Israel 2026 Tour Notes

Day 3 — Wednesday, Sep 9: Coastal Plain, Caesarea Maritima, Mount Carmel (Muhraqa)

We drove north along the coastal plain to Caesarea Maritima, then climbed Mount Carmel to the Muhraqa overlook above the Jezreel Valley before heading to the Sea of Galilee for the night.

Not recorded: Paul's trial site at Caesarea; most of the Temple of Augustus and Roma talk (only the closing application survives); and the first few minutes of Opher's Mount Carmel overlook talk (the history of armies crossing the valley is almost entirely inaudible). The Acts 12, harbor and Cornelius talks at Caesarea are missing their openings.

On the bus — to Caesarea

The gospel spreads — and then stalls (Acts 1, Acts 13)

• Jesus said the gospel would start in Jerusalem, then go to Judea, then Samaria, then the ends of the earth — and the book of Acts follows that progression (Acts 1:8).
  • Acts 2: it spreads like wildfire in Jerusalem through the baptism of the Holy Spirit, then out to Judea and Samaria.
• Then, apart from some scattering during Saul's persecution, it stops — the church waits about 15 years instead of sending the gospel out as commanded.
• The Holy Spirit moves them to act: "I have set you apart for this" (Acts 13:2).
• Paul understood he was called not just on the road to Damascus but "every step of the way" for a purpose God destined for his life.
• Barnabas and Saul leave Antioch not for some distant foreign land — they go "home," because Barnabas is from Cyprus.
  • The gospel returns to a place it should have gone as soon as Barnabas received it.

Why we're here

• "You did not choose to come here. The Holy Spirit motivated you to come here."
• Something about this journey will impact not just your life but the kingdom as a whole.
• The focus: when I get back from this trip, how am I a better disciple — and, as a disciple, how do I make disciples?
• Listen constantly for the whispers of the Holy Spirit to understand why he called you to this land.
• God promised this land to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob — but the promise extends to all who are grafted in, as Paul says, who seek to do God's will and build his kingdom.
• The church rightly focuses on mission, but sometimes God's call isn't to send others out — it's to train you up for mission in your own backyard, where you grew up, where you're comfortable.
• He closed in prayer for the trip, asking that we go home stronger disciples and a stronger church "whether in Round Rock or to the ends of the earth."

The coastal plain and the Philistines

• We're driving north on the coastal plain — inland it is lush, fertile and flat.
• That flatness is what let the Philistines control this area.
• Israel's history as a nation:
  • The united monarchy: Saul, David, Solomon.
  • The divided monarchy: after Solomon, his son Rehoboam "listens to his young, dumb friends" — red flag number one — and the kingdom splits into north and south (1 Kings 12).
  • We'll deal with the northern kingdom at Mount Carmel today.
• The Philistines aren't a big issue in the divided monarchy, but they are Israel's number one enemy in the days of the judges, Saul and David.
• They weren't originally from this land — they were imports from Greece, bringing advanced technology.

Chariots: the ancient tanks

• Put a few archers on a chariot, add spikes, roll through a battlefield — no one can get near it while arrows rain down.
• Armies were often measured not by soldiers but by chariots.
  • 100,000 soldiers against 20,000 soldiers with 5,000 chariots: "Guess who's going to win that battle? It's going to be the chariots."
• So for most of Saul's reign Israel could only hold the hill country — you can't get chariots up there.
• The Philistines kept scheming to force Israel to fight elsewhere or fight in unconventional ways.

Goliath and Greek-style warfare (1 Samuel 17)

• The Philistines propose: send out your champion and we'll send out ours.
• "That's how Greeks do battle" — like the Iliad or the Odyssey, Greek heroes against Trojan heroes, one on one.
• Ancient audiences of the Bible already knew these things; learning them adds depth to the stories, starting at our first site today.

Caesarea Maritima

Why James was killed by the sword (Acts 12)

• Acts 12:2: James, the brother of John, is put to death by the sword — a detail that would have made Theophilus pause, though we miss it.
• James and John were sons of Zebedee, a well-known family.
  • At Jesus' trial, Peter is outside by the fire; John is the one present, because his family was known to the high priest (John 18:15–16).
• James is a Jewish man being executed by a Jewish king. How did Judaism execute, all the way back to the Old Testament? Stoning — as with Stephen, stoned just outside the temple.
• Who executes by the sword? Romans — they beheaded their own.

The Mishnah and "fences around the Torah"

• The Mishnah tells us much about first-century customs; it was written about a hundred years later.
• After the Bar Kokhba revolt in the second century AD, the furious Romans expelled the Jews from Jerusalem; Jewish life regrouped up in Tiberias, where we'll be at the end of today.
• There Judah the Prince wrote down the oral Torah — Judaism's developing understanding of the law.
• The world changes over a long history: commandments given around 1300–1250 BC weren't all directly relevant by AD 1.
  • "You shall not boil a young goat in its mother's milk" — a Canaanite fertility practice, and the Canaanites were long gone.
• So how do you keep God's law? Build fences, or hedges, around it so you never drift back into sinful practices.
  • That's how you get from the milk command to: don't mix meat and dairy at all. "No cheeseburgers, let alone bacon cheeseburgers."
• The Mishnah likewise adds rules on execution: an apostate is executed in the manner of the Gentiles.
• So James was identified as an apostate and killed the Roman way to show how completely they rejected him.
  • His "apostasy": proclaiming Jesus as Messiah and living it so powerfully that this is how they tried to silence him and denigrate his memory.

Herod Agrippa's death in this theater (Acts 12:19–23)

• Herod went down from Judea to Caesarea; Tyre and Sidon, dependent on his food supply, sought peace through Blastus, his trusted servant.
• Today's sound booth was the most important seat in the house — the best view, where a throne would be set.
• Where do you make a speech in a city? The theater, where the acoustics are perfect — this is the place described.
• Josephus says outright that it happened here, and adds details:
  • His royal robes were woven with silver.
  • It happened in the morning — "look where the sun is, it has just come up" — so as he stood, the sun hit the silver and he glowed.
• He is struck by an angel of the Lord and eaten by worms; Josephus says the same thing.
• Opher added: Herod probably died right here, and James was executed down there. There are many Herods in the Bible — this is not Herod the Great but his descendant Herod Agrippa.

Same event, different sources

• Biblical, Roman, Greek and Persian sources sometimes tell the same story with different details.
• Best example — the Assyrian siege: an angel of the Lord strikes down 185,000 Assyrian soldiers (2 Kings 19:35).
  • Josephus: a plague in the Assyrian camp wiped out the same number.
  • Herodotus: rats came among the camp.
  • "Same story with a different understanding."
• In Scripture we're seeing history from a theological understanding, and we see God's hand on every step.
• Q: How did Herod get worms?
  • Likely already in his system — trichinosis from tainted pork, a sign he wasn't fully keeping Jewish ways. A very common way to die; Herod the Great died the same way.
  • Some commentaries say the stress and exertion of the moment exacerbated it.

Theater, amphitheater and hippodrome (Opher)

• A theater is for shows; the Colosseum has no stage but an arena — "arena" literally means sand — for fighting and animals.
  • "Theater for shows and amphitheater for blood."
• A hippodrome — "hippos" is horse; "the way of the horses" — is for chariot races, the main attraction.
• The Colosseum held about 70,000; a hippodrome, about 200,000.
• The Roman strategy: give the masses games, a distraction from daily life.
• Rome assumed the Jews would eventually accept that the Roman way was right, like everyone else they conquered. They miscalculated: the harder Rome pushed, the more the Jews rebelled — endless rebellions.
• This is the world Jesus comes into: heavy taxes, foreign occupation, and Jews actively looking for a military leader to get them out.

Herod's harbor and frankincense (Opher)

• Herod took a new invention and used it in a way no one had thought of — by putting it in the water — and built one of the largest harbors of its day.
• Ships arriving around October–November were stuck for the whole winter:
  • They paid port taxes, needed their boats repaired, and their crews spent money with local sellers.
• His main export: frankincense, the hottest commodity of the ancient world.
  • A specific group of Bedouin knew how to move it from the deserts of Yemen to this land, and Herod controlled the whole export industry.
• This made him "filthy rich" — the source of his money to build and build and build.
• The builders were not slaves; they were paid — around 10,000 people on a single project — so people could feed their children.
• An illegitimate king (not a son of David, as far as the Israelites were concerned) stays in power through economic prosperity: "As long as we can feed our children, we know it could be worse."
• It got bad when his sons took over — "not very smart rulers" — the economy slid, and with an illegitimate king and hated Romans: "Let's rebel, rebel, rebel."

Herod the builder and Greek ideals of beauty (Opher)

• Herod lived in the Roman period but held Greek ideals of beauty — a gift to archaeologists.
  • In Greek-style building, one piece of a column tells you its full height, its capital, the spacing to the next column, and how many stood in the street.
  • Everything is symmetrical: if one side is built like this, the other side matches.
• Greek vs. Roman:
  • A Greek statue is perfect front and back; a Roman statue is perfect in front, with a rough block behind — "if you're not going to see it anyway, why waste time?"
  • Greek columns are all one material; Roman columns match in size but might mix marble with a basalt column reused from 2,000 years earlier.
• Herod was the greatest builder of all time; everywhere he went, even briefly, he built himself at least one palace — Masada has two.
• His palace here is just below us; the column pieces are reconstructions stamped 1997.
• Columns aren't single stones but stacked drums, "kinda like Lego pieces" — a hole on top of one, a peg on the bottom of the next — then plastered to look like one stone.
  • Anyone wanting a Samson picture between the columns is welcome — "Samson was a big guy, so he had a good reach."
• This theater was the first Roman theater in the land of Israel — Roman culture penetrating the land.

Why the governor was in Jerusalem at Passover (Opher)

• Three times a year, hundreds of thousands of Jews made pilgrimage — not to Caesarea but to Jerusalem, where the temple was.
• Like the Macy's parade: does the police commander watch from his couch, or is he on the ground making sure it goes smoothly?
• So whoever ruled — governor or king — lived here most of the year but went up to Jerusalem for the feasts.
• That's why, at Jesus' trial, the governor was there and not here: it was one of those pilgrimages.

Public latrines (Opher)

• Running water flowed underneath the seats, with fresh water in front.
• You used a stick with a cloth on it to clean yourself — something found everywhere in the ancient world. "Day-to-day life. You can't escape it."
• Q (on the walk to the hippodrome): Were there Jews who embraced the culture?
  • Yes, many — called Hellenized, from the Greek; almost everything in the Roman world came from the Greeks first.

The hippodrome by the sea (Opher)

• Being so close to the sea, the water kept eating away at the foundations.
• Herod maintained it anyway because he wanted to show off the beauty of the sea.
  • "This is not like a theater. This is only a hundred percent for fun."
  • He left out the seats on the sea side so dignitaries could watch the ships come and go; normally both sides would have equal seating.
• Later Roman governors didn't want to maintain it and let it be destroyed, then built another hippodrome inland beyond the sea's reach.
  • Archaeologists know where it is and intend to dig it up once funds are raised — archaeology is not only about what you find; "you need money to start the operation."

Herod's games and the first three medals (Opher)

• When Herod finished building the city, he wanted to celebrate by reinstating the Olympics.
  • The games had been banned in Rome for about a hundred years because too many people died — sometimes they were to the death.
  • They were held every five years, not every four.
• The problem: top athletes wouldn't come. This was the border between Rome and its biggest enemy, the Parthians (Persians) — constant war, constant Jewish rebellion — and there was only one prize.
• Herod wrote back: "I'll make it worth your while" — there would be three winners.
  • The idea of gold, silver and bronze in a single event starts right here, and the prizes had cash value.
  • "We are not the people of sports, but we revolutionized sports history."
• Q: What time of day were the races?
  • Almost everything was by day — no electricity — from morning to evening.
  • The theater sits at the edge of the city, away from the shopping, so you stay focused on the show; at the hippodrome, "spend as much money as you can, lose as much money as you can."
• Q: Did the theater and hippodrome run at the same time?
  • Eventually, yes. Early on, when Rome first enters a place, the theater matters most, to teach the stories of the gods and the culture; once people are "already Roman," they can choose either.

Cornelius and the Acts 15 council

• Cornelius and his whole household are filled with the Holy Spirit (Acts 10); so are Gentiles on Cyprus and in southern Turkey during Paul's travels.
• The church has to pause: if the gospel and the Spirit are for the Gentiles too, do Gentiles have to become Jews — be circumcised, eat kosher, dress the same way?
• The Acts 15 council debates it and answers no: their ancestors didn't stand at Sinai with ours and never made that covenant.
• What they must keep is rooted in the covenant with Noah that binds all mankind — three main things (Acts 15:20, 29):
  • Abstain from sexual immorality.
  • Abstain from idolatry, the worship of false gods.
  • Abstain from strangled animals, or the shedding of innocent blood.

The new self

• We read those three and think, "That's easy — I don't do any of those."
• But those three things defined the Gentile world. The call was to forsake your entire old identity.
• We proclaim this at baptism — I go into the water and come out a new creation — but do we live it?
  • "Sometimes the world doesn't see any difference between pre-Christ us and us today."
• The identity that made me me "needs to die and needs to be crucified along with Christ."
• That was not an easy call for the first-century church, and it isn't today.
• Demas: "Demas has deserted me, because he loved this world" (2 Timothy 4:10).
  • Demas traveled with Paul. In Ephesus, Paul performed "extraordinary miracles" (Acts 19:11) — meaning healing, casting out demons and raising the dead were the usual.
  • Demas witnessed the unusual and still loved the world enough to walk away.
• That's the danger when we don't get rid of the old self.

Temple of Augustus and Roma

• Some sources argue the temple here honored not just Caesar but Caesar and Roma — common in the first century, with Caesar as the living-god personification of Rome.
• Q: Are these ruins the palace?
  • No — the palace is not up here; these are fortifications from the Crusader era.

Application: What's our excuse?

• The early believers carried the gospel out of that court down there, in the middle of everything this place represented.
• "If they are willing to carry the gospel in such darkness... then what's our excuse in the world that we live in?"

Mount Carmel (Muhraqa)

The view from Muhraqa (Opher)

• The Mongols swept across Asia from east to west and took even this land, before being beaten by the Mamluks.
• We are probably at the spot where Elijah's contest happened — whether on this peak or the next one, you have to be able to see both the peak and the Kishon below, which is why the church was built here.
• The Elijah statue at the entrance shows the false prophets under his feet as he raises his sword.
• The story is 1 Kings 18 — and Armageddon is Revelation 16:16.
• Mount Tabor, the round mountaintop: in ancient Israel it marked the border between three tribes; one tradition places the Transfiguration there, when Moses and Elijah appear beside Jesus.
• The Jezreel Valley holds "endless" biblical stories, especially from the book of Judges.

Passes, highways and Megiddo (Opher)

• Megiddo sits at the southern edge of this mountain range.
• The Carmel range is a natural barrier on the number one highway of the ancient world; to cut across, you went through the pass here or the main one next to Megiddo.
• Whoever controlled these mountains controlled the road — and its taxes.

Yokneam and the Levites (Opher)

• The tree-covered hill with nothing built on it, between the small houses and the larger buildings, is the biblical Levitical city of Yokneam (Joshua 21:34), no longer being excavated.
• In ancient terms, a place with a wall around it is a city — even if it's four families.
• The Levites received no tribal territory, only cities within the other tribes.
• They were chosen because they alone did not take part in the golden calf (Exodus 32:26).
  • They became God's "ambassadors," the connection between God and the people, serving in the temple.
• Descendants of Aaron are Kohanim (priests); the rest of the tribe are Levites, the helpers.
  • Even today, the surname Cohen marks a Kohen and Levi a Levite.
  • "It is not something that you can learn and become." Unlike a seminary-ordained priest, no amount of study makes you a Levite — it's bloodline.

Israel's military and safe rooms (Opher)

• The airbase below is active.
• Its runways aren't parallel, so an enemy needs two rounds of bombing instead of one; planes land and are "swallowed up" underground.
• For scale: one US aircraft carrier has more personnel than Israel's entire navy and more firepower than Israel's entire air force.
• For 20-plus years, every Israeli home has one designated safe room with a blast door, blast window and air filters against chemical attack.
  • His son lives in theirs — it's a regular bedroom in normal life.
  • When the alarm sounds, everyone is in within five seconds; after about eight to ten minutes, a phone app signals the all-clear and life goes back to normal.
  • There are also public shelters, and schools must have them.
• "It's very strange to see Israelis living through a war" — you go to work, go to school, run to the shelter, then go back to what you were doing.

A land that depends on rain (1 Kings 17)

• Elijah declares there will be neither dew nor rain except at his word (1 Kings 17:1).
• Israel knew from the start it was a difficult land — no natural water source for irrigation:
  • The Mediterranean and the Dead Sea are salt water.
  • The Jordan River and the Sea of Galilee are the lowest river and lowest freshwater lake on earth — you'd have to siphon water up, and they lacked the technology.
  • The only source of water for crops was rain (we'll build on this at Dan).
• The 40 years in the wilderness weren't punishment as we might think — they forced reliance on God, who provided water and manna day by day.
  • So that in this land, when there's no rain, they'd know who to look to and pray to.

Covering all the bases

• The northern kingdom hadn't abandoned God — they worshiped God and other gods.
  • If the Lord doesn't send rain, maybe Baal the storm god will; if not Baal, maybe Asherah — down the list.
• Jezebel, a Phoenician princess, pushed the worship of Baal and Asherah while killing the Lord's prophets.
• Elijah thinks he is the last one; the Lord says no — there are others he has protected (1 Kings 19:10, 18).

"You troubler of Israel" (1 Kings 18:1–18)

• In the third year, God sends Elijah to Ahab; the famine is severe in Samaria.
• Obadiah, a devout believer, had hidden 100 prophets in two caves, fifty in each, with food and water.
• Obadiah is terrified to report Elijah — that's how dangerous loyalty to the Lord was.
• Ahab greets him: "Is that you, you troubler of Israel?" (1 Kings 18:17) — a strange way to greet a prophet, as if it's all Elijah's fault.

Ahab: the greatest king of the north

• By earthly standards Ahab was the northern kingdom's greatest king — most powerful, most wealthy, strongest military, most political influence.
• He was the first king of Israel to master chariots.
  • He had his capital at Samaria and a second capital here in the Jezreel Valley to control the valleys with his chariots.
• Assyria was rising to the north — "absolutely brutal," picking off small kingdoms one by one.
• The frightened local kingdoms turned to Egypt, the "big god on the block" since 3200 BC.
  • Egypt wouldn't fight (overextended, vulnerable to others like the Libyans) but offered arms and money — on condition it chose the leader. It chose Ahab.
• Battle of Qarqar: only the Assyrian account survives, and it claims victory — but everyone claimed victory (the Hittites and Egyptians both built victory monuments after fighting each other).
  • Yet Assyria halted its advance and didn't return for a hundred years, Ahab's reign continued, and the other kingdoms survived. Ahab won and became the hero of the region.
• Then Elijah shows up saying, "You're doing it all wrong. God's angry with you."

Blessing isn't proof of righteousness

• "Look at how well God has blessed us" — but blessing doesn't always reflect that we're in God's will.
• God's grace, mercy and blessing fall on the just and unjust alike (Matthew 5:45); his ways are higher than ours.
• Most of us know someone who's loaded and a horrible person.
  • Growing up in the New York City area, he knew teenage drug dealers making hundreds of thousands of dollars — more than his parents ever made — by doing horrible things.
• Elijah was the only one standing up and saying so publicly: "I have not made trouble for Israel, but you and your father's family have" (1 Kings 18:18).

Why Mount Carmel: Baal's home field

• Elijah summons all Israel, the 450 prophets of Baal and the 400 prophets of Asherah "who eat at Jezebel's table" to Mount Carmel (1 Kings 18:19–20) — somewhere within eyeshot of where we stand.
• Carmel was the border: Phoenicia crept down the coast, and this mountain was Phoenicia's southern border and Israel's northern one.
• Archaeology and the text show this place was consumed with Baal worship — his high holy place.
  • In the ancient world you went up to worship, as close to the heavens as possible — the same reason they built the Tower of Babel. This is the highest peak in the region.
• Elijah is saying: we'll go to Baal's home ground — "We're going to give you home field advantage."

Stacking the deck (1 Kings 18:21–29)

• "How long will you waver between two opinions? If the Lord is God, follow him; but if Baal is God, follow him." The people say nothing.
• Elijah lets Baal's prophets choose their bull first — he gets the leftovers.
• "The God who answers by fire" — fire from the sky is lightning.
  • Baal is the storm god; how would you expect him to answer? With a storm, with lightning.
• Home ground, the best sacrifice, and the answer expected in Baal's own way — "He's stacking the deck against himself."
• They call on Baal from morning till noon, dancing around the altar; no answer.
• Elijah taunts them: shout louder — maybe he's deep in thought, busy, traveling, on vacation, or asleep. "This is where I love Elijah."
• They slash themselves until the blood flows, prophesying frantically until the evening sacrifice — "no one answered, no one paid attention."

Fire from heaven (1 Kings 18:30–40)

• Elijah repairs the altar of the Lord that had been torn down — so before Baal was ever an issue, this mountain was a holy place where people worshiped God.
• Twelve stones, one for each tribe of Jacob; a trench around the altar.
• Four large jars of water poured on the sacrifice — three times — until the trench is full.
  • Remember what Israel hasn't had for three years: water. "Oh, you're talking craziness, Elijah."
• His prayer: "Let it be known today that you are God in Israel and that I am your servant... Answer me, Lord."
• The fire of the Lord falls and consumes the sacrifice, the wood, the stones, the soil and the water. The people fall down: "The Lord, he is God!"
• The prophets of Baal are seized and killed in the Kishon Valley.

