hiking is very popular in the Upper Galilee and the Golan, and people almost always stop to pick you up eventually) where I found the college. There she was sitting in on a book club where a yogi was teaching students about the Bhagavad Gita, the sacred epic of Hinduism. So I got to sit in on that before heading back with her to get to sleep.

P.S. If you ever want to hear me rant Hinduism and why it's not philosophically viable, let me know and I'll be sure to do so.

And that was my very full day exploring the Tel Dan Nature Reserve.