Today was field trip number two. We went to an area known as the Negev. If I remember right, Negev in Hebrew means dry. It's just about as far South as you can be and still be in Israel. And it's a desert. Dry, hot, but also suprisingly windy. It was so windy, you didn't feel sweaty until you were out of the wind or went inside. And then it felt super gross. But out in the wind it was great.
Our first stop in our trip to the desert was a place called Lakiya to visit a weaving factory there. The weaving factory is owned and run by Bedouin women. The Bedouin people were more or less forced to stop their nomadic lifestyle by the State of Israel. They settled down in towns, some sanctioned by the state, others not. The men would go out and work, and the women would stay home and take care of things. The women would rarely leave their homes because they didn't know how to act in the outside world. They had no skills necessary to really do anything outside the home. The weaving project was created to help these women learn skills in management and finance, more or less basic buisness skills, by selling their weaving, something that they had passed down in their communities for generations. It was really amazing being there, and seeing everything that those women were able to accomplish on their own. They have started to market their wares all around the world. If anyones's interested their website is http://www.lakiya.org/. I'd very much reccoment checking it out.
Next we went to Tel Beer Sheva. A tel is the word for an archaeological site where you can't see any ruins on top, it more or less looks like a big hill, perhaps where a hill shouldn't be. After digging down, the archaeologists will run into walls and other things. The tel dated to the Iron Age, so it's not the Beer Sheva that is mentioned in regards to Abraham and the other patriarchs. The site of that Beer Sheva is most likely under the modern city of Beer Sheba. (From what I've been able to tell, the names Beer Sheva and Beer Sheba are more or less interchangeable. My Old Testament professor today referred to Beer Sheva as the tel and Beer Sheba as the modern city. It's Beersheba in the bible. Wikipedia made me think that it doesn't matter. Confusing? Sorry. :P) The Iron Age is the during the time of King David, Solomon, basically through the first temple period. They had a cistern there underneath the city that you could walk through. It was huge! Crazy huge! There was basically a deep, stone lined pit with a hole in the bottom. You walk through the hole, and into a series of huge plaster lined water chambers underground. It was just cool.
The next place that we visited was tel Arad, and the place where I got the title for this blog. Arad had both an Iron Age fortress on top of the hill, and a Canaanite village at the bottom of the hill. We explored the fortress first. My Old Testament professor told us about how when they were excavating the tel they found in one house pottery shards called ostracon. Ostracon are special pottery shards because they have writing on them, used more or less as disposable letters. A few of the pottery shards deal with events leading to the fall of the the Kingdom of Judah in 586. My professor read a few of them to us. When reading about the fall of the Kingdom of Judah, I've always thought that the people deserved what they were getting. They weren't listening to the prophets, and this was their punishment. But even though they weren't doing everything right, they were still people, people who were doing everything that they could to defend their home against the coming armies, but in the end just couldn't do it on their own. They weren't necessarily evil people, just people who weren't listening to the right people.
The Canaanite village was huge, and had a good sized wall all the way around it. It reminded me of the Great Wall of China. The village dates to 2500 BC, so before the time of Abraham. There was a huge well at the very bottom of the village. My professor explained that we don't know a lot about the various buildings in the village, but it was easy to see walls, and what would have been rooms. There are a lot of places around here...well, Jerusalem, where the city is much higher than it was at the time of Jesus. More or less, the only areas of the city that are the same hight as they would have been at that time are the Temple Mount and the Western Wall. But walking through these ruins that have been excavated, people actually walked there. People build that wall out of mud bricks, and you can still see the bricks. People dug that cistern. People who are gone now, but they actually lived. And you can see what they left behind.
One thing that we talked about in regards to the sites we visited were when the people weren't following the God of Israel. In each site that we visited there was some kind of alter or temple that you can tell from various signs that weren't following the Law of Moses. Arad actually had a temple patterned after the temple in Jerusalem. You read about in the scriptures how the people aren't following God, but it's different to actually see the evidence, and to discuss what they were doing wrong. Most of the time they were following a lot of the tenets of the Law of Moses, but there was something, or a few things, that were just off, and they completely missed the mark because of it.
All in all, it was a really great fieldtrip. It was a ton of fun to explore the ruins. And we saw camels! There were camels everywhere! They have camel crossing signs like we have deer crossing signs. Also, there were sheep herds all over the place. We got to see a shepherd herding sheep! It was so cute, the sheep at the front, if they got too far ahead of the shepherd, would stop and wait for the shepherd to catch up before continuing on. Super cool.
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