Application: Coming to God without coercion

• The prophets of Baal spent hours trying to make their god do something.
• In the Greco-Roman, Egyptian and Canaanite systems, worship meant appeasing the gods to get them to do your will — "Trick them if you have to."
• We don't try to make God subject to our will; we are subject to his. His will that day was that Israel would return to a right relationship with him.
• Elijah didn't need anything fancy — "He didn't need smoke machines and light machines," or hours of crying out at the altar — just a prepared heart: "God, show yourself."
• A pastor once said God is insulted by small prayers; "That's not the reality of what Scripture tells us."
  • We seek God's will above fanciness, riches and the things of this world; in his will, there's no need to coerce or manipulate the moment.
• "All it takes is, God, I'm your servant. Show yourself here. Answer me today."
• The answer isn't always what we want, but God promises he's with us to the end of the age (Matthew 28:20) and we won't be left without answers if we are faithful.
• Elijah knew his God was greater than all of it.
• The question for us: do we approach the altar knowing our God is greater than every power of this world — knowing the deck is stacked against us and being somewhat joyful about it? "Because when God answers, it shows others exactly who he is through our lives."

The Carmelite monastery

• We're at a Carmelite monastery; the Carmelites are a Catholic order that ties its identity specifically to this place and these events.
• At last count, about 23 Carmelites live here.

Day 4 — Thursday, Sep 10: Jordan River Baptisms (Yardenit), Magdala, Sea of Galilee Boat Ride, Chorazin (Corazim), Ancient Jesus Boat Museum (Ginosar), Capernaum (Kfar Nahum)

The day circled the Sea of Galilee: south from Tiberias to the Jordan River at Yardenit, back north past Tiberias to Magdala, across the lake by boat, up to Chorazin, then down to Ginosar and Capernaum on the northern shore.

Not recorded: The baptisms at Yardenit themselves (no audio); most of Opher's commentary after the film at the Jesus Boat Museum (Day 4-11 is too garbled); and Opher's opening at Capernaum on pilgrims and sacrifices (only a fragment survives in Day 4-15). Several Magdala talks and the first minutes at Chorazin are also missing their openings.

On the bus — to Yardenit

Why be baptized again? (Jeremy)

• Yardenit is one of the traditional sites of Jesus' baptism. He was baptized in the Jordan, but the question is where along the river.
  • Some place it down by the Dead Sea, but "that doesn't make sense when it comes to what we know about the first-century world" (more on that when we drove south).
  • There are two prominent candidate sites, one just north and one just south of the Sea of Galilee, and both are ritually pure by first-century standards. Yardenit, just south of the lake, is the one we went to.
• In the first century, baptism wasn't "once and done." Immersion happened daily.
  • It began as a proclamation of repentance and became a proclamation of belonging to Jesus.
  • In Ephesus, Paul meets disciples of John, not of Jesus, and has them baptized in Jesus' name. They were already practicing baptism, and John's whole ministry of baptism pointed to Jesus (Acts 19:1–7).
• In the first century, being baptized could be a death sentence: a public declaration of connection to Jesus at a time when following him was illegal.
  • Today we don't face the same danger, but the emphasis is the same: "a public declaration for all to see who it is that we follow."
• He closed in prayer for us, both those being baptized and those not. Jesus, who needed no cleansing from sin, humbled himself to be baptized and came up out of the water to show his connection to the Father.

From Jericho to the judges (Opher)

• Joshua takes over from Moses, and God splits the Jordan for Israel to cross, just as he split the "Reed Sea" (R-E-E-D).
• Israel enters from the east (modern-day Jordan) after about 400 years in Egypt and 40 years in the desert.
  • The land was never empty. It sat on the ancient world's main highway. He called its peoples "the -ites": Jebusites, Amalekites and so on. The exception to the rule was the Philistines.
• Jericho is the first city conquered: seven days of circling, seven times on the seventh day, with the Ark of the Covenant in front. Then they shout and blow the horns, and God destroys the city for them.
  • Groups from Nigeria, Taiwan or Hungary all join in "Joshua fit the battle of Jericho": "Somebody brainwashed the world."
  • The message of the Bible at this point is simple: do what God says and good things happen; do what he forbids and bad things happen.
• Judges tells how 11 tribes settle the land. Levi gets no territory of its own, only cities within the other tribes.
  • Each section follows one tribe finding a leader to rally around and fighting the local peoples. At the end the tribe is settled, "and it was quiet for 40 years."
  • The settlement period covers roughly 250 years (judges like Samson of the tribe of Dan, Deborah and Ehud).
• A pagan is someone who believes in more than one god. Back then there were two options: Israelite (one God) or pagan (many gods).

Saul, David and the Philistines (Opher)

• Israel sees that every pagan nation has a king and gets jealous. God isn't thrilled but lets them try, and Saul becomes the first king.
• The Philistines were Israel's biggest enemy. They held the coastal lowlands and brought chariots and iron.
  • This is the first introduction of iron to the region, while Israel used bronze. An iron sword and shield is a battlefield advantage.
  • It was also an economic advantage: if your iron farm tool broke, you had to go to the Philistines to fix or replace it.
• Goliath's challenge to single combat was a well-known Greek custom (the Philistines came from the Greek world). The champion was a delegate who represented his god.
• David, the youngest brother, only came to bring food to his brothers. His sling was the kind you whirl overhead, and the stone was almost baseball-sized: "you're gonna fall down like a bag of chips."
• After Goliath falls, the Philistine army barely fights. From their perspective, "our God lost this battle." "Gods don't die. So he just lost the battle."
• David keeps Goliath's iron sword, so he now has a better sword than the king. Saul's jealousy grows as the people's love shifts to David, and Saul chases him (we would see one of David's hiding places near the Dead Sea).
• Between Saul and David, a surviving son of Saul, Ish-bosheth, briefly crowns himself. The Bible mentions it in two or three verses.
• David is Israel's greatest conqueror, with influence stretching toward modern Turkey in the north and Yemen in the south.

Jerusalem, Zion and the temple site (Opher)

• David takes Jerusalem from the Jebusites by a loophole: his men go in through a secret tunnel and open the city gates instead of storming them.
• David wanted to name the city Zion, the source of "Zionist" and "Zionism," but the name didn't stick.
• "Jerusalem" is the pagan name: Ur Salima, "city of Shalim." Ur means city (compare Abraham's Ur Kasdim).
  • Shalim was apparently a Canaanite god, "so Jews, Christians and Muslims who only believe in one God still call one of the holiest cities in the world under a pagan god's name."
  • Some commentators connect Shalem to the one God, since Abraham meets Melchizedek, priest of God Most High, in that area (Genesis 14:18).
• Pagans believed in all gods, the Israelite God included, as one among a thousand. Each god controlled a territory, often marked by a northern altar and a southern altar.
• David buys the temple site from Araunah the Jebusite rather than conquering it (2 Samuel 24:18–25).
  • What you conquer, someone else can conquer back; what you purchase is yours. The Bible stresses purchases on purpose. Abraham, for example, refused to take his wife's burial place as a gift and paid for it (Genesis 23).
• David brings up the Ark and builds an altar, but he doesn't build the temple because he is a man of war with too much blood on his hands.
• Solomon (Shlomo, which contains shalom) builds God's house: "the king of peace builds God's house." Shalom means peace, hello and goodbye.
• They didn't call it the "First Temple," just "the temple." We call it the first because it was destroyed and another was built.

Questions

• Q: Samuel says Goliath wore bronze. How does that fit with the Philistines bringing iron?
  • Keep reading: the tip of the weapon is iron. They knew how to incorporate iron, even if other gear was still bronze (1 Samuel 17).
• Q: How did people prove a purchase rather than a conquest?
  • Conquest leaves bodies and blood. A purchase leaves proof: an agreement stamped or carved in stone. Archaeologists have found small inscribed tablets, such as one recording the purchase of a dove for sacrifice.

On the bus — to Magdala

Why "Sea" of Galilee? (Jeremy)

• "Lake" fits better. Matthew, Mark and John call it a sea for theological reasons, one of which ties to a verse in Isaiah.
• Jesus draws on key passages from Isaiah to show his messiahship.

Jesus avoids Tiberias

• About 85% of Jesus' ministry happens in the Galilee, mostly in the "evangelical triangle," yet the Gospels never mention him entering Tiberias.
• On his final journey to Jerusalem in Luke, he goes out to the Jezreel Valley and cuts back to the Jordan, adding days just to avoid it.
• The reason is that Tiberias was an unclean city, built on graves even though it was a Jewish city.
• Background:
  • Herod the Great's Galilee capital was Sepphoris. Nazareth was effectively its suburb, which fits Joseph and Jesus working as day laborers on Sepphoris' building projects.
  • After Herod dies, Philip builds a capital named for Caesar (Caesarea Philippi), and Antipas has to match him with Tiberias.
  • Antipas ruled the Jews but didn't really know Judaism, so he built the city on tombs. Contact with the dead makes you ritually unclean, so nobody wanted to live there, and he forced people to move there under threat of death.
• Tiberias became a black eye on the Galilee.

Mount Arbel and the prayer for the Messiah

• The crag we saw driving in is Mount Arbel, which overlooks the city.
• Pilgrims walked through the Arbel pass toward Nazareth to avoid Tiberias. As they passed, they developed a prayer asking the Lord to send his anointed one to redeem Israel from the Romans.
• "A psychological game": you see a massive city on the water that you can't enter, and avoiding it adds two days every time you go to Jerusalem "if you seek to follow the will of the Lord."
• The Galilee was the most volatile part of a volatile region. Rome's prefects were military commanders enforcing martial law, and revolts broke out even before Jesus because messianic expectation already existed.

Other would-be messiahs

• In Acts 5, Gamaliel defends Peter and John before the Sanhedrin. He lists earlier messianic hopefuls who were killed and whose followers scattered, and asks whether they might be fighting against God (Acts 5:34–39).
  • Jesus' followers are not dispersing.
• Paul says he studied under Gamaliel (Acts 22:3). Gamaliel headed the Pharisaic party in his day, and his grandfather Hillel is seen as a founder of one of the main Pharisaic schools (continued at Chorazin).

Magdala

How the site was found

• The modern town nearby is Migdal. A Catholic order (he thought the Franciscans) bought the land to build a hotel.
• In Israel you must run an archaeological dig before you build anything, "because sometimes you find something so important to somebody out there in the world that your entire building plans are going to have to change."
• The survey turned up ancient Magdala, including one of the earliest synagogues in the world. Today the site is entered through the finished hotel.

The Magdala Stone and the menorah (Jeremy)

• Everything stopped when they found this ornately carved stone, because its carving connects it to the temple. The key is the menorah.
• In Old Testament times, the Ark of the Covenant was the centerpiece of the tabernacle and then the temple. What happened to it, nobody knows.
• By the time the temple was rebuilt, the Holy of Holies was an empty room.
  • Alexander the Great and Pompey the Great forced their way in and were shocked to find nothing. Their own temples held images of deities and piles of gold.
• So the menorah, the golden lampstand outside the Holy of Holies next to the table of showbread, became the central symbol of Judaism in the New Testament world.
  • In the land, menorahs show up only in places connected with holiness, so finding one here signaled an important stone, and excavation found a first-century synagogue.

A synagogue Jesus almost certainly visited

• A few first-century synagogues are known, but this is the first from the Galilee of Jesus' ministry.
• Matthew and Luke say Jesus taught in all the synagogues of the Galilee (Matthew 4:23; Luke 4:15, 44). "I'd say it's a 99.99% chance that he is here."
• "If it walks like a duck and acts like a duck": he likely taught in these synagogues before his public ministry too. A boy could read and teach once he mastered Hebrew at about 12, which leaves about 18 years before his ministry began at 30.
• Only one other site in the land carries as much certainty, and we would see it near the end of the trip.

Magdala's wealth: salted fish

• Magdala was an extremely wealthy city because of the fishing industry.
• "How many of us grew up hearing that Jesus' disciples as fishermen were kind of this low-class, poor peasant-type people? … They were loaded." James and John were "two of the richest boys in the whole land."
• The Hebrew name, Migdal, means "tower." The Greek name, Taricheae, means "the place of the salting of fish."
• Salt was worth more than gold. Phrases like "worth their salt" and the word "salary" (Latin sal, salt) come from Rome paying soldiers and officials in salt.
• Salted Galilee fish were shipped to Jewish communities across the empire in Spain, Rome and France. Sources describe Galilee fish in Jewish shops in Rome.
  • Why? The Passover lamb can only be sacrificed at the temple. Outside the land, as when Paul keeps the feast in Philippi (Acts 20:6), people ate salted fish from the Sea of Galilee to tie themselves to home and the festival.
• The fountain in the hotel lobby isn't a modern recreation. It is an ancient fish pool where fishermen dumped their catch.
• Mary Magdalene was wealthy. She anoints Jesus, and she goes to bury him, which is expensive. Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus, who were also involved in the burial, were likewise wealthy: "The wealth hangs out with the wealth."
• Magdala rivaled Tiberias in some ways, but it was a clean city, so it makes sense that Jesus would come here.

What happened in a synagogue

• The front section was the school (beit midrash). The stone with two grooves is a student's desk for resting and turning a scroll. Later synagogues have nothing this fine, and the building also had frescoed walls and mosaic floors.
• The synagogue was a public gathering house used all week, mainly for reading and teaching.
  • Prayer was focused at the temple ("my Father's house will be called a house of prayer"), and worship happened at the temple. Study was also a form of worship.
• The synagogue is the basis for the church today. Paul, the "apostle to the Gentiles," always went to the synagogue first in a new city. Only after he was rejected there did he take the gospel to the Gentiles, some of whom (the God-fearers) were already attending.
• On the Sabbath, the reader read the Torah and the Haftarah, then gave an interpretation.
  • The Torah (Genesis–Deuteronomy) is read on an annual cycle, and the rest of the Old Testament on a three-year cycle. Because of the Jewish calendar, "it's almost as if you're never reading the same thing twice."
  • The two readings are expounded together: "this means this because of that."
• Hebrew is written without vowels, so the consonants D-D could be "dad," "deed" or "dead." Context decides, and interpretation becomes a conversation.
  • Example: the traditional figure of about 2 million Israelites entering the land can't work. Nine nations larger than Israel already lived there, and the land couldn't sustain a population bigger than today's even with modern technology.
  • The Hebrew word eleph can mean "a thousand" or a much smaller unit, "a handful," or a squadron of fighting men. One reading makes sense and one doesn't.
• Translators still wrestle with this, which is why there are so many versions: "we don't always agree."

Luke 4: Jesus in the synagogue

• He teaches in the synagogues of the Galilee and everyone praises him. In Nazareth he goes to the synagogue on the Sabbath "as was his custom," meaning every week (Luke 4:14–16).
• He stands up to read, so Jesus was literate. "How many of us have heard that Jesus has maybe a third-grade education?"
• "Carpenter" is a mistranslation. The Greek tekton means builder.
  • The King James translators were English and had never been to this land. English houses were wood, but here everything is built of stone, so a better term is stonemason.
  • The same thing happened with Samson's "foxes," which were actually jackals. Foxes are solitary, so catching that many would be a huge feat, but jackals run in packs. England has no jackals.
  • "We become people of the text and not the tradition."
• If even stonemasons were literate, the Galilee was a highly educated region, not a backwater.
• He is handed Isaiah and reads the Haftarah: "The Spirit of the Lord is on me…" Then he sits down and says, "Today this scripture is fulfilled in your hearing" (Luke 4:17–21).
• That is a messianic claim, yet nobody calls it blasphemy. "All spoke well of him" (Luke 4:22).
  • "Isn't this Joseph's son?" Matthew has "the carpenter's son," and Mark has "the carpenter himself," or the stonemason himself.
• The shift comes when he points to Elijah sent to the widow of Zarephath in Sidon and Elisha cleansing Naaman the Syrian. Both were Gentiles (Luke 4:23–27).
  • The message is that the Messiah isn't just for you. He is for all mankind, and the synagogue is furious.
• The context was tension: people hated the Romans and the Gentiles who forced pagan ways on them (the worship of Pan at Caesarea Philippi, and yesterday's hippodrome where people died for sport).
• Only one disciple really gets it: Judas (not Iscariot), who asks why Jesus shows himself to them and not to the world (John 14:22).
• They take him to the brow of the hill to throw him off, which was the start of a stoning (Luke 4:28–30).
  • Stoning wasn't a crowd throwing baseball-sized stones at someone against a wall. You pushed the person off a height and rolled large stones down on them. The small stones came last, to finish them off.
  • All this because he suggested God's mercy and grace were available to Gentiles.

Application

• The expert in the law asks, "Who is my neighbor?" In effect he wants Jesus to draw a circle around who deserves grace. Jesus answers with the Good Samaritan, the enemy of Israel who shows mercy (Luke 10:25–37).
  • Asked who was the neighbor, the man can't even bring himself to say "the Samaritan," only "the one who showed mercy."
• There is no drawing a circle around who receives grace. Jesus says the Father forgives us as we forgive one another (Matthew 6:14).
• An idol is an image representing a deity. The God of Israel needs none, because "we are his idols. We are his representatives. We bear his image for the world to see."
• "If Jesus is willing to say that, then what's our excuse?"

Questions on translation

• Q: What version are you reading from?
  • Mostly NIV, with some of his own translation from the Hebrew or Greek.
• Q: What translation do you recommend?
  • "The best translation is always going to be your own." He studied eight years of Hebrew and four of Greek.
  • Traditions stick even when translators know better. For example, the Greek of the Bethlehem story doesn't say there was "no room," but it became part of the Charlie Brown Christmas version.
  • The NET is the most accurate: a "wooden," word-for-word translation with notes explaining the choices, but hard to sit down and read.
  • For students: the NASB has the strongest New Testament and the ESV the strongest Old Testament.
• Q: Did each community have its own synagogue?
  • Yes. Magdala was big enough for two, and a second one was found across the street.

Details on the stone and the seat

• The oil lamps carved on the stone's side are knife-pared (Herodian) lamps, mass-produced in Jerusalem.
  • Pilgrims brought them home as the idea of carrying the light of the temple, the Shekinah glory, into your house: "bringing the glory of the Lord from the temple to build your house and impact your family."
• His former professor at Yeshiva University, Steven Fine, suggests the stone is a three-dimensional depiction of the temple, looking in through porticoes toward the table of showbread and its bread.
• The stone may have been where the Torah was unrolled for reading.
• In Luke 4, Jesus stands to read and sits to teach. "Sitting is the posture of teaching inside the biblical world." That's why the 12-year-old Jesus is found sitting with the teachers at the temple (Luke 2:46).
• One white limestone block among the common basalt probably served as the seat of Moses.
  • It was reserved for the elder, and in some synagogues it was where you sat to teach. Because of its central spot, Jesus would have stood to read here and then sat there.
  • At Chorazin we would see an actual throne-like seat of Moses.

Dating the synagogue: the Jewish revolt

• In AD 67, early in the Jewish revolt against Rome, the synagogue was torn down and its pillars used to build a fortification wall across the street.
• His first archaeology paper argued that the first-century general who claimed to have fortified this city was lying. The excavation found the wall: "Got proved wrong."
• The defenders lost on land, took to boats and lost at sea, then retreated overland.

Jesus' wealthy followers and the cost of the call

• Beyond the Twelve, a group of women traveled with Jesus and the disciples (Luke 8:1–3).
• At the trial of Jesus, John is let in because his family is known to the high priest (John 18:15–16). Some of the most influential people were following Jesus, so this was no backwater movement.
• Compare the rich young ruler: told to sell everything and follow, he walks away sad because he has great wealth. James and John did what he wouldn't and never got to enjoy their family's lavishness in their adult lives.
• The disciples fail again and again.
  • Mark especially highlights their failures. The young man who flees naked from Gethsemane is assumed to be Mark himself, saying "I also failed" (Mark 14:51–52).
  • Peter keeps putting his foot in his mouth.
  • "But at the end of the day … they understood the nature of the assignment and they stuck with him."

The spring-fed mikvaot

• These ritual immersion pools were very hard to keep full. You couldn't carry jugs of water from the lake, because the water had to be supplied "by the Lord." One source was natural springs.
• These pools sit on a line of natural springs, and wealthy households paid top dollar to be on it.
• They were uncovered only around 2019–2020. When the springs were opened, water flooded back in, and it still runs as clear as it did 2,000 years ago.
• How the ancients drained them is still unknown (today pumps are used).
• This is more evidence of Magdala's influence, and of why people from its world, like James, John and Mary, had such influential roles in Jesus' ministry.

Studying scripture in its world

• Q: Where do some of our traditions come from?
  • Many come from medieval or Renaissance times, when people imposed their own world on the text.
  • For example, shepherds in Jesus' day weren't lowly outcasts. They filled a role needed for the temple and held places of honor, and first-century sources are adamant about that.
  • Today we have far more: the Bible in many languages, more people who know Hebrew and Greek, faster sharing online, and more ancient sources that parallel the Bible.
• "If you're gonna study the Bible, you're not gonna study just the Bible itself."
  • A paper on Abraham Lincoln also has to cover the Civil War, Jefferson Davis and Thaddeus Stevens.
  • Likewise, understanding Joseph requires Egyptian history, Moses requires the geography where he shepherded, and Paul requires Roman history. That is why Paul can quote Greek and Roman authors in Acts 17.

Sea of Galilee Boat Ride

Fish and kosher law (Opher)

• Fish thrive where salty spring water enters the freshwater lake. Fishermen learned where fish gathered, and villages were later founded at those spots.
• Kosher law divides animals into three groups (birds of the sky, animals on land, creatures in the sea), and each has a biological test.
  • Fish must have both fins and scales. There's no "50% kosher."
  • Catfish is not kosher. His joke: "We bless it, we circumcise it, and then we eat it." In reality, observant Jews release it.
  • Even with modern genetics, no animal has been found that doesn't fit one category or the other.
• A "green" way to think about it: in almost every case Jews may eat animals that don't eat what humans eat. "A cow eats grass, I don't eat grass." A pig eats apples like we do. It isn't across the board, but it points to a cycle of life.
• Separating meat and dairy came later, through tradition.
• Fishermen caught only kosher fish by throwing the net and pulling it straight up rather than closing it around the fish.
  • Fish whose scales snagged in the mesh were at least half kosher, and then you checked for fins. A catfish can't get caught that way.

