I know, I know, I haven't posted...in a week and a half, I guess. It's been crazy, with something going on every day. This post will focus on last week, then I'll do a second post on what's been going on this week.
The quote that is the title of this blog post is from my Old Testament, displaying the attitude that we were encouraged not to have as we went on our Shephelah field trip last Monday. The Shephelah is a region located between the Judean hills and the coastal plain, and is characterized by soft limestone, and several river valleys. It's a really fun word to say, and my ANES professor likes to throw is out wherever he can, so we like to joke about the "Soft limestone of the Shephelah." It's also a really easy word to substitute into songs. I know that it looks a little hard to pronounce, you say it sh-fey-lah.
Anyway, the reason my teacher had to remind us to have good attitudes was because it was all day, in the sun, climbing up and down tells, basically being as miserable as possible while seeing some really cool things.
The Shephelah, as my Old Testament teacher called it, is Samson and Delilah country. We went to Beth-Shemish, which is where Samson is from. There wasn't a lot there...yea. A couple of church ruins. The valley was full of fields, so it gave a really good visual for the destruction that Samson would have caused when he lit the foxes on fire and had them run through the fields.
Our second stop was to a fortress called Azekah. It was way up on the top of a mountain. My Old Testament teacher read to us a passage describing how the king of Assyria the first time they came through wasn't able to get his siege engines up to Azekah because the hill was so steep. We didn't have to walk up all the way...but we what we did, it was steep. Azekah looks over the Elah valley, which is the place where David slew Goliath.
Our next stop was Maresha. We went first to a place called the Bell Caves. There were chalk deposits under the ground (chalk is a form of limestone, which is found in the Shephelah), and so the people who lived there would dig down and then around to get the chalk out to make plaster, basically making a bell-shaped hole in the ground. We walked through several of them, and we sang a hymn in the biggest one. So cool.
After the caves was the underground city of Maresha. The people would carve caves out of the soft limestone of the Shephelah, and they lived there! Olive oil, we learned, needs to be kept into the dark, or else it spoils really fast, so a cave is the perfect place to have an olive oil press. Or an olive oil factory. We walked through what would have been a home there...or more like a neighborhood. I couldn't imagine living there, but hey, worked for someone, right?
Our last stop was a place called Lachish. The story of Lachish is begins with King Hezekiah not paying the Assyrians tribute. Sennacherib was a new king, and wanted to show everyone who was really in charge, which meant death and destruction for the Kingdom of Judah. My Old Testament teacher read to us a excerpt from an ostracon from Lachish talking about how one by one, the signal fires from other fortresses in the region, including Azekah, which wasn't able to be beaten by King Nebuchadnezzar, went out, meaning that they had been destroyed by the Assyrians, and that they would be coming to Lachish next. There is an Assyrian relief featuring the siege of Lachish that my ANES teacher showed us a copy of. To get their siege weapons to the city wall, the Assyrians build a ramp up the side of the hill. The defenders of Lachish would have known what they were doing, and would have tried everything to try and stop it, but in the end, there was nothing they could do. Lachish fell, leaving only Jerusalem to withstand the Assyrians.
On our way home, we stopped in the valley of Elah. My Old Testament professor kindly provided us with slings and then gave us the opportunity to sling stones at a rock wall in the same valley where David slew Goliath. Pretty legit.
Probably the other coolest thing that happened last week was our forum address. It was by a journalist who has lived in Israel for the last 25 years. He talked about the discrepancies between what we read about in the news and what life is actually like here. One of the problems he talked about was what he called celebrity journalism, where the news networks use a person to cover a story who is well-known, a familiar face or name, instead of the local person who the viewers or readers have never heard of before. He shared with us one story about how when Yasser Arafat died, he went to the city of Ramallah to see what was happening. While he was there, he saw an American news network...I think it was CNN... get ready to start a live news story. At the last minute, a well-known reporter from the United States who had just flown in jumped out of a car, run up, and kick out the local reporter. The girl who kicked out the local reporter had no idea what she was talking about and got all of her information wrong, all of which the local person would have been able to talk about perfectly. He told us this story to emphasize his point that the news networks can be more obsessed with getting the news out with a familiar face than with getting the story out right.
His next big point was about how journalists want to seem like this is a war zone, and how they are always in danger of some sort, because it makes them look cooler. There are tensions and demonstrations here, but things generally don't get really out of hand. Journalist however like to show the worst of it. And it's easy to find the bad things. Our speaker talked about how he once brought a reporter who was new to the country to Ramallah right after Palestine was recognized by the U.N. The whole city was basically a big party, everyone was just having a great time. Our speaker left the newbie and came back to Jerusalem. The next day, he saw that the story that the newbie had posted was him by a checkpoint where there had been a "demonstration," which was nothing more than some kids throwing rocks at soldiers, instead of talking about the party in Ramallah.
Basically, the moral of his story is to take every news story, especially the ones that you read about here, with a grain of salt.
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