Wow, today was a busy day. Unfortunately, no pictures today, I took some good ones, but the girl whose camera I’m using sometimes has a bit of a stomach bug so I didn’t get the memory card from her today. We had three or four people who threw up last night, if you could pray for them and for the rest of us I would appreciate it. It would be a bummer for everyone to be throwing up on the plane-ride home. I’ll try to post some pictures to today when I get them. Anyway back to our busy day. Here is the itinerary that our teacher Todd gave us when we got on the bus today.
- Chorazin
- Hazor
- Lebanon boarder crossing (just to look at, not cross)
- Lunch
- Dan
- Caesarea Philippi
- Slopes of Mt. Hermon
- The Golan Heights near the Syrian boarder
It was a full day but we fit everything in. It is interesting, these places (except for Chorazin) were all places that were up in the northernmost part of the country, and some of them were only mentioned in the bible a few times. Chorazin and Caeserea Philippi were only mentioned once each, and although Hazor was an incredibly massive city it didn’t play as big a role as many of the cities down south.
Chorazin sits near the shores of the sea of Galilee. I think it’s only reference is when Jesus says, “Woe to you Chorazin! woe to you Bethsaida! For if the mighty works that were done in you had been done in Tyre and Sidon they would have repented in sackcloth and ashes.” Chorazin seems to have been a city that was part of the region where Jesus spent a large amount of time during his ministry. The most striking thing about Chrorazin is that all of the buildings are made out of basalt, a black volcanic stone. There some extinct volcanoes in the upper Galilee region and in the Golan Heights, and as a result of that there is a lot of black volcanic rock around here that people used to build their cities with.
After Chorazin was Hazor. Hazor maybe the largest Canaanite city in the promised land during the time of Joshua’s conquest. Its tel is massive, something like 200 acres, but only a small part of that is excavated. One of the cool things that we saw at Hazor, is something that we saw at Gezer and at Megiddo, city gates. It says in the Bible that there are three cities that Solomon fortified, Hazor, Megiddo and Gezer. At all three of these cities archeologists have found gates in the walls that are all triple chamber gates (if you care enough about what those are, ask me when I get home) of a similar design and they pretty much have the same dimensions. And they all date from the same time, Solomon’s time. It’s cool to see archeology match up with what we know from the Bible, and it is cool to see an expansion of what was meant when it says Solomon fortified those towns. At least part of it involved fortifying the walls and making the gates more defensible.
After Hazor we went up to the northern most tip of Israel and looked out at a couple of sites that we couldn’t drive to because they were in Lebanon. The northern part if Israel is really pretty, as is the southern part of Lebanon. Most of Israel has been really green in the time that we were here, I guess that is because January is part of the rainy season (it rained a little bit today). In the summer a lot of the green fields and hills that we see will be brown, but I think that some of the places that we saw today are green year round.
For lunch I had Macdonalds, part of the reason was because the back patio of this Macdonalds sits just beyond one of the three source springs of the Jordan river. Most of the springs that I know about are little mountains springs in Colorado that are just little trickles. These springs that are the source for the Jordan are like small rivers in themselves. For anyone who has been to Lake City, the river that came from the spring near this Macdonalds is about the size of Henson Creek.
The next place we went to, Dan, is a city that was built near the largest source of the Jordan River. In fact the spring there is the largest spring of its kind in the middle east, it pumps out 240 million cubic feet of water a year. The area of Dan was absolutely beautiful. It had a river running right through the tel (thanks to the spring), and was surrounded by a thick forest of Oak trees and the ground was heavy with green vegetation.
Dan is the city that belonged to the tribe of Dan. Dan was the tribe of Samson, their tribal allotment was down in the Shephelah, but they weren’t able to run the Philistines out of the land so they decided to go look for somewhere new, they found a city in the northernmost part of the promised land, that had lots of water, great natural resources, and was kind of isolated from any neighbors so they decided to go up there, kill everyone and live there. On their way up there they decided to bring some idols up there with them so that they could have their own gods to worship when they got there.
After Solomon died and God split the kingdom into two, the ten tribes in the North and the two tribes in the south, Jeraboam (king in the north) was afraid that if people went to Israel to worship they would turn against him so he made two golden calves for the Israelites of the northern kingdom to worship, put one in Bethel and put one in Dan. Archeologists have found the high place in Dan where the golden calf was and even part of the altar that they made sacrifices on. They reconstructed the altar out of a metal frame and it is gigantic. I measured it out and it is about sixteen feet wide, sixteen feet long and eight feet tall.
After Dan we went to Caesarea Philippi. The only mention of Caesarea Philippi in the Bible is when it says that Jesus was in the region of Caesarea Philippi when Jesus went up on a mountain with Peter, James, and John and the transfiguration happened. The mountain near Caesarea Philippi is Mt. Herman. It is the largest mountain in Israel and is snow capped year round. Caesarea Philippi is also the home of the third source spring of the Jordan. The spring used to come right out of a cave so people built a bunch of pagan temples there to different gods, in the cave they worshiped Pan, god of the wild places, and there is some evidence that there were some human sacrifices that went on there. It rained when we were there, but it was really beautiful there, at the base of Mt. Herman. I got some great pictures of the river there. I even saw some fish rise on the river there and I skipped a going to the bathroom to try to get a better look at them but I wasn’t ever able to get a good look at them.
After Caesarea Philippi we stopped for a great view (the rain had stopped) in the Golan heights, then we drove out and looked down on the Syrian border from the Golan Heights. At that point we were only 35 miles from Damascus. We were actually looking along the direction that the road would have gone when Paul was travelling to Damascus. We read the story of Jesus appearing to Paul on his trip and then we got on the bus and headed back to our resort on the Sea of Galilee. No swimming/attempting to walk on water for me today, it was too cold today, but don’t worry, I’ll try it before we leave.
In case you are interested, today’s mystery candies were, a chocolate bar that was filled with pop rocks, and some kind of red, yellow, green and white candy that when you ate it felt like a mouth full of sugar but not as good.
Tomorrow we will be around the Sea of Galilee (and even on it for a while). Until then, thanks for reading.
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