Israel's water (Opher)

• The lake is roughly 150–160 feet deep at its deepest.
• Near the baptism site is the dam at the south end that controls the flow into the Jordan.
• Pumping began in the 1960s, and then this lake supplied drinking water to almost every household in Israel.
• Today almost all drinking water is desalinated or recycled.
  • Tap water is recycled for fish ponds, and fish-pond water is recycled again for agriculture, such as date palms, which need lots of water but not clean water. Jericho is "the city of dates." There is almost no water loss.
• Twenty-five years ago, everyone would have put water at the top of their list of issues: Palestinians, the ultra-Orthodox, and politicians on the left and the right.
• In 1948 the whole area had maybe 1.8 million people. Today, counting Palestinians, it has over 12–13 million.
• "We're making the desert bloom." More fruits and vegetables are grown in Israel's desert than in the rainy north.

John 21 and the 153 fish (Opher)

• In John 21, Peter jumps out of the boat in a shallow area close to shore: "He's not walking on water, he's walking in the water."
• The catch was 153 fish (John 21:11). Hebrew is alphanumeric, meaning every letter is also a number.
  • Any specific number other than a round one like 40 signals a deeper layer, so readers try to turn it back into letters and words.
  • One reading of 153, his favorite, is Ani Elohim: "I am God."
  • A Jew of the time who knew gematria would immediately hear someone saying "I am God."

Calming the storm (Jeremy)

• In Matthew 8:23–27, English translations usually say a "furious storm" or "gale." The Greek word is seismos, the root of "seismic."
• Matthew uses the same word in chapter 28: at the resurrection there is a great earthquake (Matthew 28:2).
• Storms really do hit the lake.
  • It is the lowest freshwater lake on earth and is ringed by mountains.
  • In the evenings, cool Mediterranean air and warm Arabian desert air meet right overhead, get trapped in the bowl, and create furious storms.
• The lake also sits on one of the largest fault lines on the planet, the Syrian-African Rift. One side of the lake is on one plate and the other side is on another.
  • He cited the 2023 earthquake in Turkey and Syria as an example of how deadly quakes on this system can be, even with modern buildings.
• So Matthew describes waves, the disciples later mention the wind, and the ground itself is shaking. Jesus rebukes the wind and waves and all is calm: "What kind of man is this?"
  • "Not only did the winds and the waves stop, but what was creating them stopped, even the shifting of the tectonic plates."
  • He shows dominance not just over nature "but over all of creation."
• This comes right after Jesus heals many in Capernaum. It is what shakes the disciples to the core: "it really is God amongst them."

Application: He reveals himself again and again (Pastor Benito)

• Many iconic Bible stories happened on this lake. In Luke 5, the disciples have just landed their greatest catch ever. They leave a fortune in fish and resources to follow Jesus, who makes them "fishers of men" (Luke 5:1–11).
• In John 21, Peter is still dwelling on having denied Jesus three times, and Jesus comes to this same sea and reveals himself again: "try the other side."
  • Even after you've fallen, even after all the miracles, "I want you to know, I am your God."
• God called people in this group here from very different places: out of Hinduism in a village in India, out of a Buddhist family, from Laos, from West Texas, from New Mexico.
• "He's not just a God that is out there." He is Emmanuel, God with us, and now he lives in us.
• The group took a minute to thank God for how he first revealed himself to each of them (at a VBS, through a friend, a church service), then prayed and sang "We Exalt Thee."
• "The mission is always the same. That we follow him so others can know who our king is and we can be fishers of men."

On the bus — to Chorazin

Reading the map (Opher)

• Israel's borders:
  • Egypt and the Sinai to the southwest.
  • Jordan to the east, the longest land border.
  • The Mediterranean, "the quietest border."
  • Lebanon to the north and Syria to the northeast.
• From the Golan Heights you can see four countries: Lebanon, Syria, Israel and Jordan. From a mountain at the southern tip near Eilat (six or seven hours down Route 90) you can see Israel, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Jordan.
• Recap of the route so far: landing at Ben Gurion, up the coast to Netanya, Caesarea, Mount Carmel (the Muhraqa), Nazareth, and around the lake.
• The Jordan enters the Sea of Galilee from the north and leaves from the south, ending at the Dead Sea, its final outlet.

Herod's sons and the Jordan border

• After Herod the Great dies, his three sons divide his kingdom, which also included land in today's Jordan.
• Herod Philip and Herod Antipas did not get along. Antipas took Philip's wife, and John condemned him for it.
• The Jordan River was the border between them: mostly Jewish territory under Antipas on the west, and mostly non-Jewish territory under Philip on the east.
• The "kings" were Rome's puppets ("like a muppet"). Their job was to keep the Roman peace and send taxes to Rome, and a ruler who failed was quickly replaced. Eventually Rome took direct control.

The Decapolis

• The Decapolis was a third area belonging to none of Herod's sons, running from the middle of the lake's eastern side down toward the Dead Sea.
• Deca means ten (as in decade and decimal) and polis means city: ten self-governing Roman cities, each with its own governor and tax system.
  • Philadelphia was one of them.
  • The region of the Gadarenes, home of the man called Legion, was another. Jesus sends the demons into pigs that rush into the lake (Mark 5:1–20).
• The largest Decapolis city, Beit She'an (Scythopolis), was the only one west of the Jordan.
• When the Gospels say Jesus "got into a boat and went to the other side," it means crossing from Jewish territory (Capernaum, under Antipas) into pagan territory, a completely different culture.
  • Roman cities didn't care where they buried the dead. In Jewish areas you couldn't walk over graves, especially a man heading to the temple who needed to be in his purest state.
• Jews avoided the Decapolis. There were two routes from here to Jerusalem for the three annual pilgrimages:
  • West, through the Arbel pass to Nazareth, over the Carmel range on the ancient number-one highway to Jaffa (then a Jewish city), then east up to Jerusalem.
  • East, through the Jewish villages in Philip's territory and the mountains of Gilead, down to Jericho (a Jewish city), then about a nine-hour walk up to Jerusalem.

Chorazin (Corazim)

Staying ritually pure (Jeremy)

• Galilean Jews wanted to stay in a constant state of ritual purity so they could drop everything and go when called to worship at the temple, even if their trade (like pressing olive oil) made them impure.
• In Jerusalem, pilgrims who had purified themselves received a token to present at the temple, inscribed "pure unto God."

The setting for John the Baptist

• Before Rome, Israel had its own Hasmonean kingdom, the first self-rule since the sons of David. Because of sin and infighting between two brothers fighting over control, Rome "kind of just waltzes in and takes it."
• Messianic movements rose: "Follow me, I'm going to get rid of Rome."
• John came saying that's not how it works. Turn the hearts of the fathers and the sons back to the Lord, and he will send the Messiah (Luke 1:17).
• John was born to Levite parents who were advanced in age (Luke 1). By the time Jesus is 30, John already has a ministry and disciples.
• More was written about John outside the Bible by first-century authors than about anyone else of the time, including Jesus.
• He turned ritual immersion on its head: if you're going to immerse daily, make it about purity of heart and repent every time. That drew huge crowds.
• Jesus' early disciples were John's disciples.

Could John be the Messiah?

• John says he is not the one and isn't fit to untie the sandals of the one coming (John 1:27).
• The Messiah must come from David, of the tribe of Judah. John's father was a priest and his mother a daughter of Aaron, both Levites. He couldn't be the Messiah, yet people were so desperate they were willing to look past that.
• Likewise, the leader of the AD 67–72 revolt, Simon bar Giora, was proclaimed messiah though his name means "son of a proselyte" (a convert to Judaism), a man of no tribe. He was taken to Rome and executed, and his revolt failed.
• Paul meets disciples of John in Ephesus, about 1,500 miles away, some 25–30 years after John's death (Acts 19:1–7). Yet Chorazin, Capernaum and Bethsaida were John's backyard, and there's no evidence he left this area once his ministry began.
  • That shows the scale of John's impact.
• This is why God set Jesus' ministry here. John had already prepared the ground with a people who already had prepared hearts, people constantly seeking purity.

John as Elijah, Jesus as Elisha

• John is likened to Elijah. Before being taken up in a chariot of fire, Elijah asks Elisha what he wants, and Elisha asks for a double portion (2 Kings 2:9).
  • Elisha is so full of the Spirit that even after his death, a body thrown into his tomb comes back to life (2 Kings 13:21).
• If John is Elijah, Jesus is Elisha.
• Elisha raised the Shunammite woman's son, the son he had prophesied she would have (2 Kings 4).
  • Shunem is called Nain in the New Testament. There Jesus raises a widow's son from a funeral procession, and people say "a great prophet has appeared among us." They connect him with Elisha (Luke 7:11–17).
  • "Jesus just went in and provided the exact same miracle that Elisha did in the exact same place."
• John prepared hearts to follow and minds to see the wonders of God, as Israel had seen them 700 years earlier.

Baptism beyond the land

• When Gentile churches received the gospel, they were immediately baptized in Jesus' name. Yet outside the land there is no ritual immersion, because you are already ritually unclean. Purity is possible only in the land.
• So when Paul, Barnabas, Silas and John Mark baptized people, it had become something greater: repentance, and remembering that Jesus himself was baptized.
• If John's baptism was about repentance, why was Jesus baptized? To show his humanity: he lived as a man, without sin, to create a way back to the Father.
• In the morning's baptisms, we proclaimed what God has done. "You have a path to God already … but the idea of baptism is creating an example so that others follow and find that path."

Was John an Essene?

• Q: Was John one of the Essenes?
  • He doesn't think so. John had Essene-like tendencies, as Jesus did, but Jesus also deconstructs some Essene theology, and Paul mixes Sadducee and Pharisee thought. Overlap doesn't define someone.
  • The idea comes from the baptism site just north of the Dead Sea ("brown, murky, muddy water"), where Israel crossed on the way to Jericho, so it already had religious significance.
  • Pilgrims until modern times traveled at great expense, mostly on foot, and Jerusalem was the focal point. Crusaders went first to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre to pray. So in the medieval era a site was set up at the closest point on the Jordan to Jerusalem, and John became linked to nearby Qumran, the Essene headquarters.
  • The New Testament places John only in the Galilee. Josephus, the only outside source, says John was executed at Machaerus, but he believes Josephus got it wrong and that, based on the text, it was most likely Tiberias.
  • "Wilderness" (midbar) here means uninhabited pastureland where wild things grow, like the land around Chorazin, not necessarily desert.
  • John's "locusts" weren't insects. The word was slang for the carob plant, with its beans. John lived off the land, which requires somewhere things grow; the desert wouldn't sustain him.
  • There was little Essene influence up here.

Syncretism: the golden calf and Elephantine

• Aaron presents the golden calf as "your God who brought you out of Egypt." He blends the idea of Yahweh with the Egyptian goddess Hathor, whom they had been surrounded by.
• When Babylon attacks, Israelites including Jeremiah flee to Egypt. On the island of Elephantine they build a temple to the Lord next to a temple to Khnum, the potter god who makes life out of clay.
  • The Old Testament also says God is the potter and we are the clay. The similarity led to blending, and about 150 years later the priests of Yahweh were also worshiping Khnum.
• If you don't keep your guard up, that's what happens.

The seat of Moses (Matthew 23)

• "The teachers of the law and the Pharisees sit in Moses' seat" (Matthew 23:2).
• The seat here is a replica; the original is in the Israel Museum. The synagogue is 200–300 years later than Magdala's, and by then the seat of Moses had become an actual throne-like seat for the elder, who explained scripture during the service.

The four "philosophies" of first-century Judaism

• The Zealots, the "fourth philosophy" and the latest, wanted to drive God's enemies out by force and restore his rule.
• The Essenes are "the Amish of the Jewish world": hyper-strict, living cut off in their own communities, and rejecting Pharisees and Sadducees as not strict enough.
• The Pharisees and Sadducees, the two main groups in the New Testament, emerged in the first century BC.
  • After Israel threw out its Greek overlords (in place since Alexander the Great), the family that led the revolt was priestly, and half the people wanted to make them kings. You can't be both priest and king. Uzziah tried, and God struck him with leprosy (2 Chronicles 26).
  • The Sadducees were tied to that ruling family and held power in the kingship and the temple.
  • Those who resisted and wanted pure worship in line with God's law in a changing world found their authority in the synagogue. These were the Pharisees, who developed stricter and looser schools.
  • When the Hasmonean kingdom fell, the Sadducees kept power through the temple, "a money-making industry" that they abused. They were disliked by ordinary people and friendly with the Romans.
• "The Pharisees have nothing to do with the death of Jesus, it is all the Sadducees."
  • The Pharisees opposed capital punishment and especially crucifixion. When the two groups went to war, the Sadducees crucified captured Pharisees as an insult.

Testing Jesus: a culture of conflict

• Why do we see the Pharisees as Jesus' main opponents? Because they're who he interacts with most.
• "Judaism is a culture of conflict, but conflict is not bad. Conflict is how we grow."
  • When Pharisees "test" Jesus, it can be a way of asking to learn from him.
• His first master's degree, in ancient Judaism and the origins of Christianity, was in New York City. Students from Nyack College (Christian) and Yeshiva University (Jewish) took classes together.
  • They drilled each other hard ("tell me why you think this way"), "and afterwards, we went for Chinese food." They wanted to make sure the Christians truly believed and could back up what they proclaimed.
• The grain fields on the Sabbath: rubbing grain heads counts as destroying, which is work (Mark 2:23–28; Matthew 12:1–8).
  • This was a live debate between two Pharisaic schools. Shammai (strict) said that if your bull falls in a pit on the Sabbath, let it die rather than profane the Sabbath. Hillel (looser) said to get all your sons and neighbors and pull it out, because God cares more about sustaining life than about the Sabbath.
  • Jesus cites David eating the showbread and says the Sabbath was made for man, which puts him with the school of Hillel.
• Jesus was very close to the Pharisees, and his message resonated with them. Some wanted him dead, but "there's rogues everywhere."
  • Paul was "the most rogue of rogue Pharisees," rejected by other Pharisees.
  • Nicodemus and Joseph of Arimathea, who provided the spices and the tomb, were leading Pharisees.
  • Gamaliel, Hillel's grandson, defended the church (Acts 5).
  • Acts mentions believers who "are" Pharisees, present tense. Paul says "I am a Pharisee." Before the Sanhedrin the Sadducees want to kill him and the Pharisees defend him (Acts 23:6–9).
• Like a text message from your spouse, we can misread the sentiment of a text. One sad influence on how the Pharisees are read is antisemitism in the church.

Matthew 23: a human problem

• Jesus affirms the Pharisees' teaching ("do everything they tell you") but warns against their practice: "do not do what they do" (Matthew 23:3).
  • "Do as I say, not as I do." "Is this a Pharisaic problem or is this a human problem?"
  • Pastors today preach great sermons and fall morally. He cited the TV ministries of Jim Bakker and Jimmy Swaggart in the 1980s: many were saved through them, but you wouldn't want to do what those pastors did.
• "They tie up heavy, cumbersome loads" (Matthew 23:4): how often do we tell a new believer to do something we aren't doing ourselves?
• Wide phylacteries and long tassels were markers of a devotional life (more on them at the Western Wall). Love of honor, seats and titles follows. "You have one teacher … the greatest among you will be your servant … those who humble themselves will be exalted" (Matthew 23:5–12).

Application

• The things the Pharisees struggled with, "at one point we were there too."
• We need the same salvation and grace, working out our faith with fear and trembling (Philippians 2:12), staying humble, and knowing we're not in control but serve a master who is.
• Our responsibility: "Lord, how do I be more like you each and every day?"

Antisemitism and the church

• Q: A traveler noted that some early church fathers introduced antisemitism, and that only in the 1960s did the Catholic Church formally say the Jews didn't kill Jesus. How do we unwind that?
  • We're fighting generations of people who claimed to be Christians and set a horrible example. It won't be fixed in our lifetime.
  • The "parting of the ways" came in two steps. In the revolt of AD 67–72, Christians heeded the Olivet Discourse and fled (Matthew 24:15–20), and Josephus notes they were nowhere to be found during the siege. When they returned they were ostracized.
  • Rome then taxed Jews simply for being Jewish (the Fiscus Judaicus). About 50 years later the Bar Kokhba revolt failed, and Rome persecuted Jews across the empire.
  • To survive, Jewish communities often turned on the small, underground churches. He sees this already in Revelation, where the churches of Smyrna and Philadelphia are persecuted by the synagogue (Revelation 2:9; 3:9).
  • When Christianity was legalized in 313, the church turned on the Jews.
    • In Rome, the head of the synagogue was made to kiss a New Testament once a year at the Arch of Titus, which celebrates the destruction of the temple, "something that as believers we should be mourning."
  • He described the Crusades not as Christianity versus Islam but "my branch of Christianity against everybody else": Crusaders fought Muslims and also attacked Jewish villages and Greek Orthodox Christians.
  • His friend Moshe (whom we would meet later) says every Jew you meet isn't 50 or 60 years old, "they're 3,000 years old." They carry the memory.
  • He pointed to Martin Luther's On the Jews and Their Lies and its later use by the Nazis, noting that Lutheranism was Germany's state church in the 1930s–40s.
  • "There's a lot that the church has to atone for."

Why antisemitism, and our role

• God promised Abraham a people and a land, and descendants as numerous as the stars and the sand. Israel was called out to represent God to the nations.
• "When God makes a promise, the world and everything in it will go against the promises of God." If his promises could be thwarted, he wouldn't be a promise-keeping God, and therefore not God.
• As a youth pastor, a Jewish student asked him whether he really had a special relationship with God. The answer was "absolutely," and we are special too, because God called the Jewish people first.
• We are grafted into the living tree (Romans 11:17–24), like the grafting Opher had pointed out in this region. You can't graft a living branch onto something dead.
  • So, he argued, replacement theology (supersessionism), the idea that the church has replaced Israel, doesn't make sense. God's plans and promises for Israel are alive.
  • "All Israel will be saved" (Romans 11:26). How to understand it is open to interpretation, but we can't go against it.
• He said the church's responsibility is not just to recognize this but to stand up for it. He attends a conference on antisemitism about every other month.
  • He said propaganda is shifting world opinion against Israel, noting that by October 8, before Israel had even responded, people were already blaming Israel for October 7.
  • About six months later he walked through Kfar Aza and Be'eri and saw "the lack of regard for human dignity" in the devastation.
  • He watched 9/11 from his fifth-grade classroom in New York and grew up with many kids who lost parents. He cited a poll in the Arab world in which most respondents blamed Israel rather than al-Qaeda for 9/11.
• He quoted the Holocaust-era saying: when they came for others, I didn't speak up, "and then when they came for me, there was no one to speak up for me."
• "God's plans won't be thwarted," but the blessings God has for us in this life and the next are tied to the stand we make for his promises and his people.

Was Joseph a Pharisee?

• Q: Some scholars think Jesus' father Joseph may have been a Pharisee?
  • He leans yes. Matthew calls Joseph a righteous man (Matthew 1:19), probably from the Hebrew tzaddik, a term used for a group within the Pharisaic class known as the Hasidim.

Ancient Jesus Boat Museum (Ginosar)

The discovery (museum film)

• Two local amateur archaeologists had long dreamed that "one day the Sea of Galilee will give us a gift."
• After a drought year, walking the exposed shore, they found an ancient nail, then another, then wood, and realized it was a boat almost 10 meters long.
• Experts, including marine archaeologist Shelley Wachsmann, knew at once it was ancient, though not how old.

The rescue

• "As soon as we started excavating it, we were in a sense destroying it." The air was the enemy.
  • The waterlogged wood would turn to powder if it dried out, so sprinklers and people sprayed it with water all day, under a shade awning.
  • Tools couldn't be used near the wood. It was so soft and spongy that fingers went right through it, so the digging was done by hand.
• The Air Force, Navy, port authorities and others were consulted, and the Air Force even offered a helicopter.
• The solution was to fill and wrap the boat in fast-drying polyurethane foam.
  • To support it from below without it collapsing, they dug person-wide channels under the boat one at a time and filled each with foam.
• A channel was dug from the pit to the lake, and the boat floated out: "For the first time in 2,000 years, it was sailing on the waters of the Sea of Galilee." People had tears in their eyes.
• The next day a crane lifted it onto shore. "One wrong move, and it could just disintegrate."

The boat and the Gospels (Opher)

• Boats like this may have sunk during the naval battle between the Jewish rebels and the Romans in the Great Revolt. Are there more boats out there? "Maybe, we don't know."
• It was built mostly of oak and a few other woods, and could hold six or seven people.
• From his angle, the man casting can't see where the fish are, so fishermen relied on someone else calling out that he could see fish surfacing on the other side. That fits Jesus telling the disciples after a night of fishing to "try the other side" (John 21:6). Even so, the catch that followed wasn't normal, even for a fisherman.
• A mosaic floor found in a synagogue in the area shows a fishing boat almost identical to this one.

Capernaum (Kfar Nahum)

Pilgrims spread the news (Opher)

• Pilgrims brought sacrifices according to their means: someone better off brought something more expensive, and doves were probably the cheapest.
• Community members who went up to Jerusalem came home and reported what they had seen, and the community trusted them.
• Jesus was crucified at Passover, when Jews from all over the world were in Jerusalem as potential witnesses.
  • A report of a man resurrected in Jerusalem at Passover is news "I don't care who you are." Pilgrims carried it home, "and just like that, every single person in the Jewish world heard about Jesus. Did they believe it? Doesn't matter. But now you know."
• Seven weeks later came Pentecost (Greek, 50th day), or Shavuot (Hebrew, "weeks"). The Holy Spirit came and pilgrims from everywhere heard those Galileans in their own languages (Acts 2).
• That made two incredible miracles in Jerusalem, the holiest place, associated with Jesus and his disciples.
• Roman rulers had informants in every community to watch for rebellion, and the buzz in the synagogues was about a resurrected man and miracles.
• Christianity used the Jewish communication network. That's how, 30 years later, Paul could correspond with Jewish communities outside Israel: through the synagogue system and members traveling back and forth.

