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.