Day 1: We left Jerusalem early in the morning again, unsurprisingly. But I was really excited for where we were going: Caesarea is a beautiful city from the time of Herod the Great all the way until the end of the Crusades. It sits right on the sea shore, so the waters crash against the fortress walls, and there the palace where Paul was housed before he was shipped off to Rome to be killed has survived. We wandered around in the ancient theater and the palace, stopping in a room where it is absolutely certain that Paul would have stood to deliver his speech to the leader of the city who declared, “Almost thou hast convinced me to be a Christian.” It is really rare to go somewhere we are certain that one of the New Testament figures would have stood. This is one of them. The port, of which only about a fourth is left, is stunning because it was built by Herod the Great completely from scratch and it remained a prominent port for the next several hundred years. The Crusaders used this as a major base of operation and consequently they had an awesome triple gate and even a real, honest to goodness moat! I was practically giddy on seeing the moat… originally; guess how you had to cross it? Yup, a draw bridge.
From there we stopped at something which was equally awesome, though it didn’t sound like it. It was an aqueduct. And lest you think of a pipe running below or on top of the ground, know that it is actually a seventy mile long wall of beautiful arches which carried the water along the top. It ran right along the sea shore too, and let me tell you, it was the perfect place for a photo shoot, well, and for being ridiculous in general. The day was cloudy and the landscape the striking twin of California’s prime agricultural/orchard land. It started to get colder and colder, and this lent itself well to our next stop… Armageddon.
Yes ladies and gentlemen, we went to the place which the great battle which is supposed to end the world will take place. The valley, the Jezreel valley, is beautiful and flat, stretching up towards Nazareth and the mount of Transfiguration. The city which Armageddon is named for is now just a tel, called Megiddo. We learned all sorts of awesome stuff about the history of the place, but the coolest thing by far was sitting on the ridge of the ancient city and looking over the valley, the wind cutting right through our jackets, and reading about the end of time. Cool? I think so.
The day just kept getting better and better because our next stop was Nazareth. The city is almost exclusively Palestinian now, and it is chock full of churches dedicated to Mary or Joseph or Jesus. Interestingly, on the outside of the “Church of the Visitation” where the angel was supposed to appeared to tell Mary she was chosen to give birth to Christ, there are large banners in English and Arabic which say something to the effect of (quoting the Qu’uran) “God never was and never will be begotten, nor does he beget,” and, “Islam is the only truth, those who reject it will be thrust down to hell.” It reminded me of other such propaganda I’d seen in the U.S., propagated by a different faith against another. It was a good reminder that people are the same no matter where you go. We blazed through the “Church of the Visitation” and the place where Mary and Joseph may have lived then ran up to see the alternate “Church of the Visitation” which is run by the Greek Orthodox Church. Having two churches dedicated to the same occurrence, both claiming to have the actual location of occurrence, is far from unusual in the Middle East.
We arrived at Galilee that night, late enough that I was utterly exhausted and was glad to crash in the bungalows which four of us shared. The Kibbutz where we stayed is right on the shore of the Sea of Galilee; I would see it out my window were it not for the other bungalow in the way. Despite my exhaustion, I had to wander along the shore for a while, just soaking in the fact that I was now in the place Jesus loved. While he certainly spent a fair amount of time in Jerusalem, and the most important occurrences happened there, the Galilee is where he wanted to be. The moon was barely a crescent that evening, and a bunch of us waded out into the water, standing so we could look out over the sea. What a beautiful place that is.
Day 2: The first place we went was not that memorable, or in other words, I have little recollection of it past the fact that it had a palace which was constructed almost identically to Herod the Great’s temple. The other place we went that morning was quite something. In the Old Testament, whenever they’re referring to the whole of Israel, they say “From Dan to Beersheba.” We’ve already been to Beersheba, so this was our chance to go all the way to the top of the ancient kingdom of Israel. Dan was named for the tribe who was given the land after they were pushed out of their original lot by the Philistines. It is stunning because there are three different springs which gush out of the mountain and make the place a virtual rainforest. We wandered through it for a while until we got to the original city where the idiotic Old Testament King of Israel after the end of Solomon’s reign, decided it would be a good idea to create golden calves and put them in Dan and another city named Bethel so the people of Israel wouldn’t go down to Judea, the rival kingdom, to make pilgrimage to Jerusalem. This sin was the main problem which plagued Israel for the next few hundred years until it was destroyed by The Assyrians. We saw the foundations of the temple they built there.
The next place, Caesarea Philippi, is the place where Christ told the Bread of Life sermon. A famous spring comes directly from the mountain there and a temple was built right on top of it a few thousand years ago, a pagan temple dedicated to the God pan. It’s gone now though, but the spring is still pouring out water. We headed from there to the coolest castle I’ve ever been to. It was stunning, built high on a mountainside overlooking a valley, and had been used by the Crusaders then the Arabs after the defeat of the Crusaders. It is one of the best preserved castles in all of Israel, the walls at least ten feet thick, and the whole place large enough to hold several thousand people if needed. It is called Nimrod’s castle because the local population said that it was such an impressive castle that only the biblical figure Nimrod, the great hunter would have been able to build it. I loved being there; I could have stayed there for hours more. A few hundred years ago, there was an earthquake and, awesomely, it rocked the castle walls so that the keystone of a hall of arches started to slip out, but then the walls rocked back, trapping the keystones again. So there is the is long stone hall you can walk along where the keystones of all the arches have slipped out exactly the same amount almost as though it were planned. From it, you can see the exact actions of the earthquake. How cool is that? We stopped briefly after this in the Golan Heights, one of the most contested pieces of land in the world. We parked near mine fields so we could take pictures near the signs which say, “Danger, Mine Field,” in English, Arabic and Hebrew. It is a sad reminder of the hate between these peoples and the problems which continue today in this area. Later that night we had a bonfire right on the beach of the Galilee. It was a wonderful event, we just stood up and sang or told stories if we felt like it. The group of students here is the most incredibly talented group I’ve ever been in. My talents are positively dwarfed by theirs and we’re always kept entertained by someone. The bonfires we enjoyed while there were some of the most memorable things we did, though it was mighty cold outside of the influence of the fire’s warmth.
Day 3: We had New Testament for three and a half hours straight in the morning of this day, and then studying for the rest of the day.
No comments:
Post a Comment