From sacrifice to prayer

• In temple days there was a morning and an evening offering on behalf of every Jew who couldn't be at the temple.
• After the temple was destroyed, the rabbis agreed that prayer is a legitimate temporary replacement for sacrifice, and that you don't need to be in Jerusalem to pray. "That was the miracle": they didn't agree on how to pray, but they agreed on that.
• Since people already gathered in the synagogue, prayer moved there. Jews pray toward Israel from abroad, toward Jerusalem from within Israel, and toward the temple site from within Jerusalem.
• In Jewish tradition, the foundation stone was the first thing created on earth. It is where Abraham went to sacrifice his son, what David bought from Araunah, where the temple was built and where the Ark stood.
• "Today, synagogues are houses of worship and prayer, but that's not how they started."

Reading and arguing the text

• Jesus stood to read and sat to teach (Luke 4), and then came the discussion: "Do you agree with me? If you don't agree with me … can you back it up with something from another scroll?"
• Jeremy's Luke 4 reading seemed to stop a few words short compared with our Bibles. That's not a mistake: Jesus knew the text by heart, and where you start and stop is exactly what people argued about.
• Ancient scrolls (such as the Dead Sea Scrolls) have no chapters or verses, only paragraph breaks, and no punctuation.
  • "Let's eat Grandpa" versus "Let's eat, Grandpa."
  • Rabbis debate where to put the commas. Yeshiva University still studies the unpunctuated text for this reason.
• A great rabbi is one who can convince other rabbis that his reading is more right.
  • "Jewish rabbis are never wrong. They're just not always right."
• Practical questions went to the local rabbi rather than the temple. For example, if your ox gores my ox's eye, does "an eye for an eye" mean taking the other ox's eye, or monetary compensation? First agree on where the commas go, then interpret. If you don't like one rabbi's answer, go to another.

How a rabbi chose disciples

• "Rabbi" means teacher, and to be a teacher you need students.
• Around age 12–13, rabbis visited communities and synagogues and quizzed the boys. They had to know the text instantly: "In the beginning…" "…God created."
• Opher played it out with us:
  • "What's two plus two?" Four is correct, but not what he's looking for, so go learn your father's trade.
  • A father had two duties: teach his son the text, and give him a trade. "There is absolutely no shame in going and doing your father's work."
  • The right response is a question that shows you get where he's going. Asked "two times two," you answer "Rabbi, what is the square root of sixteen?"
  • "I don't need someone to think the way I do … I need somebody to challenge me."
• Then come two words: "Follow me." It was a huge honor. You said goodbye to family and went for a season of learning, maybe seven years.
• Jesus called people who had already gone into their fathers' trades, which was shocking. They could still have been only 15 or 16, and they dropped their nets and followed.
• The Torah is read in a year and the rest of scripture on a three-year cycle. Jesus' ministry lasted about three and a half years, enough to pour his whole "yoke," his way of reading scripture, into the disciples.
• Jesus was considered a great rabbi. After his answers "they had no questions back," and even at 12 the teachers at the temple marveled at him (Luke 2:41–47).

The centurion who built the synagogue (Luke 7:1–10)

• Jesus enters Capernaum, "exactly where Jesus enters in this passage." The Jewish elders plead for the centurion: "he loves our nation and has built our synagogue."
  • "Not only am I going to show you the 2,000-year-old ruins of the synagogue, I know who built it."
• A centurion commanded 100 soldiers through sheer fear, and a soldier feared his centurion more than the enemy.
• Yet this centurion cared enough about a servant to ask a Jewish rabbi for help, and he sent friends to say "I do not deserve to have you come under my roof … just say the word."
• This is the only time Jesus is "amazed" in a positive sense. Usually he is amazed at unbelief. "I have not found such great faith even in Israel."

Why this was so hard for Jews to accept

• Rabbis agree on almost nothing, but some things are untouchable, and one is God's authority: God can do anything.
• The belief was that you must go to him: to the temple in Jerusalem, with the right sacrifice, properly dressed and ritually purified. Then, if God deems you worthy, it happens.
• Jesus taught that you don't need to come to God. He can snap a finger, whisper a word or send an angel, anywhere, anytime, because God is everywhere.
• For over 1,000 years every rabbi and forefather had taught that God is in Jerusalem. Then a man from Nazareth ("what good has come from Nazareth?") says to forget that, a 180-degree turn: "Are you insane?"
• Today every rabbi will say God is everywhere. "Jesus was ahead of his time."
• A Gentile hadn't been taught otherwise for a thousand years, so it was far easier for non-Jews to accept. Paul kept failing in the synagogues and succeeding with Gentiles.
• Gentile messengers were spreading Jesus' name even before the Jewish community heard: the healed man from the Decapolis told to proclaim what Jesus had done, the Samaritan woman at the well, and the Ethiopian official, all even before the centurion Cornelius with Peter in Caesarea.

The two synagogues and Peter's house

• The white limestone synagogue sits on a darker basalt base. The basalt layer is the first-century synagogue, the one the centurion had built.
  • He didn't lay the stones himself: "He tells them to go into the Jewish community and build a synagogue. What do you think they'll do?"
  • It was large, extending further to the left, with stairs to a second floor.
• The modern church "hovers" above the traditional house of Peter's mother-in-law, where Jesus stayed. He called it the "Star Trek version of a church."
• In the fourth century, Helena, the emperor's mother, came looking for the holy sites and hired a local guide ("obviously not as handsome or knowledgeable").
  • For 300 years, persecuted Christians had met secretly at night by oil lamp in house churches (domus ecclesiae), and she built churches on those sites.
  • Church was built on church, several levels in all. Under the lowest layer were oil lamps, and beneath them fishing gear, which fits Peter the fisherman.
• The exact spot could be off by 50 yards, but that's the tradition, and the church's clear floor lets you look down into the house. After the Catholic–Orthodox split, the Orthodox built their own church by the dock, which was also part of Capernaum.

Houses around a courtyard: "many rooms" (Jeremy)

• Families lived in clusters of houses (insulae) around a central courtyard. A father built his house, and each son added his own as he married, so the complex grew outward.
• This is how Jesus describes heaven. The King James "many mansions" isn't what the text says. It says "my Father's house has many rooms" (John 14:2): many dwellings in one family compound.
  • The translators didn't know this way of life, because it was all still underground.
  • "The family of God does what in heaven? Lives together, lives in community." That is the desire for the kingdom on earth too, in unity as the body of Christ.

The roof and the manger

• Stairs led up to thatched roofs. That matches the friends who carry a paralyzed man up and cut through the roof to reach Jesus (Mark 2:1–12).
• Some skeptical scholars argue the New Testament was a fabricated story written years later, but here the geography and culture match the text exactly.
• Feeding troughs built into the walls show animals living among the people. That will matter in Bethlehem: Jesus was laid in a manger, a feeding trough, and "no room in the inn" with a barn out back isn't how the text reads.

Reading an excavation

• Numbers on stones are for reconstruction. Fallen stones are pieced back together ("play Legos"), sometimes chipped so they can be scanned in case a better fit turns up. A restoration line (to be seen at Dan and Masada) marks what is original in place versus rebuilt.
• The octagonal church over Peter's house is Byzantine, with three phases, built right into earlier houses, and remains of the house are visible beneath it. This is called stratigraphy.
• "Archaeology is a science of destruction." To reach a lower layer you destroy everything above, so you map it and make the hard call whether to go deeper.
  • At El-Araj, a few miles away and likely ancient Bethsaida, where he has excavated, the team found a Byzantine church with a mosaic saying it was built on the house of Peter and Andrew. The only other reference to it is an early pilgrim. They decided to stop and preserve the church rather than dig for what would likely be just a simple fishing village.

Where is Jesus' synagogue?

• Q: So is this where Jesus read the scroll?
  • The white synagogue is from the fourth century, the same period as Chorazin's, but far more magnificent.
  • After the Bar Kokhba revolt, the heart of Judaism moved to Tiberias. There's a story that Judah HaNasi and another rabbi prayed for any bones within six feet to rise so they could be removed, and when none rose, declared the city pure: "loopholes, people, loopholes."
  • As Byzantine Christians built grand churches, Jews may have built this synagogue over Jesus' synagogue to assert Jewish presence.
  • The first-century building would be the local basalt underneath. The white limestone was imported.
  • Reaching it would mean destroying a masterpiece, and given how Magdala's synagogue was torn down, little of the earlier one may survive.

Application: "Don't you remember what I did here?" (Jeremy's testimony)

• This is his favorite site, for personal reasons.
• He wasn't a great student and was running from the Lord. His dad offered to pay for Bible college, and he got saved there and fell in love with God's Word and its world ("Bible backgrounds").
• He planned the usual path of youth pastor, senior pastor, "global following," but every interview went nowhere. The one thing he didn't want was to work for his dad.
• The week of graduation, his father's youth pastor resigned. He took the job for the summer and sensed God saying he had closed those doors: "I have opened doors that no one can shut" (Revelation 3:7). The youth group grew from 5 to about 75 that summer, and he had two years of "absolute bliss" working with his dad.
• Then one Sunday in January, after they locked up the church, his father was killed in an accident on an icy road driving home. That night a board member asked, "Well, Pastor, what's next? You're in charge."
  • "Sometimes God has a much farther roadmap than we do." His father had pastored the church for 30 years, and the church could transition because someone close to the situation stepped in.
• Carrying everyone else's grief without grieving himself, he was crushed. He was 23. The board sent him here for two and a half months, and he lived just down the street and came to this spot every afternoon.
• Asking God why, he heard: "Don't you remember what I did here? This is where all those who were broken, who needed a touch, came to me … This is where I showed who I am. Do you not think that I'm doing that today?"
• "It's not lost on me that for some of you, this is an escape." Some have family, work, health or housing "giants" waiting at home.
• He prayed that there is no situation too big and nothing God's power can't overcome or walk them through; that through the Spirit we have his strength because he is master of creation; and that as Jesus did great things here, God would do the same today. Then we had time to sit by the water and reflect.

Day 5 — Friday, Sep 11: Tel Dan, Caesarea Philippi / Banias, Damascus Road Overlook (Golan Heights), Local Olive Wood / Olive Shop

We drove from the Sea of Galilee north to Tel Dan and Caesarea Philippi (Banias), had a Druze lunch on the Golan Heights, stopped at the Damascus Road overlook looking into Syria, went on to an olive shop, and ended with an evening lecture at the hotel.

Not recorded: The olive shop stop itself (only the bus ride there was recorded), and Opher's promised explanation on the bus of what followed the 1973 war. Several bus talks (Crusader history, the 1970 Jordan–Syria background, the start of the Eli Cohen story) and Jeremy's Jeroboam talk at the Tel Dan high place are missing their openings.

On the bus — to Tel Dan

Opening (Pastor Benito)

• Many on the trip have said they will never read the Bible, or relate to God, the same way again.
• His challenge: take notes, review them every night and again in the morning, and research what you've been taught, like the Bereans, who were commended because they checked what they heard instead of just accepting it.
• He prayed that we would be good stewards of "the deposit of truth," like the servants in the parable who multiplied the talents they were given.

A Hebrew song (Opher)

• Opher taught "Hevenu Shalom Aleichem": three words repeated over and over, then "shalom" three times in the fourth line.
  • Hevenu = "we bring," shalom = "peace," aleichem = "upon you." So the song means "We bring peace upon you."

From Solomon to the Babylonian exile

• For about 400 years after Solomon built it, there is a temple in Jerusalem.
• The Assyrians (an ancient empire, not modern Syria) destroy the northern kingdom of the ten tribes and exile many of its people.
  • This is the first time the Jews are dispersed in large numbers around the world.
• Assyrian policy was population swaps: pagans believed each land had its own god, and a people who didn't know the god of the place they lived in would be easier to rule.
  • Deported northern Israelites were scattered across the empire, and other peoples were brought into the land.
  • When the newcomers' animals kept being attacked, they said they wanted to worship the local God but didn't know how, so the Assyrians brought back Levites to teach them.
  • These are most likely the Samaritans of the New Testament: not descended from the twelve tribes, but they had learned to worship the God of this land.
  • When the exiles return from Babylon in Ezra and Nehemiah, they find people who have been worshiping God here for 200 years.
• Jerusalem holds out against Assyria for about another 150 years. Then Babylon besieges it, conquers it, destroys the temple and exiles the people to Babylon (roughly modern Iraq).

Where the word "Jew" comes from

• By then most of the people left in the land were from the tribe of Judah. Some refugees from other tribes were there too, but the Babylonians didn't ask each person his tribe.
• So they called everyone after the majority tribe, "Jews," instead of "Israelites," which referred to all twelve tribes.

The return and the Persian period

• About 50 years later the Persians conquer Babylon and let the Jews go home and rebuild the temple.
• Most of the people who went back were those with nothing to lose, plus the very religious. "If you're a rich Jew living in the middle of the desert in Persia... you're probably gonna stay."
• In Ezra and Nehemiah the rebuilding starts with a small altar and grows. The elderly who remembered Solomon's temple say it isn't the same, but "we now have a temple" (Ezra 3:12).
• Under Persia the Jews have freedom of religion and only have to pay taxes, so the early Persian period is a very good time for them.
• Then comes Haman, a Persian advisor, who plots to kill all the Jews (Esther). God's name is never mentioned in the book, but "God works in mysterious ways" and the Jews survive.
  • This gives the holiday of Purim, which is something like Halloween (everyone dresses up), "with an added bonus... you must get drunk and be happy."
  • The other day Jews are commanded to celebrate this way is Simchat Torah ("the joy of the Torah"), when the yearly reading of the five books ends, just before starting Genesis 1:1 again. It falls at the end of Sukkot, about three weeks from now.

Greeks, Maccabees and the real reason for eight days of Hanukkah

• Alexander the Great takes the region from the Persians. For the Jews the only change is who they pay taxes to, and they still have religious autonomy.
• About a hundred years later Antiochus, a Greek ruler short of money from his wars, loots the "banks" of the ancient world, which were the temples and altars where people left gold and silver as offerings.
  • He loots the temple of Ra in Egypt, then goes into the Jewish temple. A non-Jew entering desecrates it, which means the Jews have lost their religious autonomy, so they rebel.
• The rebellion is led by the priestly Hasmonean family under Judah the Maccabee. After about three years they win, purify the temple and rededicate it. Hanukkah means "dedication."
• Q: Why eight days? The oil-lamp answer is "exactly the wrong answer I was looking for."
  • The story says one day's worth of oil for the seven-branched lampstand lasted eight days. But then the miracle would be seven extra days, not eight.
  • The oil tradition only appears about a hundred years after the first celebration.
  • Real reason: while the temple was desecrated they couldn't keep the pilgrimage holidays. After the purification they celebrated the missed eight-day Sukkot late, in about December. "So eight days of Sukkot becomes eight days of Hanukkah."
  • The Hasmoneans' own books of Maccabees say this: they were celebrating in remembrance of Sukkot at the wrong time.
• God gave Israel an unheard-of gift: 70 days off a year. That is 52 Sabbaths, plus 18 days for the three pilgrimage feasts (Passover, Shavuot, Sukkot), Rosh Hashanah (two days, starting today) and Yom Kippur.
  • "People were very, very jealous of the Jewish people. That's why they tried to kill us all."

How religions build on one another's calendars

• Hanukkah starts on the 25th of the month, around December. The pagans already celebrated the sun's "birthday" then, because they knew (even the Egyptians knew) that the days start getting longer after the shortest day, around December 21–23. They celebrated it with lights.
• When a new religion takes over it doesn't tell people to stop celebrating. It gives the celebration a new reason: the sun's birthday becomes Hanukkah, and later Christians put Jesus' birth there, still with lights.
  • The Bible gives no date for Jesus' birth. Opher thinks it could have been summer, since the shepherds were out in the fields with their flocks at night.
• Count eight days from December 25 and you reach January 1, the day a Jewish boy is circumcised. New Year's is the "most well-known recorded circumcision of a Jewish child ever": a new covenant, so a new year.
• Calls to prayer: Jews put a man on a high place to blow the trumpet, churches rang bells, Muslims built minarets. "Whatever the other religion did, and we're making it a little bit different, making it our own."
• Easter's date follows the Jewish Passover.
• Every Jewish holiday has the same three parts: "Somebody tried to kill us... we survived... let's eat."

Hasmoneans, Herod and Jesus

• The Hasmoneans rule for about 100 years with full autonomy and mint their own coins, which in the ancient world is a sign of independence.
• Two Hasmonean princes fighting over the throne ask Rome for help, and Rome takes over and appoints Herod the Great.
  • Herod rules almost 40 years ("astonishing" for a king back then) and builds all over the land, including up here in the north.
• Jesus is born in Bethlehem just before Herod dies, grows up in Nazareth, does most of his ministry from Capernaum, and is crucified at Passover in Jerusalem, officially for disturbing the Roman peace, since keeping the peace was the governor's most important job after collecting taxes.
• He rises on the third day, appears for 40 days (the last time around the Sea of Galilee, with the 153 fish), and ascends from the Mount of Olives.
• The difference between Judaism and Christianity comes down to one question: was Jesus the Jewish Messiah? Both are waiting for the Messiah, Jews for his coming and Christians for his return.
  • "Jews close the door on Jesus, but we always leave a window open." If it turns out to be Jesus, "we'll just say that we weren't right for 2,000 years", because rabbis are never wrong.

The two revolts against Rome

• A little over 30 years after the ascension the Jews revolt again, and this time it works at first: guerrilla tactics wipe out an entire Roman legion.
  • Opher estimates about 20% of the Roman population was Jewish (Jeremy thinks a little less). News spread through the synagogue network and Jews all over the empire joined in.
  • Rome was in chaos, with four Caesars in about two and a half years, until the army made its general Vespasian Caesar.
• Vespasian sends his son Titus, who works methodically from north to south so no rebels are left behind him: he destroys Gamla, then besieges Jerusalem and destroys the temple a second time.
• To make an example of them, the Romans keep going south to the last stronghold, Herod's fortress of Masada (tomorrow's stop).
• The Jews' reaction at first: "big deal". The Babylonians destroyed the temple too, and eventually they were allowed to rebuild. After 50–70 years with no sign of that, they revolt again in the second century.
• Why that surprised Rome: to pagans, destroying a god's temple showed that the god had lost not just a battle but the war.
  • It's like David and Goliath, where the champions represented their gods. When David won, the Philistines took it that their god had lost that battle.
  • As long as the temple lay in ruins, the God of Israel had in effect admitted he was weaker than Rome's gods. But to the Jews, God is everywhere.
• The second revolt lasts almost five years and is put down even more harshly, followed for the first time by laws aimed specifically at Jews:
  • Jews are banned from Jerusalem, the land around the city is salted, as many Jews as possible are exiled, and life is made so hard that some give up their Judaism.
  • Places are renamed so Jews will forget their connection to them: Jerusalem becomes Aelia Capitolina and Shechem becomes Neapolis ("new city").
  • Judea (the name on the Pontius Pilate stone at Caesarea) is renamed after Israel's main biblical enemy, the Philistines (from Peleshet): Palaestina. "This is where the word Palestine comes from."
  • The Philistines came from Greece. Modern Palestinians, who came from Arabia and Egypt, "have nothing to do with the ancient Philistines."

Roman, Byzantine and early Islamic periods

• For about 200 years Jews are exiled and oppressed, with extra taxes and burdens.
• Almost half of the Roman military is stationed here, because this is the border with the Parthians, Rome's biggest enemy. Caesarea becomes the largest city, while Jerusalem is basically destroyed and guarded so Jews can't enter.
• There are few records from this period, only an occasional pilgrim's account.
• In the fourth century Constantine makes Christianity the official religion, "and this is when it starts raining gold on the land of Israel."
  • His mother Helena builds a church at every site her guides point out (birth, the multiplication of loaves and fish, the crucifixion).
  • From the 4th to the 7th century is the most populated period in the land's recorded history until modern Israel. Jews are still persecuted.
• In the seventh century Islam, founded by Muhammad, becomes the power. The review stopped here as we arrived at Tel Dan.

Tel Dan

Why we walk through the nature reserve

• The trail is deliberate: the Bible relies on the land's plants and animals to tell its story, and many of its details only make sense once you have been here.
• The cool pockets under certain trees are "natural AC": dew gathers on the underside of the leaves and releases a mist. The best-known example is the tamarisk.

Abraham's tamarisk and hospitality

• When Abraham makes covenants with the locals, sometimes he digs a well, sometimes he offers a sacrifice, and sometimes he plants a tamarisk, as at Beersheba (Genesis 21:33).
  • The tree is a sign of comfort and rest for any visitor coming off the hot Negev desert, and it shows Abraham's hospitality: "I might not be one of you, but I still want to get along with you."
• In that culture, someone who doesn't show hospitality is "the lowest of the low." Israel is told to welcome foreigners because they were once foreigners in this land.
• Taken to an extreme: Lot's shocking offer to protect his guests in Sodom (Genesis 19:8).

Jeremiah's almond branch (Jeremiah 1:4–12)

• Jeremiah's call: "Before I formed you in the womb I knew you." He protests that he's too young, and scholars estimate he was 13–17.
• His job is to prophesy that Jerusalem will be destroyed. Lamentations is him weeping when it happens.
• God touches his mouth, promises to rescue him, then asks, "What do you see?" "The branch of an almond tree." "You have seen correctly, for I am watching to see that my word is fulfilled."
• Anyone who farms here understands: the almond is the first tree to bud in the year but the last to bear fruit. Once it buds, you're sure it will bear, about 11 months later in November.
• Jeremiah prophesies for roughly 50–60 years before it happens. Even during Josiah's reforms God says the past hundred years of wickedness can't be overlooked. Jeremiah is mocked, mistreated and thrown into a pit and left for dead.
  • The almond was God's assurance: "Yeah, it's a long road... but because I'm showing you this blooming branch right now, you have the assurance that my word is going to come to pass."

