Day Eight - The Negev

Today, today, today. What did we do today… Well it was another good day, but the days are starting to run together a little bit, we are learning so much and we have so much that we are accountable to know that some things (like what day it is and when we did what) are starting to get a little fuzzy. I haven’t sorted through my pictures from today yet and I am really, really tired so I’m not going to post any pictures tonight, I might try to add some to this post later if I have time.

Today was a day that was focused on the Negev. Imagine chalk dust and flint. Bedeuins and camels. Imagine almost no water. Imagine breathtaking vistas and deep canyons. Imagine all that and you might imagine the Negev. The Negev is the southern wilderness that Abraham and Jacob both spent a lot of time in as well as where the Israelites sent spies into the promised land from and then decided that Canaan was too tough a place for them to handle.

The first place that we stopped was where our hotel was last night, Beer Sheba. The Negev is dry, the weather is beautiful for January but right now is the dry season and even now it is mostly brown. I guess that the government subsidizes a lot of the cities and settlements down here in the Negev because there is just not enough going on for these places to support themselves on their own.

In the Bible, Beer Sheba is a place where God came to Abraham and promised to give him and his descendents the promised land. It was also Abraham’s last stop before heading on out to Egypt (where he told Pharaoh that Sarah was his sister). It is also the place where God confirmed his covenant with Isaac and it is where Jacob was when he sent his son’s into Egypt because of the famine that was in Israel.

After Beer Sheba we went to Arad, which was a southern fortress during the time of David and Solomon. The most interesting thing about Arad was that they have found a temple where Israelites worshiped God in Arad. That is a really bad thing to find. God was pretty clear that the only place where sacrifices were to be offered to him was the temple of Jerusalem. This temple in Arad actually has two gods that it worships, God and his “mistress.” It is a pretty clear case of what people call syncretism, where different religious beliefs get mixed together and a third thing is formed that draws from both. The Bible is pretty clear that there were people in Israel and Judah who did not worship God as they should and that God did not want them to be too close to the Canaanites because he didn’t want their religious beliefs to be tainted by them, and this is a clear case of that mixing and tainting happening. Actually they found an altar in Beer-Sheba that was destroyed and then built into a wall during the time of Hezekiah, so when the Bible says that Hezekiah took down the high places and altars to false Gods, we actually saw an example of that today.

After Arad we had lunch down near the wilderness of Zin. Then we went over to another part of the wilderness of Zin and took a great hike through a canyon there, I got some cool pictures that I’ll try to post at a different time.

We spent some more time in the wilderness after that, the wilderness of Paran this time, and we spent some time in prayer and solitude thinking about what life was like for the Israelites spending forty years wandering through the wilderness. You get a whole different understanding of God promising them a land with pools of water, pomegranate trees and as much bread as they can eat when you are standing in the dry wilderness, where the chalky ground has cracked under your feet because it is so dry and the world is filled with nothing but rocks and a few shrubs.

And that was pretty much it today. I am really, really, really tired, and tomorrow we are going into Egypt to climb Jebal Musa (Mt. Sinai). I am pretty sure that there were some more things that I was going to add that I thought were important or funny but I can’t think of anything else. I did post my stuff that I wrote for yesterday down below, so if you want to you can read that, yesterday was a pretty cool day. I’m off to bed. As always thanks for reading and until tomorrow…