Today has been an exhausting day of digging Khirbet Qeiyafa, the ruins of Qeiyafa, also believed to be the fortified outpost of King David and Solomon calle Shaaraim. It overlooks the valley of Elah, believed by many to be the site of the great battle between David and Goliath. (see valley photo)
This has been our second day of excavating. After only 5 hours of sleep, we got onto the bus taking us to the dig at 4:30am today. Such an early start allows us to work in the cooler hours of the day, and is meant to acclimate us to the daily rising temperature. Sort of
cooking a frog by slowly raising the temp of its water. The heat was tolerable, but the blisters and sore backs and feet have made the work slow. Hopefully these annoyances will go away soon as we build more core muscle strength and callouses. It is really exciting work, and that distracts me from much of the pain. That was nothing though compared with yesterday. Yesterday I had sunscreen in my eyes all day. Just thinking about it makes me tear-up. I had trouble keeping my eyes open for the picture of me posing with the first pot handle I found.( see photo).
The pot handle is likely from the Byzantine period, and it seems that what we are excavating is a Byzantine structure presumed to be overlying the iron age citadel of David and Solomon's outpost. There we hope to find some Hebrew inscriptions giving clear reference to David or Solomon--that's the pot of Golda (Meir)!
Today, while peering into a cistern discovered and excavated previously, I made an exciting discovery. A Palestinian Viper had made it there before me.
The dig is being directed by the renowned archaeologist Yossi Garfinkel, and there are about 90 others, mostly students, involved. I have enjoyed getting to know some of the other students not from our group, and speaking of Yeshua haMesiach (Jesus the Messiah) as much as comfortably possible. One, it turns out, is a Jew who immigrated to Israel from Sweden! We had fun talking Swedish with each other today. When he doesn't want others to understand him, he speaks Swedish with me. His name is Sam. I have also had conversations with several others: Sarah, a higschooler from Long Island, Sara, a college student who grew up in Skokie, Shiphrah, a married Israeli college student and orthodox Jew born in BC, Canada, and Hodeah, an Israeli college classmate of hers.
Since our tour around the sea of Galilee, a few days have passed, and much during that time is also worthy of mention, but time constrains me to just mention a few highlights. Jericho was nothing like I expected it. The oldest known city on earth, and at the lowest elevation as well, it is in a hot desert. I pictured it up in the hills where things were green and not so hot. It was amazing to see the excavation which has uncovered a history of pagan and cannanite worship going back to even further than the 10th millennium BC. The evident speedy erosion of the excavated walls that were found (see photo) is a good explanation for why the (demolished) Biblical walls of Jericho have not been found also--they quite easily could have eroded away.
Also important to mention is our visit to Bethlehem to see the very, very likely spot where Jesus was born. It was a
sad experience for me, but drives home the reason he became man to die for our sins: there was a lot of pushiness and crankiness expressed by some people impatient to have a look. The orthodox embellishments felt overdone and out of place for such remebrance of the humility of God, who in Christ became a poor helpless baby to ultimely save us from our sins. Here is a picture of me crouching beside the spot where his manger lay (see photo).
We are glad to have ended our travels with Ozmir, our bus driver. He was in a seemingly endless sqabble with our leader John. John says he clearly had his own agenda for the trip--making some money off us by taking us to choice shops and restaurants which would give him a cut of their profit, or so I think.
Now it is time to wash the pottery and glass fragments we have found over the last two days to enable better identification of the time periods from which they come, and detect any writing on them as well. We are looking for Iron age pottery, which will give more evidence for the historicity of the site as that belonging to David and Solomon in the 10th c BC.
More news to come!
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