Application: God's timing

• God hasn't forgotten the promise he spoke over you at youth camp, in college, when you were saved, or in a struggle with your kids or parents. "Sometimes we want God to act in our timelines and not in his own."
• His ways and thoughts are higher than ours. Our job is to obey and trust.
• Some promises aren't fulfilled in our lifetime. Abraham could count his descendants "on two hands," yet Beersheba, where the promise was spoken, is one of Israel's largest cities today.
• "If God has promised you that he's going to do something great through your kids... it might not be while you get to see it."

Rehoboam, Jeroboam and the split kingdom

• The people ask Solomon's son Rehoboam to lighten the taxes and forced labor. His father's old advisors tell him to ease up, but his young friends say that would make him look weak.
• He takes his friends' advice, answers harshly and doubles their burden (1 Kings 12), and the north rebels.
• Jeroboam comes back from Egypt and wins most of the country. Pharaoh Shishak (Jeroboam's father-in-law, Jeremy said) attacks Rehoboam and carries temple treasure off to Egypt.
  • That's where Raiders of the Lost Ark starts, but the Ark is still mentioned in Josiah's day, so Shishak can't have taken it.
• Jeroboam's problem: Rehoboam still holds Judah, Benjamin, part of the Levites and Jerusalem, and all Israel is supposed to go up to the temple three times a year and pay the temple tax there.
  • Like the Magdala Stone, which put temple imagery in a synagogue, the heart follows the place of worship, so Jeroboam sets up his own altar here.

The high place and its altar

• A steel frame shows the size of the altar. It was "unkosher" from the start because of how it was built, not just where: an altar has to be made of uncut field stones that God provides, just as a mikveh has to be filled by God through springs or rain.
• Jeroboam sets up golden calves here and at Bethel. That is syncretism: worshiping Yahweh while giving him the face and features of other gods.

Why Dan: the tribe that stopped depending on God

• After the golden calf at Sinai, Israel doesn't struggle with idolatry for centuries. In Judges the sin is "everyone did what was right in his own eyes," not idolatry, until Samson.
• Samson, the judge of Dan (then in the Shephelah lowlands next to the Philistines), is a Nazirite and breaks every rule: sexual immorality, contact with dead bodies (honey from a carcass), drinking, and finally his hair cut through Delilah.
• After Samson's death at the Philistine temple, the Philistines take revenge on his tribe. Things get so bad that Dan leaves the land Joshua gave them (Judges 18).
• This spot was never part of Israel's tribal allotments. "Dan to Beersheba" was only a way of describing the length of the land.
• The problem is the water. The springs and streams here feed the Jordan, even in the worst drought in 40 years. The Sea of Galilee is so low that where kids used to jump off the dock there's barely water.
  • God put Israel in a land that would make them rely on him for rain. Here you "just dig a channel," with no need to pray.
• Dan conquers Laish, a Phoenician satellite town on the Phoenicians' southern border, which the Phoenicians wouldn't bother to defend. They keep its idols.
• "Sometimes when we have the things that we truly desire, that moves us farther away from God."
• That created generational sin, so when Jeroboam needed a place to draw people away from God, the city that had already said "we don't need God" was the obvious choice.
• In 733 BC the Assyrian king Tiglath-Pileser III hits Dan first. Its people are the first sent into exile, 10–12 years before everyone else.

Application: who is your provider?

• "If we lose trust in God, we're setting up not just our lives, but generations to fail after us."
• "You don't need to be your kid's provider... They need to see God as their provider."
  • Jeremy never went to Disney as a child and now takes his son several times a year, but he wants his son to know it's possible because God made a way for his dad, not just because his dad works hard.
  • If he can instill that, he protects his son's children and grandchildren too.
• "Who is the one who is providing in your life? Is it your work ethic? Is it your job? Is it your 401k?... Or is it the Father above all else?"
• Q: A seminary professor once said Samson may not have been muscular. Is that right?
  • Jeremy leans that way: the Philistines keep underestimating him, and his strength is supernatural.
  • The same author wrote Judges and Samuel, and he likes to draw parallels to the Greek world when dealing with the Philistines, who were Greeks.
  • He portrays Samson like Achilles, whom the Iliad describes as small but gifted by the gods with great fighting skill. Stories like the donkey's jawbone have parallels in the Iliad.
  • "Suddenly the strength comes out of him and they're like, what are we doing here?"

Lebanon border overlook (Opher)

• The little town across the valley is Lebanon, and the radar on the hill is Israel's northernmost position. Lebanon starts where the vegetation suddenly stops.
• He described Iran-backed groups around Israel: Hezbollah right here on the border, Hamas to the south, and the Houthis farther away. "We live in a very rough neighborhood."
• This land has always been at war (Egyptians, Canaanites, Jebusites, Israelites, Assyrians, Babylonians, Persians, Greeks) because the two main highways of the ancient world ran through it, with a link to the Silk Road. Whoever controls the roads controls trade and taxes.
  • The joke: God asked Moses where he wanted to go, and because he stuttered, "Ca-, Ca-" became Canaan instead of Canada. "Imagine the Jewish people in Canada. What a lovely, quiet life we would have had."
• He mentioned that the night before, Israel had destroyed a large underground Hezbollah bunker complex about 10 km from here.
• Military service is mandatory from 18 to 21, followed by reserve duty. Some of Opher's friends have done more than 600 days of reserve duty since October 7.
  • The Six-Day War took seven days, the Yom Kippur War about three and a half weeks, and the War of Independence about a year and a half. This war is nearly three years old, a huge strain on a small country. "We don't have a choice."

Who can become an Israeli

• After the Holocaust, Jews who wanted to leave Europe had nowhere to go, partly because borders were closed after the Great Depression. So Israel declared that any Jew anywhere is welcome.
• Religiously you're Jewish if your mother is. The state widened that: "If you were Jewish enough for the Nazis to kill, you're Jewish enough for the State of Israel."
  • One Jewish grandparent on either side, shown by documentation, gets you citizenship on arrival, and you can vote right away. He called it "the only biased law we have in Israel."
• Israel also sees itself as the protector of Jews everywhere. In Operation Magic Carpet it secretly flew Yemen's Jews out, with the seats removed to fit more people. Today Israel has Jews from more than 180 countries.
• Iranian missiles have hit Muslim and Christian Arabs as well as Jews.
• Identity comes in layers: "You can be Muslim, Jewish, Christian, but you can still be an Arab."
  • Opher's grandfather, born here under the British with "Palestine" on his birth certificate, was a Palestinian Jew who became an Israeli (more on this on the Day 6 bus ride).

Israel's military and the United States

• Israel has one of the most up-to-date militaries in the world. "You guys usually do the funding and we put the brains in."
  • Israel takes US F-16s, rebuilds them with Israeli technology, and the US adopts what works. Opher said close to 90% of US military aid is spent with American companies.
  • He said cooperation continued across US administrations, and the US guarantees Israel's edge over neighbors it also sells to, like Egypt and Jordan.
• The highest peak is where Israel, Lebanon and Syria meet. The trenches and old bulldozer here are from a military outpost used in 1948, 1967 and 1973.

Names in the Bible: Dan, Ramesses and Akhenaten

• Jeremy dated the mud-brick "Abraham Gate" to early in the Bronze Age (which begins around 3200–3000 BC): about 5,000 years old, roughly 300–400 years older than the pyramids.
  • It has a canopy because rain would dissolve the mud brick. The only similar gates are at Troy and Ashkelon.
  • Its doorway is an arch, "about 2,500 years before the Romans ever come." "There's a lot of technology and a lot of credit that is stolen."
• It is named for Abraham, who came through here chasing Lot's kidnappers toward Damascus and afterward met Melchizedek.
• Genesis says Abraham came to "Dan," but the city was called Laish until the tribe of Dan took it in Judges. Later copyists updated names so readers would know the place.
  • It's like saying "Peter Stuyvesant was the first mayor of New York" instead of "New Amsterdam."
• The same thing causes confusion about the Exodus. The Israelites build the city of "Ramesses," so people assume Ramesses was the pharaoh.
  • But his son Merneptah records conquering a people called Israel, which doesn't fit if Israel left Egypt under his father and then spent 40 years in the desert.
  • The city's earlier name was Avaris. Not knowing that gave skeptics ammunition to say the timeline doesn't work: "Of course the timeline doesn't add up because we got it wrong to begin with."
  • Jeremy suggests Akhenaten, about 100 years earlier, known as the "traitor king." His older brother, the firstborn, died suddenly, and after centuries of polytheism Akhenaten declared Egypt would worship one hidden god behind the sun. "Could it be the events that we read about in the book of Exodus?"
• That's why understanding manuscripts and how the text was passed down matters.

The Israelite city gate

• The Iron Age gate dates to about 900–700 BC. Jeremy leans toward the earlier end, since King Ahab later moved the capital south to Samaria, where the terrain suited his chariots better than these muddy hills.
• Defensive design: attackers had to make several 90-degree turns and get through two gates, with chambers and archers above.
• "Once the gates fell, your city fell." That's the point of the Trojan horse, and why God promises Israel "the gates of your enemies."
• The gate was also the market. Most people lived outside the city and only rich or important people lived inside, so everyone met at the gate.
• Most of all it was the court. Iron and Bronze Age gates have benches for the elders, and since this was a capital, there's a king's throne with holes for poles to hold a shade canopy. "This is where Jeroboam ruled and reigned from."
  • A king lived in his palace but did his daily business at the gate.
• Absalom (2 Samuel 13–15):
  • After the crime against his sister Tamar, Absalom takes revenge on Amnon and flees to his grandfather in Geshur, just north of the Sea of Galilee. David brings him back with no consequences, and Absalom sees weakness.
  • He stands at the gate every morning telling people who came for justice, "your claims are valid... but there is no representative of the king to hear you... if only I were appointed judge," and "he stole the hearts of the people of Israel" (2 Samuel 15:2–6).
  • David was absent from his duties, just as when he stayed at the palace "when kings go out to battle" (2 Samuel 11:1). When Absalom revolts, David has to flee. It ends with Absalom caught by his hair in a tree and killed by Joab against David's orders.
• In Ruth 4, Boaz settles the kinsman-redeemer question at the city gate.

Standing stones: religion and politics mixed

• The high place was for yearly sacrifices, but the gate was where people were every day, and that's where the standing stones (matzevot) are.
• In Canaanite practice each stone stood for a god: the chief god, his consort and lesser gods. In Israel the big stone stood for Yahweh and the second for Asherah, who went from Baal's consort to "Yahweh's consort." Inscriptions to "Yahweh and his Asherah" have been found.
• Seeing it every day at the market was "the propaganda of that day": after a few generations it replaced God's way, despite "you shall have no other gods... for I am a jealous God."
• The stepped platform on the high place is Hellenistic: the Greeks built a temple where there had always been worship.
• Much of Dan is still underground and being excavated.
• Q: Is it certain the throne was Jeroboam's? Yes, it would have been his.
• The city fought the Assyrians here and lost. "Everywhere you go in this land, somebody died."
• Q: What does it mean that God is jealous?
  • He is jealous for the worship and glory that he alone deserves, which people give to things that don't deserve it.

On the bus — Tel Dan to Caesarea Philippi

Why Israel kept being punished

• Opher: God told Israel to tear down the idols and "wipe out their names from those places" (Deuteronomy 12:3), yet we just saw a standing-stone shrine. At best they buried such things under rubble.
  • "God tells you to do something very specific and you don't do it, so you get punished."

Panias becomes Banias

• The city was dedicated to Pan, a god of nature, so it was called Panias. Arabic has no "p" sound, so after the 7th-century Muslim conquest it became Banias, today's name.
• Mount Hermon, which Opher called "the highest mountain in the entire Middle East," has a ski resort, and soldiers make sure you don't ski the wrong way into Lebanon or Syria.

The Golan Heights and the minefields

• The Golan is a geographical region. From Syria's independence in the 1940s it belonged to Syria. In the 1967 Six-Day War Israel took about a third of it.
• In the 1950s and '60s Syria laid almost a million landmines along the border.
  • Whole areas are still fenced off. One community is completely ringed by minefields except for its access road. In the 1970s and '80s the radio would report cows setting off mines.
  • There are no reliable maps, and rain and snow have shifted the mines. Clearing them is slow: the military closes an area and clears it.
• Jeremy: when he digs up here, the army brings special equipment to clear the soil first.
• Caesarea Philippi was built by Herod's son Philip and dedicated to Caesar.

Caesarea Philippi / Banias ("Gates of Hell")

The capital of paganism in the north

• When Herod died his kingdom was divided. Antipas got the mostly Jewish territory and Philip the mostly Gentile one, with its own cultures and languages.
• Greek was the common language of the whole Mediterranean because of Alexander's Hellenism, which Jeremy said was not about making everything Greek but about blending foreign cultures with Greek culture.
  • In Egypt Alexander called himself Pharaoh, dressed as one, built Egyptian-style temples with hieroglyphs, and married an Egyptian. In Jerusalem the first thing he asked was to worship Yahweh in the temple.
  • That earned the conquered peoples' loyalty ("I've adopted your culture. Don't you want to adopt a little bit of mine?"). It was the opposite of Assyrian deportation and Babylonian indoctrination (Daniel, Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego).

Jesus spoke Hebrew; the New Testament was written in Greek

• The New Testament is in Greek so the whole region could read it, but Jeremy said Jesus and Paul mainly spoke Hebrew. Many Diaspora Jews didn't, which is why the Septuagint (the Greek Old Testament) was made.
• Jesus was trilingual. Jeremy said the claim that he mainly spoke Aramaic has been undercut since the Dead Sea Scrolls, most of which are in Hebrew.
• Why the idea persists, in his view: antisemitism. If you remove the Jewishness of Jesus and Paul, "you can treat the Jewish people however you want." He traced those ideas to 1800s Germany, "already in prep for what's going to happen inside the 1900s."

Pan and why Jesus stayed out of the city

• Matthew 16:13 says Jesus came to the region of Caesarea Philippi, not the city. "Jesus would never be caught dead in this city."
• Pan, half man and half goat, was the city's patron god, with his grotto up the cliff. His worship and myths were notoriously debauched, and the English word "panic" comes from Pan.
• This was the seat of pagan idolatry and debauchery in the land. After destroying Jerusalem, Titus hurried up here because the rest of the land "is not pagan enough for him."
• If Jesus avoided Tiberias to stay ritually clean, he wouldn't enter this city. He was in the region on a mission, as when he went to Tyre, Sidon and Samaria.
• Matthew sets the scene on purpose: they are among Gentiles who speak Greek.

"Who do you say I am?" (Matthew 16:13–20)

• Some said John the Baptist, which shows John's influence. Others said Jeremiah, the prophet Jesus is most often compared to after Elijah, or "one of the prophets," an allusion to Elijah.
• Peter: "You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God." Jesus: "You are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church, and the gates of Hades will not overcome it."
• "Arguably one of the most devastatingly misunderstood passages in the Christian world."

What the rock is

• The Catholic Church rests its claim on this verse: St. Peter's Basilica is said to stand over Peter's grave, and Peter to be the first pope.
• The wordplay works in Greek: Petros is a small stone you pick up off the road, and petra is bedrock you build on.
• Jesus is answering what Peter just said. The rock is Peter's confession that Jesus is the Messiah, which Peter was the first disciple to say out loud.
  • Peter puts his foot in his mouth, but he's always the one who steps out in faith. He was the only one out of the boat, "close enough to Jesus for Jesus to reach out and catch" him.
• That confession is what unites the church across Africa, Asia, the Americas and Europe, whatever our cultures and backgrounds.

Hades, not hell

• Most Bibles say "the gates of hell," but it's Hades, and the two aren't the same in Greek thought.
  • The Hebrew for hell is Gehinnom, or Gehenna. In Greek thought Hades is the whole land of the dead: heroes go to Elysium and the wicked to Tartarus. Tartarus is the Greek term closest to hell.
• The gates of Hades are the entrance to the land of the dead, which is death. Jesus is telling them the cost of this confession: "If you make this claim, your life is forfeit."
• Tradition says every one of the Twelve except John was martyred (leaving out Judas and counting Matthias).
• Martyrdom is real today in the underground church in places like China and North Korea.

Application: the cost of the confession

• Following Christ is not an easy thing to claim. Expect the world to try to silence us.
• In the United States hardly anyone hunts Christians down, but we should live knowing that could change. Many have already seen society turn against the gospel.
• The cost is worth it: "to live is Christ and to die is gain" (Philippians 1:21). "God's kingdom cannot be thwarted by our death."
  • In Acts the church explodes every time it is persecuted.
  • In Revelation the two churches with nothing negative said about them, Smyrna and Philadelphia, are the ones told they will be persecuted, because God uses persecution to reveal himself through their faith.
• Q: (on salvation and eternal life)
  • "If you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved" (Romans 10:9). The power that raised Christ lives in you and will raise you.
  • In the first century, "Jesus is Lord" was a bigger claim than Peter's. Caesar held the title Dominus et Deus, "Lord and God," so calling Jesus Lord meant calling Caesar a liar.
  • Cities competed for Caesar's favor, and a neokoros ("warden" of Caesar's image) got money first, building projects and tax breaks. Christians put that at risk, which is why they were persecuted.
  • Our reward: heaven comes down to earth in Revelation's last two chapters. Earth becomes paradise again and we are raised to rule and reign over creation with Christ, as Adam did at the beginning.
• Q: Why wouldn't Jesus go into the city itself?
  • "It's incredibly pagan... He's not going to be associated." If you saw Instagram pictures of Pastor B at a Las Vegas slot machine, you'd assume the worst, even if he never pulled the lever.
  • Uncleanness isn't sin. Nicodemus and Joseph of Arimathea made themselves unclean burying Jesus, which was one of the most righteous acts in Judaism because the dead can never repay you.
  • Being in Gentile-run territory doesn't make him unclean when it's within Israel's biblical borders (including Samaria). Tax collectors like Matthew were Jews, despised as Rome's puppets, not necessarily unclean.
  • It's easy to be like the Pharisees: "At least I'm not that guy," and then you realize "I am that guy in many ways."
• Q: What does "whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven" (Matthew 16:19) mean?
  • The passage is open to many interpretations. Jeremy reads it as: what you do affects your eternal reward and how close you are to the Lord.
  • In Revelation the martyrs are right at his feet, crying "how long?" (Revelation 6:9–10). He thinks Jesus meant it for all believers down the generations, not just those present that day.
• Q: Was Pan's grotto here the "gates of Hades"?
  • That's a later medieval tradition that merged the two. Known "gates of Hades" sites in the ancient world included Cumae in Italy and Hierapolis in Turkey, caves with toxic gas where priests claimed to meet the dead.
  • No Roman or Greek writing counts Banias as one.

On the bus — Caesarea Philippi to the Druze lunch

From the Crusades to the Ottomans

• Opher: at the end of the 13th century the Muslims defeated the last Crusader forces. European Christians sailed home and for more than 400 years largely forgot the Holy Land, apart from individual pilgrims.
• From the 13th century to the end of World War I, more than 600 years, Muslim rule was continuous. The land was called Jund Filastin: a jund is a military district under the governor in Syria.

The Ottoman census and the population shift

• The Turks set taxes by census: count the people in a governor's region and set his quota from that number.
• Opher said the early 19th-century Ottoman census found about 250,000 people in Palestine: about 100,000 Christians (the largest group), then Jews, with Muslims the smallest.
• Ottoman subjects could move freely between provinces and paid taxes wherever they lived. Newcomers meant the governor met his quota easily and kept the extra, while losing people made it harder. So governors competed for people.
• In the 1830s the Ottomans cancelled the law banning the sale of Muslim-owned land to non-Muslims, because the nearly bankrupt empire wanted the sales tax.
  • European powers (Britain, France, Germany, Italy and others) started buying land. Interest in the Holy Land revived, and pilgrims brought business: guides, transport, souvenirs and hotels.
• Around 1840 there was a messianic buzz in the Jewish world. Many Jews moved here to greet the Messiah, and when he didn't come, some left.
• The Ottomans built railways, including a line connecting Istanbul with Mecca and Medina, and the first railway in the Middle East, Jerusalem–Jaffa. That drew Muslim workers from around the empire, including from Egypt.
• At the end of the century the Zionist movement, not necessarily religious, sought a state with a Jewish majority. Uganda was even offered, but "if there's going to be a Jewish state somewhere in the world, it may as well be" Israel.
  • European and Russian Jews came, drained swamps, and built water systems and schools. The work drew still more Muslim workers.
• The result, as Opher described it, was a complete switch in the population:
  • Christians stayed at about 100,000, because Christian pilgrims went home after a few months.
  • Jews grew but stayed second.
  • Muslims grew from the minority to the majority.
• Lunch was at a Druze community on the Golan (we met the Druze earlier at Muhraqa on Mount Carmel), with Jeremy's favorite falafel in Israel. Everyone has their own "best falafel," depending on the oil, herbs and chickpeas.

On the bus — to the Damascus Road Overlook

The warning before the Yom Kippur War (1973)

• Opher: the king of Jordan and Israel's leaders were quietly on good terms. When Syria threatened Jordan, the king asked Israel for help, Israel warned Syria off, and Syria withdrew.
• In 1973, ten days before the war, the king of Jordan secretly flew to Israel and told Golda Meir (the first woman prime minister) and Defense Minister Moshe Dayan (architect of the Six-Day War) that Syria and Egypt would attack.
• After 1967, when Israel took the Golan, Sinai, the West Bank and Gaza in under seven days, "Israel had their noses way up in the sky." Israel thanked him and "kinda laughed it off."
• Ten hours before the war an Israeli source in Egypt gave a warning. It was marked as false information and never went up the chain of command.

The war

• Israel was attacked from the south and north at once. Jordan, as part of the Arab League, had to open a front, but reportedly its soldiers pulled back whenever Israelis fired. Opher says this can't be confirmed.
• Opher said that after the first week things were so bad that Israel's leaders discussed their most extreme options: "a button push away" from catastrophe in the Middle East.
• The US president called Golda Meir, told her to hold on, lifted the US arms embargo, and airlifted the largest weapons shipment in history.
• Israel counterattacked and within about ten days reached the approaches to Damascus, about 50–60 miles from here by Opher's estimate, and was close to Cairo.
• The Soviets threatened to send troops. The US would then have had to join, and after Vietnam it didn't want that, so under heavy pressure Israel withdrew to the prewar lines. No one gained ground and many died.
• It was the first time Israelis couldn't say "without a doubt, we won." Egypt still celebrates the war's anniversary as a victory.

