Jerusalem, Jerusalem. I feel like I know this city (at least the old city) and if you told me that I have only been in this city for about 54 hours I would call you a liar. If you showed me my airplane itenerary, took me back through my pictures and my blog, reminded me that it is December 30th and on December 27th I was back in LA...well I guess I'd have to believe you, but it sure feels like we've been here longer. All of the stress of flying in on El Al feels like it happened 100 years ago.
(music side note: If I asked you to guess which country I have seen the most tourirsts in Jerusalem from (other than our group), what country would you guess? Did you say Germany? If you did you are wrong, the winner is definately France, followed by Russia. This may be because there are a bunch of french people staying in our hotel. In fact they are in the lobby around the corner from me having a beer-cigarette-piano party. Whoever is playing piano is pretty good.)
Another note before I get started. I am starting to get sick, I woke up with a sore throat, and as the day went by it moved to my sinuses. I am pretty sure that if I had some airborne and about 12 hours to sleep I'd be fine in no time (about 12 hours). Unfortunately I forgot to bring my airborne (I'm pretty sure it's at home next to my watch and sunglasses), and 12 hours of sleep doesn't seem likely for a few weeks. I'm mentioning this for two reasons: 1. I'm going to keep this post kind of short and to the point so I can get some extra sleep tonight. 2. I would really appreciate it if you all would pray for me (and about five or six other people on our trip who are sick) that I would get well soon, and that the sickness wouldn't slow me down at all, physically, mentally or spiritually. Ok, now on to Day three.
We begin some days with a lecture, today was one of those lecture days. Todd (our teacher) began our lecture by saying, "You will learn more today than you ever have in your life...at least in one day." I don't know if that is true, but I took 22 pages of notes in my field notebook today. Some of them were really cool notes where I would try to make a quick sketch of the area that he was talking about (wall, tomb, city map) so that I could make my notes on top of it to help me remember better. Most of them were just writing.
Our first stop today was this old hotel that was the first hotel in the old city, they didn't really take care of it so now it's a hostel. From the roof you get a really good view of the city, the picture above is from that rooftop. You can see the dome of the Rock there and pretty much the whole mount of Olives in the Background. If you want to know what Herod's temple would have looked like in the city imagine the dome of the rock, but twice as big in every dimension and made out of polished white marble. Must have been impressive. Those clouds in the sky turned into rainclouds, it was pretty wet and cold today, a bad day to be sick.
Today was our Old Testament day so we looked at a bunch of walls, different building periods for the city, and different expansions and destructions. I thought it was awesome but the pictures are pretty dull so I won't post many. We looked at Hezekiah's broad wall which he built to protect the city from the Assyrians, and spent a lot of time talking about David's city. Isn't David's city Jerusalem you ask? That is a good question, and the answer is...kind of.
Jerusalem in David's time was small. How small was it! (sorry I'm sick, it does awful things to my sense of humor) Well let me show you how small it was.
This picture above is of what us ol' Jerusalem vets call the eastern hill, specifically the southern side of the eastern hill. See the spot where I drew on the picture with an ugly red line? that line runs along the slope of the hill, near the vally, the eastern wall to David's city would have been somewhere around where that line was.
Ok, now look at this picture, see where it overlaps with the other one? The white stone and the wooden building with the green roof? Ok, good. Now look at the flags that I circled and highlighted with ugly red and yellow? That is where the the western wall of David's city was. See I told you, small. the city was a lot longer north south than it was east west, but all in all the city was 10 acres, it got bigger with Solomon (30 acres) and with Hezekiah (150 acres).
At the end of our time in the city of David we spent a lot of time discussing and exploring the water system of David and Hezekiah's Jerusalems. Included in that was one of the coolest things I have ever done.
(Look, people doing archeology! Those rocks are something called the pool tower of the spring of Gihon. They were here in David's time but they date all the way back to 1800 B.C. That would be Abraham's time when Melchizidek was the king of Jerusalem, which was called Salem back then.)
So Hezekiah didn't think it was a good idea to have a spring outside of the city, especially when the Assyrians were coming to attack him, so he built a tunnel to bring the water from the spring that was near this tower underground into the city of Jerusalem. It was dug about 40 to 50 feet below this tower in the picture above, through the limestone bedrock. It ended up being 1750 feet long, all dug with pickaxes and shovels. Workers started at each end of the tunnel and then met in the middle. Think about that, they had work crews that started on two sides, dug a tunnel with pickaxes and shovels, and met halfway, deep underground without GPS or anything else. And the tunnel isn't straight, it is in an S shape. Did I mention that they did this in 701 BC?
Today I got to walk through this tunnel, and it was awesome. Definately one of the coolest and the most Indiana Jones things I have ever done. The tunnel has water in it, most of the time it was shin high, the for a little bit it was mid thigh. It was never wide enough for two people to walk side by side, a few times my sholders brushed the walls on both sides. Usually it was four to seven feet tall (I bumped my head a lot) but at the end it is closer to 30. It is dark, you can't see without a flashlight. Did I mention it was awesome? Imagine walking through a dark narrow tunnel with these dimensions and water levels. Imagine knowing where the tunnel ends up but not knowing what lies being the range of the flashlight. Imagine this walk taking about half an hour. Imagine it being awesome and you can get a sense of what it was like. Imagine walking through the tunnel with a beautiful Israeli archeologist behind you and racing the Nazi's to some important secret and you can imagine the Indiana Jones movie I was making up as I walked through the tunnel.
Where are my pictures of the tunnel you ask? Well...I kind of thought that the water would be deeper so I passed my camera off to someone who didn't go through the tunnel. I did get someone else to take a picture of me doing my best Indiana Jones pose in the tunnel though and I will post that as soon as I get it from them. I do have to warn you though, my best Indiana Jones pose looks a lot more like Derek Zoolander's Blue Steele than Indy.
Ok, I need to stop and go to bed (I haven't even gotten to everything we did before lunch) so here is what else we did today. Visited the pool of Siloam where Jesus told the blind guy to wash his eyes in John 9, spent a lot of time with a 1st century model of Jerusalem that was a 1:50 scale (I hope I said that right, it's fifty times smaller than actual size.)
Oh, did I mention that we saw the Dead Sea scrolls today? We did that too.
Tommorow is our last day focused on Jerusalem, we're doing a New Testament tour. As always, thanks for reading.
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