In 1974 our whole family (six of us) had the once-in-a-lifetime privilege of spending the summer semester on a ‘working leave’ in the Holy Land. As guests of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and the Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Beersheba, we were not exactly tourists all the time, but that was all to the good. The sense of belonging was greater, and of participating in the life of a nation reborn in a Land which is marked by a dynamic fusion of the past and the present.
Your editor has suggested that we share some highlights of our experience in the Land of which Moses said that God’s eyes are upon it at all times (Deuteronomy 11:12). This would take a book not an article! We indeed went up and down the Land, not quite from Dan to Beersheba but certainly from the Lebanese border to Arad far into the Negev wastes.
Since the Six-Day War of 1967 much of the tawdry commercialization of the ‘holy places’ has been done away with. Superstitious and bogus Christian ‘sites’ are no longer treated seriously. Instead, the real places, people and events of Biblical times are being brought ever more vividly into the present through the careful work of scholars and archaeologists.
For example, it is most unlikely—though in Israeli archaeology almost anything is possible—that the exact site of the ‘upper room’ where the Last Supper was held and the Christian church began will ever be located. It is in any case buried beneath meters of rubble. But in a semi-desert land springs and vital wells cannot change even though rulers and dynasties pass. It was at the springs, wells and pools throughout Israel that we knew for certain that we were treading where men and women of faith had come to quench their thirst.
Abraham’s well at Beersheba is a secluded spot in what is today a wild west sort of a city of 100,000 people. The well has been tastefully restored by the government. There is an old wheel by which camels used to draw up the cool water from the depths. One can jump into the icy water of the Gihon spring outside Jerusalem exactly as did Joab and his warriors in their attack on the Jebusite fortress. Hezekiah’s workmen digging his emergency water conduit to the Pool of Siloam seem to have only just gone off the job! By the Pool itself we can share the excitement of the blind man as he bends down and with trembling hands washes off the clay which the Saviour had put on, blinkingly looks around him at people and things for the first time in his life, and then surely rushes out shouting I can see! I can see!” The big spring-fed pool where Gideon chose his brave three hundred is now a beautiful swimming spot just beneath the lovely cypress trees that clothe the sad slopes of Mount Gilboa. The sole ancient well at Nazareth must have been that to which Mary’s family chores took her, and her daughters, every day. Only the very rich had piped water in their homes.
Perhaps the most moving spot of this kind is the “well of Bethlehem by the gate” (I Chronicles 11:17), now no longer used. From just near this well, a wide view extends over range upon range of dry rocky hills towards Adullam more than fifteen miles away. Three men sneaked thirty miles over that terrain, right through the enemy lines twice, just to get David a drink of home water ! Even if they reached the deep well alive, would they be able to draw the water unmolested ? We now have an enhanced respect for the character of a man who could command loyalty of that sort from his friends!
Then there is a strange old well on the very top of Carmel, which though deep never dries up. It is only walking distance from the imposing statue of Elijah which crowns the summit. It is not hard to visualize the doubting men of Israel going back and forth three times at Elijah’s command and pouring water around the rebuilt altar of Yahweh. And then the fire descended and the people fell on their faces and cried “The Lord, He is the God.”
For us, perhaps the deepest and most lasting impressions were not made by the famous things—like the ruins of the synagogue in Capernaum, the Temple Area in Jerusalem, the wonderful model of Biblical Jerusalem in the grounds of the Holyland Hotel, the Garden of Gethsemane and the rest. It was the small things, once broken down carelessly cast aside and recovered millennia later, the unexpected meeting of some figure or event or place out of the pages of the Word, that told the most powerful tale.
Like the coin shop in an alleyway of old Jerusalem with a fabulous collection of ‘pennies’, each bearing the image and superscription of Caesar, and its lamps from houses Jesus may have visited. In the museum—a wine jar that belonged to Pekah, a seal of Queen Jezebel like the one that ‘sealed’ Naboth’s doom. A shepherd on the Jericho road separating the sheep from the goats to feed (right and left!). A camp of nomads in goathair tents at Dothan almost looking as though they were expecting Joseph to come over the hill at any moment. The path we took one evening which unexpectedly led to the newly-discovered grave of the prophet Malachi in a corner of the Mount of Olives.
A stone at the corner of the Temple Area, recently discovered in a pile of rubble which fell in AD 70: its inscription identifies the place on the temple battlements where the levitical trumpeter stood to blow in the new moon, the solemn feasts, and above all the year of release. A part of a temple vessel, also recently found in the rubble, bears the inscription “Corban” (offering, sacrifice) and two young pigeons are depicted on it, reminding us of Luke 2:24.
It was like this at Arad. Ruth Amiran, wife of one our hosts, is in charge of excavating the old Judean city of Arad. It is a wild and lonely spot, several miles from the new city which is taking thousands of newly arrived Soviet Jews. Painstakingly, she and her student helpers have sifted through heaps of smashed-up pots, and gone through the garbage heaps of generations long past. The story which these once discarded scraps of pottery tell is a moving commentary on the times of Jeremiah and the divine removal of the diadem from Judah’s profane and wicked prince.
Arad, these young archaeologists discovered, was one of the fortress and store cities built by Rehoboam as described in II Chronicles 11:11-12. Ruth Amiran has excavated some of the stores of oil and wine mentioned in that passage, including the quartermaster’s records for these commodities. But she also discovered something not mentioned in the Bible. In spite of the instructions in Deuteronomy 12 that Israel should have only one central sanctuary, Rehoboam built a temple in Arad on the site of an old Kenite high place. This temple flourished right down to the time of Jeremiah.
Ruth Amiran found many temple records. Among these are bits of pottery inscribed with lists of offerings made by prominent Israelite citizens. These bits of pot look so trivial until one realizes that they refer to people whom we have read about for years. One has inscribed on it “the Sons of Korah”, another “Merimoth”. One names the priest Pashhur who—according to the Bible—was “chief officer in the house of the Lord” and who smote Jeremiah and put him into the stocks.
The garrison records indicate that as Nebuchadnezzar closed in from the north, the Edomites were waiting their chance to pounce from the south, just as indicated vividly in Obadiah 11-14 and Psalm 137:7. Military dispatches, written on bits of pottery, indicate how desperate the situation had become:
“Take fifty men from Arad . . . and send them to Ramoth-Negev, and hand them over to Elisha the son of Jeremiah at Ramoth-Negev, lest anything should happen to the town. And the word of the king (Zedekiah) is upon you, upon your very souls. Behold, I have sent to warn you today—Get those men to Elisha Lest Edom should come thither “
As we look at these old bits of pot which the careless would toss aside, dug up from the dust of the land by the tanned young Israeli students, we remember that it was the prophet Jeremiah two thousand six hundred years ago who prophesied of Israel that “there is hope in thy latter end and thy children shall come again to their own border” (31,17)
The Origin of the Organic World – Part One