Damascus Road Overlook (Golan Heights)

The view into Syria

• The higher lookout is a closed UN watchtower with bunkers. Beyond the reservoir, the town and the road, the hill blocks our view of Damascus, only about 60 km (under 40 miles) away, a 30–45 minute drive.
• Acts says Paul's encounter happened as they approached the city, so it was probably somewhere within sight of here.

Paul's encounter and apostleship

• Paul was the church's main persecutor. When he ran out of people to persecute he went for Damascus, and on the way he met the risen Jesus in full, transfigured form. It was not a vision.
• The requirement for an apostle is having seen the risen Jesus (Acts 1), and Paul defends his apostleship on this basis. That's why Jeremy has issues with the title "apostle" in today's church.
• About 15 years pass before his first missionary journey: Damascus, then Jerusalem, where the church is afraid of him, then Antioch, where Barnabas is pastor and trains him. There's also a time in the Arabian desert.

Saul becomes Paul

• He is called Saul until Acts 13, not only until his conversion. The change comes on Cyprus, and it has to do with his Roman citizenship.
• The proconsul Sergius Paulus (the same root name), head over the regional governors, wants to hear them. Only a citizen could formally present to him, so Paul has to preach, not Barnabas (Acts 13:7–12).
• Barnabas is actually in charge of the first journey. In Lystra the crowd calls Barnabas Zeus, the chief god, and Paul Hermes, the messenger who speaks for Zeus (Acts 14:12).
• Sergius Paulus apparently sends them to his hometown, Pisidian Antioch, to bring the gospel to his family.
• After the Acts 15 council, they split over John Mark, Barnabas's cousin and possibly the author of Mark, who had gone home early. Barnabas takes Cyprus, Paul takes Turkey with Silas, and from then on nobody has more influence on the church's leadership than Paul.
• Paul doesn't know when to quit: he is stoned and left for dead, gets up and goes back into the city to preach (Acts 14:19–20). In Troas a young man falls from a third-story window during his all-night sermon, Paul raises him, and keeps preaching (Acts 20:9–12).
  • "No sermon that Pastor B preaches is ever too long."

Zeal like Phinehas

• Paul calls himself a Benjamite, a Pharisee of Pharisees, and a persecutor "zealous" for God (Philippians 3:5–6; Acts 22).
• In Judaism, "zeal" points straight to Phinehas, whose violent act against open sin was credited to him as righteousness (Numbers 25). First-century zealots thought restoring God's order meant killing those in sin, and Paul thought that about the Christians.
• Paul, a Pharisee, gets his letters from the chief priests, the leaders of the Sadducees, the Pharisees' rivals. He's crossing party lines, "like if Nancy Pelosi said to the Democrats, I'm going to go ask Donald Trump for permission." The Pharisees rejected zealotry, which is why the zealots were a separate party.
• He is young. At Stephen's stoning he only watches the coats, the youngest person's job, so Jeremy suggested he may have been only about 12, which would put him in his late 20s when his missionary journeys began.

Application: bought at a price

• "Don't let anybody tell you that young people can't shake the very core foundations of this world." Paul was "only a little bit older than my college students today."
• He endured more than anyone (2 Corinthians 11) and kept asking, "Okay Lord, what's next?"
• God never holds Paul's past over him. Paul brings it up himself ("chief of sinners"), but every time the Lord speaks to him, in Ephesus, Corinth or Pisidian Antioch, it's about obedience now.
• Paul calls himself a slave of Christ because he knows he was bought. He tells the Ephesian elders their church was bought with Christ's blood and they must oversee it (Acts 20:28).
• These were elders, not pastors: faithful people. As you grow you can't sit on the sidelines. You're called to make disciples and eventually guide others.
• "Our faithfulness serves as the testimony." Everyone who asks you for guidance was bought by the blood of Christ, so do your best for them under the Holy Spirit's guidance.

Q&A

• Q (Pastor): How do we reconcile Galatians with Paul still keeping Jewish customs in Acts, when people use Galatians as ammunition against Jews?
  • Everything in Galatians comes from a social situation of that day. The Acts 15 council ruled that Gentiles didn't need circumcision or kosher food, because their ancestors didn't stand at Sinai, but "Judaizers" in Galatia still insisted on it.
  • The reason is tied to the Roman bathhouse, "the golf course of the ancient world." He explained it at the bathhouse at Masada the next day.
• Q: Was Paul short?
  • There's no physical description. Early depictions show him as tall.
• Paul's prominence:
  • Luke, Paul's close friend, wrote much of the New Testament, so Paul appears a lot.
  • Paul was one of many church planters. Of the seven churches of Revelation he planted only Ephesus. His disciple Epaphras planted Laodicea, and others are unknown. "The legacy is not about the individual. The legacy is about the church."
  • "Heaven forbid that the legacy of Freedom Church ever becomes about Pastor B." That's "kingdom-minded" thinking.
  • God stopped Paul from going to Bithynia (Acts 16:7), yet Peter later writes to a church there that someone else planted.
  • The church in Africa had the gospel through Pentecost and the Ethiopian official (Acts 8), and even sent a missionary to Ephesus.
  • Paul's prominence today comes mostly from the Catholic Church, which rests on Peter and Paul. The Greek Orthodox Church also honors the many other missionaries and saints.
• Q: What was Paul's thorn in the flesh?
  • "We have absolutely no idea." Guesses include a sin or an irritating travel companion. Jeremy's guess is the rise of Gnosticism, but "it's an absolute guess."
• We're reading only one side of the conversations:
  • Paul refers to an earlier letter, so 1 Corinthians is really the second letter to Corinth. 2 Corinthians mentions another letter in between, so our two letters are more like the second and fourth of several going back and forth.
  • The letters have personal greetings and inside jokes, like the quote in Titus from the Cretan poet Epimenides calling Cretans liars (Titus 1:12).
  • Luke's formal "most excellent Theophilus" becomes friendlier in Acts, showing their relationship had grown.
  • That's why Jeremy isn't a fan of systematic theology: it strips out who a letter was written to and why, and turns it into blanket statements.
• On women in ministry and Corinth:
  • Many former prostitutes were in the Corinthian church, and some had shaved heads, so having every woman cover her head put everyone on level ground.
  • 1 Corinthians addresses serious sexual sin in the church that no one had confronted. Paul is resetting a specific church.
  • Jeremy said Paul supports women in ministry:
    • Phoebe, who led the church at nearby Cenchreae, carried Romans and ministered it to Rome (Romans 16:1–2).
    • He writes "Priscilla and Aquila," breaking the normal Greek order where the man's name comes first, because she was the leader.
    • He called Junia an apostle (Romans 16:7), and Jeremy says the name is "absolutely unequivocally not" male.
• Q (Pastor): Where can I read more on Phoebe?
  • Commentaries on Romans (the introduction, since she carried the letter, and chapter 16) and on Acts. She's usually translated "deaconess."
  • There's no single title for "pastor" in the New Testament. A synagogue leader was the archisynagogos, and a synagogue without a building met in his house (Sosthenes in Corinth, Acts 18).
  • So "the church that meets in the house of" Philemon, or of Priscilla, means they were its pastors. "You can call her a deaconess. You can call her an elder. You can call her Mary Sue."
• Q: Could we still find early copies of Paul's letters?
  • It's possible. Herculaneum, closer to Vesuvius than Pompeii, was carbonized instantly in AD 79, and a rich man's library there was carbonized too.
  • Ancient libraries kept all knowledge, even an enemy's. Before them, conquerors destroyed the technology of the people they beat to show their god was greater, which is why we don't know how the pyramids were built ("It must have been aliens and that nonsense. No...").
  • The carbonized scrolls crumbled when people tried to open them. Then a prize competition led to technology that reads them digitally, and scrolls are now being read.
  • He dated Galatians to around AD 43–45, so a copy at Herculaneum would be the earliest New Testament text we have.
  • Archaeology is only about 150 years old. Bibles from the 1930s lacked some passages, mainly in Psalms, that the Dead Sea Scrolls later supplied.
• Q: Won't the Bible change as new translations come out?
  • It already does. Jeremy noted each NIV edition makes different choices, such as on gendered language, and he has concerns about the latest.
  • Many Bible publishers are owned by secular companies because the Bible is the world's best-selling book. Church leaders need to know which publishers to trust.
  • He said scholars have criticized The Passion Translation, and The Message is a paraphrase, not a translation. He knew Eugene Peterson well: he "had a heart for what he was doing," but Jeremy thinks he was misled.
  • "We have to become people of the text itself."
  • Easier-reading versions can smooth out depth and nuance meant to make us think. Still, the best translation "is the one that speaks to you the most," but compare translations.
    • Bible Hub shows them side by side with commentary.
    • Jeremy's favorite is the NET, but it's so hard to read "you're going to want to walk away."
    • Every translation is in some way a commentary.
• Q: How do we handle inerrancy?
  • The claim of inerrancy applies to the original manuscripts, "none of which we have." Social issues creep into even the earliest English Bibles.
    • The men crucified beside Jesus weren't thieves, and the text doesn't call them that. More on this later.
  • More at the Dead Sea Scrolls. They're the oldest copy of the Hebrew Bible and older than the next oldest copy by about 1,000 years.

On the bus — to the olive shop

Eli Cohen, Israel's greatest spy

• Opher: Eli Cohen grew up in an Arabic-speaking home, a Jewish Arab. He served in the army like everyone else, worked at a company and was fired.
• Israeli intelligence recruited him: he had perfect Arabic and could pass as an Arab. His answer: "I just got fired. May as well."
• He was set up in South America as an exiled Syrian businessman, then invited back to Syria and settled in Damascus as "Kamel."
• At his peak he was a top advisor to Syria's defense minister, the highest-placed spy Israel has ever admitted to. He sat in meetings and drove visiting dignitaries.
• Most of his information came from generals' wives at his parties. He kept an open house and handed out wine: "Even generals speak to their wives in bed."

The eucalyptus trick

• Syrian soldiers on the Golan complained about the heat. Back then bases had no air conditioning and the only fan pointed at the commander.
• On a ride-along with the Golan commander, Cohen suggested planting fast-growing eucalyptus trees at the bases for shade. The order came down and the trees went in.
• Israel mapped the trees and so knew where the hidden bunkers and bases were.
• In 1967, on the fourth day of the war, the air force got a strange order: hit every eucalyptus cluster on the Golan. Almost every bunker between here and Damascus was hit.
  • Paratroopers climbed through the minefields with almost no fire from above, and found coffee still brewing and radios on in abandoned bases. The Golan was taken in a day and a half.
  • "Information is the most important thing you need for a war."
• You can still see abandoned Syrian outposts among the eucalyptus clusters along the road.
• The irony: when the Syrians needed eucalyptus trees, an Italian businessman bought them from Israel and sold them to Syria.

How he was caught

• He sent messages in Morse code, timed to go out with a nearby Syrian base's daily transmission to high command.
• Suspecting a spy, the Syrians told the base to stop transmitting for a few weeks. His signal went out alone, and they caught him at his transmitter.
• He was captured before the 1967 war, tried and executed. His body has never been returned. He was married with children.
• Read more in Our Man in Damascus (about 170 pages, "an airplane read") or watch The Spy on Netflix, with Sacha Baron Cohen.

Eucalyptus in Israel

• Eucalyptus isn't native. Israel brought it from Australia because it was told the trees would dry the swamps. They didn't, and the swamps had to be drained with channels.
• Israel then planted eucalyptus along northern roads to hide troop movements from the Syrians, since there were no satellites in the '50s and '60s. The roots wreck the roads, so they are repaired every four to six months, because that's cheaper than cutting the trees down.

Israel's tanks

• The bases around here are mostly armored units. Israel builds most of its own tanks.
• The Merkava (the name means "chariot," as in the Bible) is known for protecting its crew. The engine is in the front, so a direct hit is less likely to hurt the crew.

Evening Lecture at the Hotel

Biblical months and days

• Opher: the modern Jewish calendar is very different from the biblical one. In the five books of Moses, months have numbers, not names ("the fourteenth day of the seventh month").
• The first month is in spring, around April: "This month shall be the first of months for you" (Exodus 12:2). On the tenth the lamb is brought to be checked for blemishes before Passover four days later.
• New Year's doesn't appear in the text at all. The first day of the seventh month (now) is "a day of trumpet blasts" (Leviticus 23:24), and "even the rabbis are still arguing today... what that actually means."
• Days had no names. Genesis says "day one," not "the first day," because "first" implies a second. The days are one through six, and the seventh is Shabbat, from the word for resting or ceasing.
• The only month name in the First Temple period is Ziv, the "month of light," the second month (around May), under Solomon.
• In Babylon the Jews adopted the Babylonian month names (Tishrei, Kislev, Tevet, Nisan and others), some of them names of pagan gods. Tishrei, the current month, is Akkadian for "beginning."

The Essenes' solar calendar

• Josephus lists four "philosophies": Pharisees, Sadducees, zealots, and a men-only group by the Dead Sea. Since the Dead Sea Scrolls were found in 1947–48, we know more about the Essenes than about the other three, because we have their own writings.
• The modern Jewish calendar is lunisolar, with 354-day lunar years. The Essenes used a purely solar year of 364 days, which divides exactly into 52 weeks, so each holiday falls on the same weekday every year.
  • To stay close to the true year of about 365¼ days, they added a week every seven years and an extra week every 28 years.
• Four seasons of three months each. The rabbis made the first day of the seventh month New Year's, because that's when they say Adam was created: "Can't count time if you don't have people to count."
• The solar year begins on a Wednesday, the fourth day, when the sun and moon were created. The light of day one was heavenly light, not the sun.
• Put every dated event in the Bible on this calendar and "not a single date that is mentioned in the text falls on a Saturday." Most fall on Monday, Wednesday or Friday.
• It lost out because the Essenes were seen as a cult. They rejected the temple once the high priest, who in their view bought the office from the Greeks, adopted the Greek lunar calendar and holidays like Yom Kippur were no longer kept on the right day. So they moved to the Dead Sea.

Our calendar and yours

• The Roman year started in March with ten months, plus an ignored stretch of winter. January and February were added later, so September ("seven"), October ("eight," as in octopus), November and December ("ten") moved two places.
• Quintilis and Sextilis (months five and six) were renamed for Julius Caesar and Augustus: July and August.
• As on the bus that morning: pagan lights for the sun's birthday became Hanukkah and then Christmas. "We're always, always connected with our calendars."
• Passover and Easter should fall together, but the 354-day lunar year runs 11 days short. Judaism fixes this by adding a whole month seven times in every 19-year cycle.
• Q: Isn't there a 13-day difference between the Julian and Gregorian calendars?
  • Opher hadn't heard of it. Calendars kept being revised in the ancient world, and "Julian" just means Julius Caesar added his name.
  • "I was also told never to say that I'm an expert on anything, because an expert is someone who knows more and more about less and less until he knows everything about nothing. I know a little bit about many things."

Day 6 — Saturday, Sep 12: Ein Gedi, Masada National Park, Qumran, Dead Sea Float

We drove south from Tiberias on Route 90 down the Jordan Valley and past the Plains of Jericho, along the Dead Sea to Ein Gedi and Masada, then on to Qumran, the Dead Sea float and up to Jerusalem.

Not recorded: Qumran, the Dead Sea float and the drive up to Jerusalem. At Masada, the start of the bathhouse teaching and the end of Jeremy's application are cut off, and the explanation of the pigeon-raising is lost to about two minutes of silence. The Plains of Jericho talk and the Herod and Masada introduction on the bus start mid-sentence.

On the bus — Tiberias south through the Jordan Valley

Opher taught for most of the drive.

Why religious Jews keep Shabbat the way they do

• Ask a religious Jew "Why can't you drive to the beach on Shabbat?" and "you lost them at 'why can't you.'" From his side, it isn't a restriction.
• His illustration: one year his wife asked that for her birthday he bring home one rose and say "I love you."
  • He took three days off, bought a bouquet, cleaned the house and cooked dinner: "not only do I love you, but I love you this much."
  • "God is asking you to bring him a rose. That's all." Religious Jews do all the extra to show God how much they love him.
• God says to cease from creation, so they examine everything from brushing teeth to opening the fridge: does it involve creating?
• Creating and destroying are treated as the same thing.

What that looks like in practice

• Opening the fridge turns on a light, and pressing a switch completes an electrical circuit: "You are creating light."
  • No electrical devices. A TV left on before Shabbat stays on until Shabbat ends.
  • Some take the fridge bulb out; newer fridges have a Shabbat button so the light doesn't come on.
• A new bottle can't be opened, because you tear the cap from its ring. Open it before Shabbat and you can reopen it later.
• No bicycle: it creates friction and heat and wears away the tires. No driving: ignition makes a spark and completes a circuit.
• Natural abilities are fine: talking, walking, running, jumping, playing basketball, singing. Playing an instrument is not, because it creates music that wasn't there.
• Walking has limits. Every city has a Shabbat line, and walking beyond it could look like going to work.
  • A seamstress with a needle in her pocket could be seen as heading to mend clothes.
• A picnic with pre-made sandwiches is fine, and so are Monopoly and reading. Writing a letter or a child's drawing is not.
• The beach is fine if you walk there, but no towel. Toweling off pulls out body hair (destruction), and so does brushing long hair. You air-dry instead.
• Not everyone is equally strict. Some tear toilet paper before Shabbat, and not everyone pre-opens bottles.

Welcoming and ending Shabbat

• About 40 minutes to an hour before Shabbat, usually the women of the house light at least two candles, plus (by a modern tradition) one for each child.
  • Two candles because the Ten Commandments appear twice: once "remember" the Sabbath, once "keep" it.
• A family day with no phones, TV or radio. Special songs greet the Shabbat like a queen, and people dress in their best clothes.
• The closing ceremony, Havdalah ("separation"), uses all the senses: fire for light and heat, incense for smell, and singing.
• The only day that appears both in the Ten Commandments and in creation itself. It's the holiest day in the Jewish calendar, and Jews get to celebrate it 52 times a year.
• The roads are almost empty, so it's the one day you can nearly count on no traffic, even between Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. "Shabbat shalom," a Sabbath of peace.

Modern history: the British Mandate to 1948

• In 1900 there were about 600,000 people in the land: a Muslim majority, Jews second and Christians a minority. Jews came in waves of immigration.
• The first kibbutz in the world, Degania, was founded at the south end of the Sea of Galilee. Poor socialist immigrants believed working together was better than going it alone.
• In World War I immigration and building stopped. General Allenby defeated the Ottomans in the Jezreel Valley ("the Valley of Armageddon").
• In 1918, even before the war ended, Britain and France split the Middle East between them. The Ottoman Empire was left with only Turkey.
  • That covered today's Iran, Iraq, Egypt, Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Israel and Saudi Arabia.
  • They ignored who lived where. They cared about getting oil to the Mediterranean and about water sources, and drew lines on a crude map.
  • The first thing they built was two oil pipelines, H1 and H2 (Haifa 1 and 2), from the oil fields to the port of Haifa.
• The League of Nations (the forerunner of the UN) gave them a temporary mandate to help local populations learn to run states of their own.
• In World War II the Germans pushed across North Africa toward Palestine. Jews in Palestine volunteered with the British, seeing it as training for future wars.
  • The British stopped the Germans at El Alamein in Egypt, but the Jews came away with British training and some guns.

Who was a "Palestinian"?

• From 1918 to 1948 the area was called Palestine. It was the only time in history a birth certificate from here said "Palestine."
• Before 1918 you were an Ottoman subject, "a Turk. Period." That was true whether you were born in what is now Egypt, Lebanon or Syria.
• His grandfather was born in Jerusalem in 1930, and his birth certificate says Palestine. "My grandfather is a Jewish Israeli Palestinian."
  • With parents from Morocco, he'd have been a Jewish Arab Palestinian Israeli. You could equally be a Christian or Muslim Arab Palestinian Israeli: "no contradictions whatsoever."

Partition and the War of Independence

• After WWII Britain and France brought their soldiers home and handed the regions to the new United Nations.
• The UN sent delegations and voted on their recommendations: independence for India, Pakistan, Egypt, Jordan (1946) and Lebanon.
• The delegation to Palestine reported that Muslims and Jews "don't get along." Its plan:
  • A Jewish homeland where Jews were the majority and a Muslim homeland where Muslims were.
  • Jerusalem to stay international under UN troops, together with Jaffa (the nearest port) and the road between them.
• The UN voted for partition in November 1947, with 33 countries in favor and about 11 against.
• The Jews got no Jerusalem and about 48–49% of the land, and they still celebrated in the streets. Ben-Gurion: "A little bit is better than nothing, we accept."
• The Muslim population rejected it: roughly 1.1 million Muslims against maybe 600,000 Jews, and far more Muslims in the wider region. "We want it all. Let's go to war."
• The British were still there, so the newly independent Arab states sent weapons but not armies. The first six months were a civil war between local Jews and Muslims.
• On May 14, 1948, the Jewish leadership met in a small house in Tel Aviv and declared a Jewish state, with its borders to be decided.
  • President Truman had warned against declaring because the Arab states would invade. Ben-Gurion said they'd invade anyway once the British left.
  • Truman was the first to call and congratulate them.
• On May 15 the British left. Tel Aviv was bombed and eight Arab countries invaded.
• Ceasefires were signed around July–August 1949. Israel ended up holding more land than the partition plan gave it.
• About 1% of the Jewish population (6,000 people) was killed. For the US, 1% would be about 3.5 million.
• The local Muslim population "was offered 50% of the land" and at the end of the war received nothing.

