Day 14 - Biblical Nature Reserve and the Maresha Archeological dig

The internet is really slow again today so I’m not going to try to post any pictures. Hopefully it will be faster next time.

Today was kind of a bonus day that we fit in between our time last week in the south and next week (this week I guess) in the north. Today we spent most of the day in the Shephelah, (the area where Samson did a lot of stuff and where David fought Goliath).

First we went to a place that is a Biblical nature reserve. That means that they try to make their land in the nature reserve look like the land would have looked back in Biblical times. The only plants that they have are plants that are mentioned in the Bible, and they show the different ways that agriculture was done (vineyards, olive trees, wheat, barley, figs, dates, and pomegranates) and how they were harvested. So we saw an old fashioned wine press and guard tower, olive press and threshing floor. It was actually pretty cool, the nature reserve was gorgeous, and it was really cool to see the different tools and methods that they used in farming. The lady that we had giving us a tour was really good, and she tied a lot of the stuff she was talking about into Biblical stories and parables and even into stuff that Jesus said, which was surprising to me because I’m pretty sure that she is Jewish.

After that there was a Torah scribe at the place that showed us the process that Torah scribes go through when they write the Torah Scrolls (There are some things that scrolls are still used for.)

Then we made a mad dash for Gath of the Philistines (where Goliath was from) and we just had time to take a picture (which is a bummer because it was a really big tel, and it would have been fun to be able to walk around it for a while.
After Gath we went to our last stop, the Archeological site of Maresha. At Maresha we met an Archeologist who gave us a little introduction to the site and then took us down into the caves where they were digging. The caves at Maresha are kind of an ancient garbage dump from 2200 years ago (some people were run out of the city so they tore down their houses and dumped them into these caves which were their basements.) Because the caves are kind of like dumps, you can give 45 people a trowel and a little pickaxe and tell them to start digging. So after telling us a little bit about how to dig and what to look for we started digging. It was really, really cool. Most of what we found was pottery although someone did find a ring (which was a pretty big deal). I found a lot of pottery, some bones, and a building stone (a stone that was used in to build a house). I thought the stone was pretty important, but it turns out that it wasn’t, it was still cool to find though. After we dug for about an hour we brought the buckets of dirt that we dug up to the surface (as well as our buckets of finds), then we sifted through the buckets of dirt to find stuff that we missed. Mostly we found more pottery and bones (animal bones, from a dinner 2200 years ago), but it was still fun. The Archeologist that we were working with (or for) told us that you can actually take the bones (fish bones for instance) and send them into a museum, where someone can tell you what kind of fish the bone came from. And if you know what kind of fish then that can tell you different things about the city. If it is a fish that lives only in the Nile River in Egypt, and you find it’s bones in a city in Israel, then you know that it was a city that had some major trade connections.

After digging and sifting we went through a cave system that hasn’t been excavated yet to see what it looked like. It was really fun even though we had to squeeze through some pretty tight spots. The Archeoligist, Ian, was passing info about the caves back along the line of people (we had to go single file) and when we got to the end I started passing back some fake info to people about what the last room was, that was pretty fun.

After our mini-dig (I think I could have done the digging part for another three or four hours, the thrill of exploration and discovery was pretty high) we came back to Yad HaShmona, had dinner, and then had a preview lecture for our last week, which is in the North. Tomorrow morning we set out and we will spend the night at the base of Mt. Carmel (think Elijah and the prophets of Baal). We may or may not have the internet tomorrow. If we do hopefully it is faster than it has been here the last few nights and I can get some pictures up. If not then my next post will be in two days from the Sea of Galilee. As always, thanks for reading.