I've had internet trouble the last few days so I haven't posted anything, but here is what I've typed up. I'm not going to upload any pictures yet, I want to get this stuff posted while my signal is still good.
Well today was our last study day in Israel. After a late start this morning (we didn’t have to leave until 8:30), we headed off to the Jordan river. We came up to a spot that is a kind of commercial spot where people can come and be baptized.
They say that it is near the location that Jesus was baptized, but our teacher Todd is pretty sure that it is too far north for that. I’m sure that the people who run the area that we went to wouldn’t be happy to hear that since they charge three dollars for a small bottle of “holy water” and six for a bigger bottle (the bigger bottle is probably about 8 oz.) The “holy water” is just water from that spot on the Jordan.
The Jordan river looked pretty small. In fact, it didn’t look much bigger than some of the streams that were headwaters of the Jordan. I think that is mainly because the Sea of Galilee is the main freshwater reservoir for Israel, so they take a lot of water out of it and not as much ends up in the Jordan. Although in Biblical times the Jordan wasn’t the most imposing river either. It was never as impressive as the Nile or the Euphrates, but because it runs along a fault line, it runs in a really narrow canyon that in some places are really impassable. So even if it is not imposing, it is still a pretty substantial barrier.
After the Jordan River we went to Beth Shan, which was known as Scythopolis in Jesus time. It was a pretty big and pretty impressive Greek city in Jesus time, it was part of a bunch of Greek cities in the area that were called the Decapolis. It’s funny, after all that time that I spent in Turkey Greece and Rome last year, I feel a little bit like the Greek/Roman city designs are old hat for me. I was definitely more worried about our Beauty and the Beast performance that we did in the theater there than I was about taking notes when we were in the teaching part. The city was cool, it was familiar in some ways, it was pretty big, and even though it was in ruins they have reconstructed enough of it to get a feel for how impressive the city would have been before it was destroyed by a big earthquake.
Our performance in the theater went well. There were five of us and everyone who wasn’t Belle played a bunch of different parts. I have sung the Gaston parts from Beauty and the Beast in the shower plenty of times so I had my Gaston voice down when I was him. It was fun, everyone seemed to enjoy it, and I’m glad it’s over and I don’t have to do it again. I spent most of the morning before our performance wondering if I had caught the stomach flu that has been going around or if I was just nervous. Turns out I was just nervous. I felt fine after we were done.
After Beth Shan we went to Ein Harod, which is the spring that Gideon brought his men to when his army dropped from 10,000 men to 300 men. It used to be bigger, I guess there used to be a lake there. Now it is just a little stream, somehow they control how much water runs out through the stream so that there can be a nice park around the spring and not a swamp like there used to be.
And that was it for what we did today. After Ein Harod we drove back to Jerusalem, to Yad Hashmona, where my camera was waiting for me and we checked in for our last night as a group together in Israel. Most everyone else leaves tomorrow night at midnight. I leave at 7:00 am two days from now to meet up with Dad in Jordan for a few days before I head back to the states on the 21st.
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