1949–1967: the Gaza Strip and the "West Bank"

• Egyptian troops in Gaza held a strip north and south of the city, which became the Gaza Strip.
• Jordan held part of Jerusalem and the hill country up to half the Dead Sea (the dotted line on our maps). It lay on the west bank of the Jordan River, so Jordan named it the "West Bank."
  • It's a political term the Jordanians coined in 1949 for an area they controlled militarily.
• Neither Egypt nor Jordan gave the local Muslims citizenship.
• Jews living in those areas were told, "fight us and die, or get out." Not a single Jew remained in either area.

1967 and Israeli left/right politics

• In Israel, left and right are defined by how you describe 1967, not by abortion or guns. "You could be a communist on the right."
• The left says Israel conquered the Golan, Sinai, Gaza and the West Bank, and may have to give Gaza and the West Bank back to the Palestinians.
• The right says Israel liberated Gaza and Judea and Samaria, the 3,000-year-old name for where the tribe of Judah lived. "How can we conquer something that's ours?"
  • "The word 'back' in right-wing politics is taboo."
• The moderate right: there are about 2.5 million Muslims in Judea and Samaria. Giving them citizenship would end the Jewish majority within 20 years, and a Jewish-majority state is a central purpose of Israel. So they'd negotiate giving some land for a Palestinian state.
• His neutral version: everyone agrees Israel conquered Sinai and the Golan. The West Bank was taken from Jordanian military control, and Jordan never annexed it.
  • The British took it from the Ottomans and never granted it independence. The last autonomy here was the Jewish Hasmonean kingdom, about 2,100 years ago. Everything since was military rule.
• Israel never annexed the West Bank either, so its residents didn't get citizenship. Israeli military law applies there, not Israeli civil law.
• Jews began returning to communities they had lived in 18 years earlier, and new ones were founded. These are Israeli citizens living outside the state's jurisdiction.
• Muslims inside Israel who stayed put during 1948 and didn't join the fight became citizens. Today there are almost 2 million Muslim citizens who vote and serve everywhere, from bus drivers to Knesset members and Supreme Court justices.
• Overall about 7 million Jewish citizens, plus 700,000–800,000 Christians, Druze, Baha'i and others.
• Q: If I'm born in the West Bank today, am I an Israeli citizen?
  • Only if a parent is Israeli. Very few West Bank residents got Jordanian citizenship. There's now a process for a temporary Jordanian passport so they can fly out and return, but it isn't citizenship.
• After 1967 Jordan and Egypt said, in effect, "good riddance, we don't want it back."

Honor, Islam and the road to peace

• Western understanding misses "how important power and honor" are here, especially to leaders. "There is nothing more shameful than losing a battle."
• Losing to a non-Muslim entity in 1949 was especially humiliating.
• The hierarchy as he described it: Islam on top; Christians and Jews a level below as "people of the book"; everyone else below that.
  • When Islam conquered an area, non-monotheists had to convert or die. Jews and Christians could keep practicing but paid an extra tax (jizya) as dhimmi, second-class citizens.
  • They could hold government posts but never lead the state: "not a glass ceiling — a cement ceiling."
• After 1,300 years on top, 1948 looked like a Jewish rebellion that succeeded. 1967, lost in six days, was another humiliation.
• In 1973 Egypt could finally say "you lost" and felt its honor restored. Four years later President Sadat, "not a very religious one," offered to talk peace.
  • Israel feared a Trojan horse. Sadat came and spoke to the Knesset. His message was "you know I'm stronger than you," followed by a list of demands, including returning Sinai.
  • The 1979 peace treaty was a real peace treaty, not a ceasefire, with the powerhouse of the Arab world. It has held through all of Egypt's upheavals, including the Muslim Brotherhood period.
• Jordan: the Hashemite kings once ruled Mecca and Medina and claim descent from Muhammad. The Saudi family (for whom Saudi Arabia is named) drove them out.
  • The Hashemites had helped the British, who asked the Jews whether they'd mind the east side of the Jordan going to them, even though Britain had promised the Jews all of biblical Israel. The Jews said yes, since almost no Jews lived there.
  • The UN later halved the west side as well, leaving less than a quarter of what was promised, and "we're fine with that."
  • Ever since, Israel has had a relationship with the Hashemites unlike any other Arab leadership. In 1973 the king of Jordan flew in by private helicopter to warn Israel of the war 10 days ahead.
• Jordan is small, has no oil or natural resources to speak of, and depends on Israel for security and water. It couldn't be first to make peace, but once Egypt had, the way was clear, and a treaty followed in the 1990s.
• (Here we passed the security checkpoint into the West Bank: "We are now officially out of Israel.")

The PLO and the Intifada

• The PLO was founded in 1964, before 1967, when Jordan held the West Bank and Egypt held Gaza. So "liberating Palestine" meant all of the land, and that charter never changed.
  • Hamas and the Palestinian Authority today claim Tel Aviv and Tiberias as Palestine: "from the river to the sea." The Jews could "drown, leave, go to Alaska — just not here."
• The PLO used violence, and after 1967 it attacked Israeli forces too. This culminated in the Intifada in the late 1980s.
  • Intifada is Arabic for a dog shaking itself to get rid of fleas. Civilians picked up stones, sticks, anything.
• Gazans also threw stones at Egyptian border troops, who were ordered to shoot to kill. Almost 500 were killed in under a week, and no stone was thrown at an Egyptian soldier for the next 35 years.
• Israel, as a democracy, couldn't order troops to shoot unarmed civilians. The news cameras came, and it took four or five years to work out and legislate a response. There were far more dead on the Palestinian side.

The Oslo Accords

• After four or five years of violence the Palestinian leadership agreed to talk, which produced the Oslo Accords.
• "If you read it, we don't agree on anything": not borders, movement from Gaza, water or anything else. The one agreement was to start with test runs.
• The West Bank was divided into Areas A, B and C (there are others, but these are the main ones).
  • Area A (autonomy): cities that were already about 95% Arab, such as Nablus, Jenin and Ramallah. The new Palestinian Authority (replacing the PLO) handles everything a municipality does, like sewage, roads, taxes, schools and post, and also security, with Israeli-supplied guns and US-trained forces.
  • Area B: the PA handles civil matters and Israel handles security.
  • Area C: the Israeli military handles both. The road we were driving is in Area C. Israel collects the taxes and transfers them to the PA if the PA keeps its side.
• The plan was for C to become B and B to become A over five years as the PA proved itself, leading to a contiguous Palestinian state, while the rest was negotiated.
• Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated by a far-right extremist who saw Oslo as the beginning of the end of Israel.
  • As opposition leader, Netanyahu had warned, "we're giving them guns," and that in five or ten years they'd be used against Israel.
• Netanyahu then became PM for the first time. The Knesset had ratified Oslo, so he couldn't cancel it, and he read it cover to cover.
  • Opher called him a "strategic genius" and a very savvy politician. He has met him a few times: "There is an aura in the room."
  • His approach was to follow Oslo to the letter. Israel had done steps 1–10, and it would do step 11 once the PA did its 1–10. "We're still waiting." When the five years ran out, Oslo became void "by doing absolutely nothing."
• In 2005 Hamas won Gaza in what former President Carter called a democratic election. Hamas doesn't recognize Israel, so for Hamas Oslo never happened. Today Oslo only really applies to the West Bank.
  • Most of Hamas's leadership has been killed by Israel in the last three years, but it still controls Gaza.

The West Bank today

• A/B/C still largely holds. Bethlehem is Area A, as are Jenin and Ramallah. It isn't concentric circles: "It's like Swiss cheese," and you can go straight from Israel into A.
• Two leaderships: one doesn't recognize Israel, and the other recognizes it "but while they're doing that, still wanna kill us."
  • "How do you handle somebody who shakes your hand in a negotiating room while his other hand is pressing a button to launch rockets?"
• Mahmoud Abbas was elected for a five-year term and is now in its 20th year, because he knows he'd lose. Opher's view: Hamas would probably take about 90% in a West Bank election. So even an agreement Abbas signs wouldn't be worth much.
• Looking out at the open land: "It's not that we don't have enough space to live together... [we] don't want to live together. Or at least that's what our politicians tell us."
• Most of the people he works with in tourism are Muslims. A driver slept over at his house before an early trip, they came to his son's bar mitzvah, and he goes to their weddings. "The majority of the populations on both sides just want to live in peace."
• Tomorrow in Bethlehem (Area A), he as an Israeli Jew isn't allowed in, though tourists are. "You... have more rights and privileges of traveling than I do." Marzouk, our driver, is an Israeli citizen but not Jewish, so he can drive us in, and we'll have a local guide there.
• Q: Why aren't you allowed in?
  • Security in Area A is Palestinian. Israel doesn't want an Israeli Jew there, because if something happened the army would have to go into Area A.
  • Before the October 7 war, Jewish-Israeli guides could enter only Bethlehem and Jericho (the tourist areas). They had to notify the military, bring at least six people and stay in a specific area. He expects it to reopen eventually.
• Entering Area B with a group requires a bulletproof bus. For example, the Tomb of the Patriarchs in Hebron means switching buses for about one mile.
• On the left was the Israel–Jordan border fence, with the Jordanian mountains beyond and the Jordan River in a no-man's land between. Photos are fine as long as you don't photograph the crossing itself.

On the bus — Plains of Jericho and along the Dead Sea

Opher continued as we drove along the Dead Sea.

Holy ground

• Somewhere on the Plains of Jericho, before the conquest, God told Joshua to take off his sandals because the place was holy (Joshua 5:15).
• God himself called only two places holy: where Moses saw the burning bush in Sinai (Exodus 3:5) and here. "We are literally traveling now over holy ground."
  • "God never said that the Vatican should be holy. God never said that Mecca and Medina should be holy." People made those places holy.
• The "wonderful loophole in religion": once a place is made holy, you can't un-holy it. When David bought the threshing floor of Araunah the Jebusite and the ark came there, that place became holy forever.

Holy to Jews, then Christians, then Muslims

• Anything holy to Jews automatically becomes holy to Christians and then to Muslims, in that order and never the other way around.
  • Jesus was Jewish. Islam traces itself to Abraham through his firstborn, Ishmael, and sees Muhammad as Ishmael's descendant.
  • The number of Muslims today is, from their perspective, God's promise to Abraham kept: descendants like the sand and the stars.
• Common Muslim names are biblical: Musa (Moses), Harun (Aaron), Yusuf (Joseph) and Isa (Jesus).
• Islam sees itself as the continuation of Judaism and Christianity. Both texts are holy, but the Quran is "the final update from God," and the earlier texts had names changed.
  • Same story, same event, and "98% of the time" the same location, but a different character. In the Quran, Abraham takes his firstborn, Ishmael, not Isaac.
• So when David chose Jerusalem for the temple, it became holy to Islam too, even though the word Jerusalem never appears in the Quran.

The Dead Sea

• It's about 1,500 feet below sea level and the saltiest body of water on earth. It's called "Dead" because no fish live in it.
• Prophecy: when the Messiah comes, water will flow from the temple, the Mount of Olives will split, and the Salt Sea will turn fresh, with fish and fishermen (Ezekiel 47:8–10; Zechariah 14:4).
  • With every group he checks whether any fishermen are actually catching fish. "It hasn't happened yet. But that would be a clear sign that Messiah is here."
• Every drop flowing in is fresh water: rain from Jerusalem and Jordan, and the Jordan River from the Sea of Galilee. The saltiness comes from almost a kilometer of pure salt beneath the water.
• It's rich in sulfur, phosphates and other minerals that are good for the skin, and has been known for healing since biblical times.
  • Doctors in Europe, especially Russia, send patients here. After a few days the conditions at this depth ease arthritic joints.
  • Many companies make skin products from it. The best known, Ahava, is Israeli but was bought by the Chinese. "368" was named for its depth in meters, which is no longer accurate.

Why the Dead Sea is shrinking

• It sits on the largest fault line in the world, which runs from Turkey to Kenya through the Sea of Galilee, the Jordan and the Dead Sea.
  • Israel is on the African plate and Jordan on the Asian plate, and they're moving apart. Every earthquake makes the basin larger, deeper and wider, so the water level drops.
  • The horizontal lines at the tops of the cliffs mark old water levels. A big gap between lines means a big earthquake.
• Evaporation is constant, with 102–105°F that day.
• Since the 1960s, Israel's dam at the south end of the Sea of Galilee has controlled the Jordan's flow and held back water that would naturally reach the Dead Sea.
  • At first the sea dropped about 10 meters (30 feet) a year. It's now about 5–8 feet a year and moving toward a balance.
• Forty years ago he could park by the road, hop the fence and walk into the water. "Now look how far I have to walk."
• In 1908 a British member of the Palestine Exploration Fund rowed out from where the camels were and marked water levels on a rock (marked "PEF" with a small green sign).
  • The black line is above the height of the bus, so the road we were on was under water a hundred years ago. "There's nothing like mankind to completely destroy nature."
• Because the inflow is fresh, there's vegetation and date fields around the sea.
• The road is Israeli-built, after 1967. From 1948 to 1967 this was Jordanian-held, and it's still the West Bank.

Flash floods

• The Kidron Valley, one of the valleys around ancient Jerusalem, runs down to the Dead Sea, and we crossed it.
• Jerusalem's rain arrives here two or three days later as a flash flood: hundreds of thousands of gallons in an hour and a half, with waterfalls suddenly appearing in the desert. The discolored rocks show where it runs.
• They're extremely dangerous. A few years ago a group of Israeli teenagers hiking on a dry day, two days after rain, was hit, and he believes eight were killed. The road is sometimes closed.

Date palms

• They grow for about 15 years, then are cut down when they're too tall even for the machines, and a new batch (visible beside them) replaces them.
• Bedouin use every part: rope from the leaves, bark for heating, and a trunk as the center pole of a traditional tent.
• The leaf edges carry a mild poison. A sting swells up and hurts for a while.

Ein Gedi

Jeremy taught at the stream.

Where this fits in David's life

• David's life has segments: shepherd boy, Goliath, fame ("Saul has slain his thousands, and David his tens of thousands"), marriage into Saul's family, flight into the wilderness, and finally the throne and his dynasty.
• He had already been anointed, yet Saul had sons, including righteous Jonathan, who was in line for the throne and loved both his father and his best friend David.
• David came to Ein Gedi because it has water but is incredibly hard to reach. He likely brought only a few men, with others hiding at Adullam. He thought, "Saul would be stupid to follow me here."

The setting of 1 Samuel 24

• Saul took 3,000 young men to hunt for David "near the Crags of the Wild Goats" (1 Samuel 24:2).
  • These are the ibex we just saw. English translators had never seen an ibex, so they wrote "wild goats."
• The writer knew the land intimately. It wasn't Samuel: 1 and 2 Samuel are one book split in English, and Samuel dies partway through 1 Samuel.
• Ein Gedi is full of caves. Later today we'd see the caves that preserved the oldest known copy of the Hebrew Bible for 2,000 years.
• Saul went into the very cave where David and his men were hiding, to relieve himself (1 Samuel 24:3).

The test

• David's men said, "This is the day the Lord spoke of... I will give your enemy into your hands for you to deal with as you wish" (1 Samuel 24:4).
  • Notice it doesn't say "for you to kill," but "as you wish." God created the opportunity and was testing how David would respond.
• Killing Saul wouldn't have been sin. Saul was his enemy, the Spirit of the Lord had left him, and he'd be dead in a few chapters.
• But David understood God's plans are carried out "not by his plan or his might... but by God alone," and his job was to be faithful.
• He cut off only a corner of Saul's robe as a trophy, and even then "David's conscience was stricken" (1 Samuel 24:5). Saul was still God's appointment, and David wouldn't force God into "plan B."

David had already seen "plan B"

• Saul was "head and shoulders" taller than everyone, the giant of Israel, and should have fought Goliath himself. Instead he hid in his tent.
• Modern translations say Goliath was nine feet tall. Jeremy says the Hebrew text says six and a half feet.
  • Skeletons show average height then was about 4'9"–4'11". Today Michael Jordan at 6'6" would be a short player in the league, because people have grown taller over time. "I've got students in college right now that are taller than that."
  • So Saul and Goliath were the same height. Saul failed, David went, and that's when everyone started looking to David.

"The Lord's anointed" and authority

• "The Lord forbid that I should... lay my hand on him; for he is the anointed of the Lord" (1 Samuel 24:6). David says "anointed" twice, the double emphasis we've seen since day one.
• Every authority over us (government, work, biblical authority) is ordained by the Lord, "for good or for bad."
  • God raised up Nebuchadnezzar to destroy Jerusalem as discipline in exile. He raised up Cyrus, a pagan king who "does not know me," to restore Israel after 70 years (Isaiah 45).
• "None of that is a surprise to the Lord." God sees "a much larger roadmap" than our selfish or temporal view.

David's words and Saul's response

• David rebuked his men, let Saul leave, then called out "my lord the king" and bowed face to the ground (1 Samuel 24:7–8).
• He showed Saul the corner of his robe as proof he meant no harm: "May the Lord judge between you and me... but my hand will not touch you" (1 Samuel 24:11–12).
• David put his fate in God's hands. Saul had dragged 3,000 men into a desert where you can't drink from the Dead Sea, and David had every right. "I want the Lord to be able to work in this situation."
• Saul wept aloud: "You are more righteous than I... I know that you will surely be king" (1 Samuel 24:16–20).
  • It's the first time Saul publicly acknowledged God's plan, and he did it in front of all 3,000 soldiers. "Do you think that soldier is going to remember that moment? Of course."
• Saul asked David to swear not to wipe out his descendants (1 Samuel 24:21).
  • New kings normally wiped out the former ruling family. When Solomon took the throne he killed rivals among David's sons and David's general, Joab.
  • David kept his oath. The only sons of Saul put to death were because Saul broke Joshua's covenant with the Gibeonites. Jonathan's son Mephibosheth ate at David's table, and Saul's family became like family to him, even after betrayal.
• David's character shifts later as king, but here "his heart is prepared to be the leader that God needed that Saul wasn't."

Application

• What matters more: getting our revenge and vindication, or someone having their eyes opened to God's plan? "Let God be our vindicator."
• What God requires isn't always earth-shaking action: "sometimes it's simple obedience to let him do what he needs to do."
• If the government, the president or a senator wrongs you ("added these taxes that I don't deserve"), let the Lord be the judge and avenger.
• Maybe Saul hunting David was really God's tool to train him in the wilderness for what was ahead.
  • When we feel like we're "in the desert of Ein Gedi," struggling to survive under authority we don't like, "maybe God's using that moment to make us into somebody that's greater than who we are."
• Q: You said David possibly wrote Psalm 23 here?
  • Yes. Beside this stream of living water, it's assumed David wrote Psalm 23 and many psalms, especially the imprecatory ones, while biding his time here. He longs for "green pastures" because there are none nearby. Sit by the stream and put yourself in his mindset.

On the bus — Ein Gedi to Masada

Our Israeli guide, Opher, taught on the drive.

Herod's desert fortresses

• To protect himself, Herod built seven desert fortresses. Masada is the southernmost.
• Metzada is Hebrew for fortress. The mountaintop is a natural fortress, cut off by valleys on all four sides, and Herod built walls and storerooms on top.
• The storerooms held enough for five to seven years: grain, dates, pomegranates, carobs, raisins, honey, olive oil and wine.
  • Liquids had a double floor system. If a jar broke, the contents drained into a second container below.
• A Roman garrison was stationed in each fortress just to keep it ready in case the king arrived. Otherwise they relaxed at the bathhouse. It was an easy command with nobody above you.
• There's no record Herod was ever at Masada, yet he built two palaces: a private one (by his invitation only) and a public one for judging and receiving visitors.
• His sons and grandsons didn't maintain the garrisons, and Masada was nearly abandoned.

The Great Revolt and the refugees

• The Jewish revolt against Rome began in AD 66–67. Some families fled the fighting and took over abandoned desert fortresses. At Masada they may not have had to fight to get in.
• Titus moved slowly and deliberately from north to south, so survivors kept fleeing south. After Jerusalem fell, everyone still able to move made for Masada.
  • Most of the people there were families who didn't want to fight, along with rebels.
• To the pagan Roman mind, destroying God's temple should have ended the war. Hunting down every last pocket of resistance shows how angry Rome was.

Josephus as a source

• Josephus describes the battles and the geography, and his description of Masada is "immaculate." Archaeologists find exactly what he describes.
• His numbers are the problem. Other historians were writing about the revolt too, and he had competition for readers.
• He was born Yosef ben Matityahu, a priest (cohen) in the temple. Some of the best descriptions of Herod's temple come from him.
• As general of the Jewish northern army, after losing all his soldiers he went over to Titus as his historian, taking the family name Flavius in Titus's honor.
• "Where's the plot line? Where's the action? Where's the suspense?" He knew the ending but embellished: winds changing by divine intervention, round numbers like 4,000 killed here and 2,000 there. Add them up and you get almost a million dead, more than the land could have held.
• At Masada he's different. The description is vivid, "almost as if he was actually here," and gives an exact number rather than a round one.

The Roman siege logistics

• At least 10,000 Romans including slaves, plus horses and camels, for a campaign of about seven months.
• The nearest fresh water was Ein Gedi, where we had just been. Josephus describes caravans of Romans and slaves hauling water back and forth. "The Roman military is one of the most logistical militaries to walk the face of the earth."
• Masada was the last fortress, and the same methods were used on the others.
• First they built camps and a knee-high wall with patrols between the camps, to make sure nobody left.
  • They didn't expect gold up there. The "prize" was the people, as slaves.
• Then they found the weak spot and built catapults, a siege tower and a battering ram on site.

Masada National Park

Opher taught on top, with Jeremy joining at the bathhouse.

Arriving at the top

• The eastern "snake path" winds up the mountain like a snake, as Josephus himself describes. But the main assault came from the easier opposite side.
• We entered through the 2,000-year-old snake path gate.
• The black line: everything below it is as found, and everything above is reconstruction. Masada was the first place in the world archaeologists used this. With no line, what you see is original, and whole rooms were found still standing because almost nobody lived here after the Romans.
• Below, next to the reconstructed Roman camp by the cable car station, a much larger unreconstructed square of stones is a Roman logistics camp.

