On Sunday, a group of us went to a town called Ein Kerem, which is in the “hill country” where Elizabeth, Zechariah and John the Baptist were from. First we went to the Church of the Visitation where Mary met Elizabeth and the baby in Elizabeth’s womb leapt for joy, and Mary responded with what is known as the Magnificat. It was a beautiful church, and the courtyard had the Magnificat written in 60 different languages on the wall. There is also a tradition that tells a story of Elizabeth and John, that when Herod was killing all of the first born sons in an attempt to kill Jesus, John was also a baby at the time. Elizabeth was running away from the soldiers and when she couldn’t go any further she cried out to God for help, and the earth opened and hid her and John. The rock that supposedly hid John is enshrined in this church. Then we went down the hill and across the street to the Church of John the Baptist which commemorates the birthplace of John. Here on the wall in the courtyard they had the Canticle of Zechariah written in many different languages.
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| Statue of Mary and Elizabeth with the Magnifact behind them in different languages. |
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| The rock that hid baby John :) |
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| chapel dedicated to the birth place of John the baptist |
Then we went to the Hadassah hospital because they have a synagogue there with windows made by Marc Chagall. There are 12 windows representing each of the twelve tribes of Israel and they are very symbolic as to the characteristics of the tribes. We couldn’t take pictures inside, but I recommend doing a google search to see them because they are really beautiful (http://www.hadassah.org.il/English/Eng_MainNavBar/About/Art+at+Hadassah/The+Chagall+Windows+Pictures.htm). From there we went to the Israel Museum, which had a huge model of ancient Jerusalem, so you could see what the Temple would have looked like, Herod’s palace, the walls at different times, the residential areas, etc. It was really neat to pick everything out that we have been learning about. The museum also had some of the Dead Sea scrolls on display in a building modeled after the shape of the lid on one of the jars the scrolls were found in. We got to see the scroll of Isaiah, as well as some others from the Qumran Community. We weren’t allowed to take pictures of them though.
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| Lori and I infront of the model of the city. The temple is in the upper left, Herod's palace is right behind us. |
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| The building the houses the dead sea scrolls |
Monday we went to Tel Aviv to get our visas for Egypt, and we stopped at a museum there as well. I was pretty museum-ed out from the day before, but something they had that was neat was a model of an ancient Israeli house. Then on the way home we stopped at Nicopolis, which is one of the 4 sites that claims to be Emmaus. They don’t know which one really is Emmaus, but this is close enough! The city was normal ruins, nothing special. the really interesting part was that they have two 1st-century Jewish tombs! And you could go in one! This would have been very similar to Jesus’ tomb. Its not what we imagine from movies and pictures. The hole is only about a 2ft square, enough to crawl into and pull a body through. Inside was a room about 6 ft square that had 7 more little holes which would hold the bodies. So when they say that Jesus’ tomb was one in which no one else had yet been buried, that was important because the tombs were shared by many people, probably a whole family. The stone that kind of plugs up the hole still would have been too heavy for the women to move by themselves.
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| Model of a first century Israeli house |
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| Me "resurrecting" from the tomb |
Tuesday we toured the ruins of the City of David. This was the first Jerusalem, but it lies just outside of today’s walls. There really isn’t much left other than a huge retaining wall that would have held the temple on the top of the hillside, and other little walls. The best part was, King Hezekiah in the 8th century BC decided to hide the city’s water source so that invaders could not block it off from the city, and he built a huge tunnel underground to bring water inside the walls. We got to walk through the tunnel with flashlights in water that was up to your knees and at one point almost to your waist. It took about 25 minutes to walk through and was so much fun!
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| In Hezekiah's Tunnel |
Then we went to the Southwest corner of the Temple Mount today, which is still part of Herod’s original construction. The street along the west side of the temple was like the 5th avenue of the day with shops and socializing, so our guide said that Jesus definitely would have walked on this street because anyone who came to the temple did. That was pretty neat.
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We had about 5 minutes at the Western Wall before our next tour, so I was able to go up to it, touch it, and say a quick prayer, but I will definitely have to go back and spend some more time in prayer there. Then we walked through another tunnel that runs along the Western wall. From what I understand ( I was getting all of my time periods mixed up by then because we basically walked underground through Jerusalem’s entire history that day), part of this tunnel was dug recently and the area would have been at street level back in the day, and part of it was actually a secret tunnel then in in which they could hide the arc of the covenant during an attack.
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| At the Western Wall |
After getting out of that tunnel, we were exhausted, so we stopped at the Austrian Hotel and had a beer on the roof.
The past two days have been just catching up on rest and school work. I have a presentation to give next week, and needed to finish up some research. We leave for Galilee tomorrow! We will be spending a week in Galilee touring all of the cities Jesus preached in up there. We are staying a couple nights right on the sea of Galilee! I will post again when we come back!
“ Jesus is going before you to Galilee; there you will see him as he told you.” Mark 16:7
1 comments:
Hey Darcy!! Looks like you are having an amazing time out there!!! Keep up the great work!
Mark
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