Attempt number three at this blog ...

The interent often goes on the fritz around here, so sometimes it takes me multiple days to complete one of these things! I have been on two field studies since the last time I wrote but I will only focus on the first trip for now. Also, sad warning for today ... it's taken me this long to put this blog up because the picture feature has not been working and I've been trying to wait and see if I could get some up, but sadly there will be no picutres with today's post. I'll try to put them up on my facebook and we can share them this way!
SO ... two Sundays ago was great!

I got to visit the City of David which is no longer a part of the Old City! It actually doesn't look like much ... but I have to admit it was neat seeing the city first thing in the morning. I was standing across the valley from the ancient city and on the other side was another valley with a higher range (the Mount of Olives) and when the sun came up, the light was only hitting the ridgeline of the City of David. It was pretty neat to see Ancient Zion lit up in the midst of a valley of shadow.

I don't have a great picture of it yet (it's a little hard to take good pictures and write down all my notes at the same time!), but there has been some neat excavating going on inside of the city.

One part that I was most excited by was a section that had a small piece uncovered of Nehemiah's wall! This part was pretty exciting for me because my brother (Jeremy) recently did a theatrical monologue of Nehemiah asking for help rebuilding the wall after the Jews returned from exile in Babylon. I had a great picture in my head of the reading as I looked at an actual piece of that wall!

Another section of wall that has been uncovered inside of the Old City is a piece they believe is part of Hezekiah's wall that was built around the city in anticipation of the Assyrian invasion!


This invasion was also the prompting for the digging of Hezekiah's Tunnel which I also walked through.

However, the ceiling actually is really low for most of the first half of the tunnel. For those of you who are not aware -- I'm a little short. There were sections of the tunnel where I was bent over double ... but then at the end there are really high ceilings! It's a strange transition. The tunnel was dug from both ends and the workers met somewhere in the middle. The general understanding is that one end started up too high and had to dig down into the ground in order to meet up with the other half -- hence, high ceilings.

It's pretty interesting because they aren't exactly sure how the tunnel was dug. I find it crazy that we can think of ourselves as so much more advanced but we can't figure out how the ancient Israelites dug a proper tunnel!

After exploring these Old Testament sites, we moved on to exploring the area in terms of what occurred in the New Testament.

We were able to go into the area of ruins that was one of the main enterances up to the Temple Mount in the southeast corner. If you look up pictures online and search for Robinson's Arch you'll see a recreation of the ruins I was looking at! There are only little chunks of rock left sticking out of the wall where the arch met the Temple Mount. The ground underneath this area is fairly well smashed up from where all of the rocks fell when the city was destroyed.

One thing I always wondered was when I would read about how the city was "burned" down. How can a city made of stone burn? Answer ... the rocks the city is made of are limestone rocks -- very porous and great at retaining water. Unfortunately, this means that if you set a large enough fire under the rocks, they will heat up and pretty much explode from the expansion inside!

We were also able to sit on the southern steps where Jesus would have taught outside of the Temple to preach. It's amazing how much more the stories/parables he tells make sense when you are sitting in the context of the situation! More on that next time ...

The last thing I want to share with you was our last stop on the study ... the Pools of Bethesda and the Church of Saint Anne.

First ... don't ask me if I jumped in the pools ... there's no water anymore and it is a REALLY deep pit. An interesting side story to go along with the story of the invalid who was healed here in John 5, it is said there were smaller pools next to Bethesda that were dedicated to the cult of Asclepius, who was the Greek god of medicine. In John 5:14 Jesus says to the man “See, you are well again. Stop sinning or something worse may happen to you.” It was common practice in OT to believe that if something bad happened to you it was because you had sinned and were being punished, but Jesus contradicts this teaching everywhere except this one instance. Out of context it seems that Jesus is conforming to the traditional thinking of the time; instead, he is telling the man, who had been waiting, not just by Bethesda, but by the Greek pools for healing, to stop following the pagan ways of other gods and turn to the true God of Israel, lest he continue his life in sin. Jesus is calling him to repent of his cultural compromises.

I think it's easy to miss out on how much of the cultural meaning is used in biblical stories and they add so much more depth to our understanding. I'll try to keep adding these in so we can all benefit from this knowledge!

The last stop was actually inside of the church which was built over the place where Mary (Jesus' mother) was born and raised. This church is also called the church of singing because of the acoustics. I am going to post the video I took of our group singing a couple of songs in the church and its amazing! If you ever come to Israel, make sure to visit this church.