Day Seven - The Shephelah

(Hiking through the Shephelah)

(As you can see I am posting this a day late from Eliat, I typed it out last night in Beer Sheba)

Well, no internet here in Beer-Sheba so tonight I’m typing this from the fourth floor lobby of our hotel. There are about seven of us who are sitting here in the lobby, most of us are journaling or working through our pictures, except for our Bedouin bus driver, Joel, who packed a hooka and is sitting out here with us smoking apple tobacco. (in all fairness he did open the window, and he is really funny)

Today we travelled through the Shephelah (pronounced Shfaelah). We went to Gezer, Beth-Shemish, Azekah, Qeiyafa , and Lachish. I know what you are thinking, wow I’ve never heard of those places, that sounds like a lousy day. What if I told you that today we saw the places where Samson was born and was buried, let loose 300 foxes with their tails on fire, and met Delilah? What if I also told you that we saw the place where David killed Goliath? What if I told you that we saw the last major city that the Babylonians and the Assyrians destroyed before the moved on to Jerusalem? Ok you may not be as excited about that one but it is a pretty big deal.
It is amazing what a big difference geography makes in hearing some of these stories. Take the story of Samson taking the gates of Gaza and carrying them to Hebron. A few weeks ago if I heard that story those cities wouldn’t have meant much to me. Today when we heard that story I said, “Gath to Hebron! Are you serious!?!” (the distance between those two cities is about 40 miles and there is an elevation change of over 3000 feet.) I think looking down at those valleys and cities where the Samson stuff happened and David and Goliath made me pay more attention to the details of those stories. Did you know that when David was talking to Saul about killing the lion and the bear that this is what he says to Saul? “I went after him and struck him and delivered it out of his mouth. And if he arose against me, I caught him by his beard and struck him and killed him.” When David chased down a lion to save a lamb, if the lion turned and attacked him, he grabbed it by the mane and killed it. That is amazing, I can’t even imagine doing that, if he could trust God to help him kill lions and bears with his hands no wonder he had no problem trusting God to kill Goliath.

(The Sorek Valley, where Delilah was from, and Samson spent a lot of time)

They aren’t exactly sure where David and Goliath fought, they know the valley and the know the two cities it was between, but they don’t know the exact spot. Our teacher Todd has an idea though, and if he is right, then we walked right through that battlefield today. I even picked up five stones from the brook (sling-stones weren’t small, each one would have been the size of a baseball.) I should have picked them up on the way down, because we climbed a pretty serious hill to visit a new, maybe really important site and it definitely felt like I was hiking up that hill with a bag full of rocks (which I was).

(The Elah Valley where David fought Goliath)

Lachish was the city that we visited that the Babylonians and Assyrians destroyed before they went up to Jerusalem. I won’t say much except to say that Lachish was the second most important city in Judah, it was the second strongest city in Judah (in terms of army fortifications), and it was such a big deal to Sennacharib (the Assyrian king) that he decorated part of his palace with his victory in destroying Lachish. (Assyria was the world’s resident superpower at that time).

Well that is the highlights from today, we saw a few more things that were great but I won’t mention them. One thing that really struck me today was how beautiful the Shephelah is, I guess it is very brown and dry in the summer, but here in the winter it was green and absolutely beautiful.

Tomorrow we’ll be down in the Negev (southern wilderness) where Abraham, Isaac and Jacob spent a lot of time, as well as the Israelites. And we’ll be in a new hotel (in Elat) where hopefully I’ll have internet and I can actually post this. I hope everyone is doing well. Thanks for reading.