The commander's villa and the storerooms

• The model shows the northern part, which we walked through. We started in part of the villa of the garrison commander, with rooms around open-air courtyards.
• More than 20 storerooms have been found. When the Romans eventually took Masada, the Jews had not burned them.
• The storerooms held not just food but weapons and armor: shields, swords, spears and arrows. Liquids again had double floors, and there's a replica jar for honey, olive oil or wine.
• The black line runs on one wall but not the other, which shows roof height. No cement was found, so the roof was probably wood covered with mud and re-mudded now and then. The walls were plastered to keep water out.
• Wildlife: the golden spiny mouse lives here.

Bathhouses, walls, quarries and a pool

• There were at least three bathhouses in the middle of the desert. This was a Roman bath, not a ritual purification bath. It was small and served maybe 30–40 men of the garrison, where a city bath could hold hundreds.
• A big plastered wall was "more of a psychological wall" than anything. Anyone could use everything on this side, including the public palace (the building with the wooden-looking roof), but no one went past without Herod's invitation.
• Quarries on top, north and south, meant no stone had to be hauled up.
• There was also a pool on the southern side, just for recreation.
• Less than 40 mm of rain falls a year, and it evaporates within hours. Yet there was water for a pool, three bathhouses and a thousand people for five years.

Building for the desert

• The entrance faces east, so for most of the day the sun is overhead and behind, which means more shade.
• Very thick walls keep out the heat, and a high window circulates air. It feels noticeably cooler than the 102°F outside.
• The walls were plastered and painted, and redone when fashions changed.
• Why the paint survived 2,000 years: the very dry climate, the fallen stones that covered it (most walls here were rebuilt from the stones lying next to them), and paint applied to still-wet plaster so it soaked in.

Herod's Northern Palace

• Herod's private palace hangs on the northern cliff, built at great effort and "maybe quite a few people" dying.
• The reason is a natural wind tunnel on the north side. There's a breeze even in the heat of the day: "He's got the shade... a wine cup right next to him and somebody's feeding him some grapes."
• It has three levels: a semicircle at the top, a circle below and a square at the bottom. Columns stand about 30 feet high, everything is open to the wind, and there are mosaic floors. "This guy knew how to live." Again, we don't know he ever used it.

The Roman camps and the weak side

• A square of stones far below is another Roman camp, with the fence running off left and right to the other camps for the patrols.
• The elevation difference shows it's much easier to climb from the western side, which was Masada's weak spot.
• The large logistics camp has a square within a square: the commander's headquarters, where he oversaw building the ramp to bring the siege machines up to wall level.

The Dead Sea then and now

• 2,000 years ago the sea was much wider, the road we came on was under water, and there was no gap. It ran another 30 miles south.
• A hundred years ago it was about 100 km long, and today it's about 65 km. The loss is mostly from pumping water out of the Sea of Galilee and holding back the Jordan.
• The Dead Sea won't die out. A 200-km channel is planned to bring Red Sea water, all of it desalinated so the Red Sea's composition doesn't crystallize the Dead Sea.
  • It's a joint Israeli, Palestinian Authority and Jordanian project. Jordan passed it about eight years ago ("the king said we're doing it"), and Israel, as a democracy, takes longer. The World Bank is about to fund it, and he hopes water returns within about 10 years.

Romans, the bathhouse and circumcision

• Opher: a Roman could accept much of Judaism, like not working on Shabbat, but circumcision was where they drew the line.
  • Romans were taught that the human body is perfect as the gods created it, so to them circumcision was "butchery." It was a physical, not just psychological, barrier to becoming Jewish.
  • Every Roman city and even small town had at least a small bathhouse. They were central to social life.
• Jeremy: Romans weren't just unwilling, they were insulted by it. It became an identifying mark of a Jew.
  • The Roman writer Suetonius describes Jews in court being publicly exposed as Jewish before the jury. "Do you think you got a fair trial from that point on? Absolutely not."
  • The bathhouse was where you got ahead in society, and there everyone knew you were Jewish. Some Jews tried to hide it.
• It became an issue in the church. Acts 15 ruled that Gentiles didn't need circumcision, yet churches in the Roman world still pressed it.
  • Jeremy says the reasoning was cultural: if we're all one body and walk into the bathhouse together, one of us is mistreated and one fits in, so we should all be treated the same.
• Paul said no. God made each of us unique, called from different backgrounds and experiences, and "that is all what makes the body of Christ the body of Christ, our diversity."

Application

• Jeremy: God may call you to people "who I don't have access to." Rather than all becoming the same, celebrate that uniqueness. Otherwise "we're going to miss the places for the gospel to permeate more fully."
• God has called each of us to carry his gospel to unique places.

The siege

• The walls were up, the storerooms were full and the cisterns held enough water for a thousand people for years. Over seven months, "nobody just sits idly by and waits to die."
• The Romans built the ramp and the defenders tried to burn it. The Romans made noise 24 hours a day from all sides so no one could sleep or think straight.
• Roman catapults hit the walls, and debris could strike anyone in the wrong spot.
• The defenders answered with "bowling for Romans," rolling stones down the hill. The Romans put Jewish slaves in front of their soldiers.
• The Romans also faked attacks from left and right. Of roughly 900 men, women and children, maybe 400 could fight, and they were run ragged.
• The defenders poured water off the walls to taunt Romans who were hauling it 12 miles each way from Ein Gedi, 24 miles round trip, all day long.
• Eventually the ramp was finished and the Romans breached the wall. Everyone knew it was over. It was apparently night, and the Romans went back down to rest before the final attack.

Elazar ben Yair and the last night

• According to Josephus, the leader, Elazar ben Yair, gathered the community and urged them to die by their own hands rather than be taken.
• In Judaism, saving a life is the highest mitzvah. An ultra-Orthodox doctor will operate even on Shabbat or Yom Kippur. So taking a life, including your own, is among the gravest sins.
  • "It's not easy to persuade a bunch of Jewish people of anything." The first speech didn't persuade them, so he gave a longer one.
• Opher's summary of the speech: tomorrow Rome takes us. Do we let our families be abused, tortured until we deny God and enslaved in a pagan world? Or do we deny Rome its prize, "because we're the treasure"?
• Josephus says ten men were chosen by lot to carry it out, and the last one died by his own hand.
• Evidence: in the room behind us is a picture of exactly ten ostraca (pottery sherds) with Jewish names. One of them is Elazar ben Yair. "It doesn't necessarily prove anything, but it is quite a coincidence."
• How would Josephus know what was said up here? There are two theories:
  • He reconstructed it. The Romans found the dead, and as a former Jewish commander he imagined what would have to be said.
  • Or, as he says himself, two women and five children who had hidden survived and told him. That was a common way for an ancient historian to say "I wasn't there, but eyewitnesses told me."
• Israel's saying today: "Masada will not fall a second time." "We're still here... We got faith in God."

Pigeons

• Masada raised pigeons, the cheapest temple sacrifice, and pigeon-raising was a business throughout the land.

The water system

• The flash floods can't be stopped even today, but they can be diverted. Herod's engineers found where the floods ran and built dams to turn them into two aqueducts that brought the water to the mountainside.
• Huge cisterns were dug into the side of the mountain, each about ten times the size of the one we had passed up top. One flash flood a year fills them all.
• Slaves carried water up a path from the cisterns to the cisterns on top, which held enough for four or five months before they refilled.
• Channels on the mountain slopes also caught any rain that fell and sent it into more cisterns. "Gravity. That's all you need here, and diversion dams."
• Q: How did Herod figure all this out?
  • He was trained as an engineer, and "some of the most brilliant minds were from ancient times. Knowledge gets lost along the way."
  • The Greeks knew the world was round and even knew its circumference; Atlas holding a globe shows it. Later knowledge was lost and libraries were burned.
  • "Technology of water is one of the most important aspects of life 2,000 years ago, and they were brilliant."

The Roman ramp

• Over the wall to the left is an unnatural slope: the Roman siege ramp that brought the machines up to wall level. It was also a way up Masada in ancient times.

Day 7 — Sunday, Sep 13: Bethlehem Olive Wood Shop, Shepherd's Field Sanctuary (Beit Sahour), Church of the Nativity & St. Catherine's Grottoes, Return to Old City Jerusalem

We drove from Jerusalem through the security wall into Bethlehem, shopped at a Christian family's olive wood shop, visited the Shepherds' Field in Beit Sahour, walked up to Manger Square and the Church of the Nativity, and returned to Jerusalem for the evening.

Not recorded: The olive wood shop itself, and the return to Old City Jerusalem, including the antiquities shop visit and the evening teaching on the bus. Isa's introduction on the bus and his talk inside the Church of the Nativity are missing their openings. St. Catherine's (the Franciscan side) was closed at midday, so it was only pointed out, not visited.

On the bus — Jerusalem to Bethlehem

Going into Area A

• The West Bank is divided into three kinds of areas; Bethlehem is Area A (Palestinian Authority control), so our Israeli guide Opher could not come with us.
  • A red sign at the entrance warns Israeli citizens they are not allowed in.
• In Area A we pick up a local Palestinian guide — today it's Isa, one of Jeremy's best friends. "Isa is a common name here because it is Jesus."
  • Some Palestinian guides won't let Jeremy teach, so he sometimes has to preface things on the way in and talk more on the way out.
• Food brought into Bethlehem passes through extra inspections and customs — "technically you are not in Israel" — so meals here cost more.
• Two of the usual entrances were closed (the metal gate within the concrete wall was shut) because with no tourism they don't need to be manned; security is needed elsewhere, probably along Gaza. That forced us through a checkpoint the back way.

The Christians of Bethlehem

• In the 1950s Bethlehem was about 85% Christian; today it's about 8% "and declining even faster."
• Much of the decline comes from Palestinian Authority restrictions: Christians in Bethlehem are only allowed to work in tourism.
  • They can own tourist restaurants, be tour guides, and above all run shops and supply them.
• The shop we visit is run jointly by 12 Christian families, each covering a part — olive wood, mother-of-pearl and gold jewelry, knickknacks, olive oil.
  • Products in Bethlehem are made there, unlike Jerusalem, where you may find "made in China" on the bottom — few outside products can get in, and this is their livelihood.
• Jeremy is close to the Juha family; in Bethlehem people know him as "Jeremy Juha," not Jeremy Stein. He has helped move younger family members to Kansas City "simply in order that they might have a future."
• The Palestinian Authority is now allowing non-Christians to open lavish tourist shops to compete with the Christians and drive them out.
  • "It is not persecution oftentimes the way we think of. This is economic persecution."

Landmarks on the way in

• The Shephelah: the valleys between the hill country south of Jerusalem.
  • Where David moved his flocks and fought lions and bears; in one of these valleys, the Elah Valley, he fought Goliath.
  • Also the area of Samson's ministry.
• Beit Jala: just outside Bethlehem proper, but part of Bethlehem in ancient times; the area of the shepherds and their caves.
• The Intercontinental Hotel: closed now with no tourism or dignitaries; every major agreement between the Palestinian Authority and Israel has been signed there.
• The Kando store: the Kando family is the antiquities dealer who handled the Dead Sea Scrolls. The patriarch has passed away; his son and grandsons run the shop, and one grandson (who married into the Juha family) has started a small antiquities business in Kansas City with Jeremy's help.

The security wall

• Built after the Second Intifada, when bus and suicide bombings were killing civilians in Jerusalem almost daily.
• "As soon as the wall went up, guess what happened? They stopped." It let Israel keep watch on who came in and out.
• He compared it to a normal border wall: the borders with Jordan and Egypt look almost identical, and the Jordan border is even more secure — though Jordan is an ally.

"Illegally occupied territory" and the American double standard

• Jeremy said he presented a paper at the UN arguing that no U.S. politician should use the phrase "illegally occupied territory" about Israel, because the U.S. doesn't hold itself to that standard.
• His case: Hawaii.
  • The U.S. took Hawaii in the 1890s under William McKinley to control the sugar trade, overthrowing a peaceful, successful monarchy; Congress initially called it illegal and said Hawaii could not be a state.
  • Pearl Harbor (1941) brought the U.S. into World War II, but Hawaii didn't become a state until 1959.
  • He said a Japanese pilot shot down in the third wave was hidden by locals, some of whom saw Japan as coming to liberate the islands.
  • "If we're going to say that Israel has no right to defend itself... because it's being attacked on illegally occupied territory, then we had no right to enter into World War II." "Do you see the double standard in it all?"
• He argued the rhetoric is more about winning votes from certain demographics.
  • Of politicians speaking about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict today, only about 10% cared before 2023. Why now? TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, Facebook.
  • His comparison: the Lindsay Clancy case became famous through social media while more than a dozen similar cases went unnoticed.
  • "Social media is going to dictate the public opinion, and the public opinion is going to sway politicians."

Gaza, work permits and October 7

• He called the claim that Gaza is an open-air concentration camp "an absolute fallacy."
  • A Palestinian without Israeli citizenship in the West Bank earns about $1.45 an hour; working inside Israel pays about $15 an hour, so Israel opened the gates for workers.
• On October 7, workers paid by Hamas had drawn maps of the Israeli communities where they worked. That made the attack so devastating.
  • Attackers went first for local officials, then for anyone with medical training.
  • At Kfar Aza, a dead attack leader carried a list of the town's two political leaders and its doctors and nurses (two doctors, five nurses); all were among the first killed.
  • Jeremy walked through one nurse's house: she was shot outside her wall with her five children; three were gunned down as they ran, two escaped by hiding in the tall grass.

Israelis, Orthodox and ultra-Orthodox

• Do Israelis like Americans? "Yes, they do. Absolutely."
• Tension comes mainly from the ultra-Orthodox, and there's tension between modern Israelis and the ultra-Orthodox too.
  • The ultra-Orthodox have been ordered to serve in the military after years of exemption, justified as keeping Israel's religious heritage.
  • Since 2023 (Hamas, Hezbollah, now Iran) public opinion says everyone should serve: "if we ever lose our defenses, we're all in trouble."
• Stories of Christians being spat on involve "incredibly, incredibly fringe" ultra-Orthodox — some of whom don't even want modern Israelis in the land.
  • It usually happens when groups proselytize in Jerusalem's streets: "to them, this is their home. You're coming into their home."
• Jewish memory runs "thousands of years," not one or two generations.
  • Most people you meet in Jerusalem have family killed by a Christian for being Jewish in the last century; about half lived through the Holocaust or knew someone who did. Survivors with tattooed numbers still walk the streets.
  • Preaching the love of Jesus to someone whose family was killed by others who preached the same thing creates tension "because of the failure of Christianity."
• Q: If we get spat on, can we fight back?
  • "No. We have no rights... You are a guest inside this country." He has never had anyone in his groups spat on.
• The three groups:
  • Orthodox: normal clothes, perhaps white fringes (tzitzit) and a kippah; engaged in modern life, with phones and technology — "they are just religious."
  • Ultra-Orthodox: mostly from Eastern European communities; all black even at 100 degrees, big hats, women in wigs and long clothes (locals call them "penguins"). He compared them to the Amish: they follow 1800s rabbinic teachers who said development had peaked.
  • Secular: Jewish by ethnicity and background but not practicing. Opher is secular — "He likes his bacon."
• Shellfish isn't kosher (no lobster, crab or shrimp). In ancient times the rule protected health, because they're bottom feeders.
• Coming up: Moshe, an Orthodox (not ultra-Orthodox) Jewish scholar in his mid-70s, will explain how Judaism relates to Christianity and let us ask any question, such as "Why don't you believe in Jesus?" or "What about Isaiah 53?"
  • "The day that that man dies, there is going to be a huge loss for both Christianity and Judaism inside this land."

Culture tips: the week and the street

• Sunday in Israel is basically Monday; Friday and Saturday are the weekend.
• The day begins at sundown, not sunrise, so shops open for the new week as the sun goes down.
• With street peddlers, "when you say no to somebody here, that is not the end of it. That is the start of a negotiation."
  • "This is not the land of politeness." Ignoring someone is how you show you're not interested.
  • If they agree to a deal, they're making money; ignore the sob stories. Your best tool is walking away, and then "the price will get magically lowered."
  • In shops, too, you can bargain below the sticker price, especially when buying several things.
  • Jeremy can't step in to help: he returns every few weeks and has to protect his relationships.

Zach, the antiquities dealer

• Zach is one of Jeremy's best friends (his son is named after him) and, he says, the world's top dealer in biblical antiquities.
• Zach founded a church plant and ran the shop to support it. After TBN and CBN made the shop famous, it became his full-time job; he became an elder and another pastor took over, and the shop still funds that West Bank church.
• A former Palestinian terrorist who spent years in jail before encountering Christ.
  • After converting he was cut off from family, got death threats and went into something like witness protection. The State of Israel protected him and gave him citizenship.
  • The Assemblies of God brought him to a biannual pastors' meeting to describe what new believers in the land go through.

On the bus — Bethlehem to Beit Sahour

The town and its people (Isa, our local Bethlehem guide)

• Bethlehem's Christians belong to many churches: Orthodox, Catholic, Armenian, Assyrian, Coptic and Protestant. Muslims are the majority here and mostly Sunni, as in Palestine and Israel generally.
• Bethlehem is about 200,000 people, 10% Christian.
• Three Christmases: December 25; Isa's (Orthodox) church follows the Julian calendar and celebrates January 7; the Armenians, who adopted Christianity in 301 and keep their own calendar, celebrate January 18.
• The Bethlehem district has three small towns: Bethlehem, Beit Jala (Isa's hometown, the hill with the antenna) and Beit Sahour.
• The names:
  • Beit means "house of"; Beit Lechem is "house of bread."
  • Arabs later gave many names an Arabic sound: Beit Lahem, where lahem means "meat" — "house of meat."
• Landmarks: the Walled Off Hotel, a 10-room boutique hotel created by the artist Banksy ("no one knows his ID") with his art in the lobby, fully booked every day before the war; behind the wall, Rachel's Tomb — Jacob's wife, who died giving birth to Benjamin at the entrance to Bethlehem (Genesis 35:16–20).

Living under the Palestinian Authority

• Since 1995 Bethlehem has been under Palestinian Authority control: Palestinian license plates are white, Israeli ones yellow.
  • "Think of Bethlehem as an island run by the PA," surrounded by Israeli-run territory in Judea and Samaria — geopolitically, the West Bank.
  • PA cities include Hebron, Bethlehem, Jericho, Shechem and Ramallah; about 2.8 million people hold Palestinian ID.
• Before 1995 residents used Israeli travel documents; now they have a Palestinian passport, which says "Palestinian Authority," not "State of Palestine," because it isn't a recognized state.
  • To visit the U.S. Isa needs a visa and must exit through Jordan; before the war they could use Ben Gurion.
• "We thought that the authorities will do something good for the people... but none of that happens." Since the PA came, poverty and unemployment have gone backwards.
  • Government jobs require wasta: "Wasta means you know someone," even if you have a good degree.
• Many Palestinians used to work in Israel with permits, but all permits were cancelled after 2023, so unemployment keeps rising.

Born in a cave, not a stable

• The Beit Sahour valley was once one big field: in the 10th century BC, where Ruth and Boaz met; in the first century, where the shepherds saw the angel.
• "It's not a wooden stable." That image is mostly European. Jesus was born in a cave.
  • Houses were built over caves: the cave was the lower room, the house above.
  • Caves keep one temperature all year — cool in summer, warm in winter.
  • The limestone is soft enough to enlarge with hammer and chisel; caves are still used as storage and even apartments.
• Bethlehem is about 7 miles south of Jerusalem and about 850 meters (2,800 feet) above sea level.
  • East is the dry Judean Desert, dropping to the Dead Sea; west is greener, with red earth and different trees and weather. From Beit Sahour to Beit Jala is a 10-minute drive and a big temperature change.

Stone, family and faith

• Jesus' trade: the Greek word is tekton, which Isa explained as someone working with stone — the local building material.
• Bethlehem has no big industries: tourism is the biggest, and businesses are family-run (no franchises — "it's risky").
  • Example: the Ararat Hotel, owned by an Armenian family (Armenian surnames typically end in -ian).
• Christian families carve St. George slaying the dragon, Bethlehem's patron saint, over the door — "Like Jews... put the mezuzah" — or Jesus, Mary or a Bible verse.
• Land is inherited, so families build up: grandparents at the bottom, then the father, then the sons; "when we get older we go down." Five stories is the maximum.
• Before the British Mandate (1920s) builders used no concrete or iron: double stone walls and arches, like Jerusalem, Hebron and every old city here.
  • Mortar was made the Roman way: limestone baked in a cave fire for about three days, cooled, put in water and smashed into a cement.
  • Today houses are concrete with a stone veneer about 5 cm thick.

Shepherd's Field Sanctuary (Beit Sahour)

The site and the chapel (Isa)

• The Franciscans bought the land (more than 20 acres) to protect it; they found the remains of a Byzantine monastery and built a church.
• Jerusalem is Yerushalayim in Hebrew and al-Quds in Arabic — related to Beit HaMikdash, the Temple and its Holy of Holies.
• From here you can see Bethlehem on the hill, with the bell tower of the Church of the Nativity, our next stop. Beit Sahour, where we are, lies east in the valley; he said the name means "house of shepherds."
• The chapel (1950s) is by Antonio Barluzzi, an Italian architect Isa said Mussolini sent in the early 1930s.
  • He lived in the Holy Land about 25 years, returned to Italy around 1958–59 and died in 1960.
  • He built more than 24 churches here, including the Church of All Nations in Jerusalem and the Mount of Beatitudes; this was his last chapel.
• It's shaped like a tent on purpose: shepherds put their flocks in a cave and pitched a small tent at the entrance to guard it.
  • Inside, it's like standing in the field: the shepherds are afraid at first, then filled with joy; the dome shows the open heaven with angels coming down, "connection between heaven and earth."
  • Barluzzi gave it great acoustics for Christmas hymns — we sang.

Why the shepherds were told first (Isa)

• "We always say they are the poor people... that's all nice. These shepherds, they were on a mission."
  • They were raising lambs for the Temple sacrifices; a sacrificial lamb was wrapped in swaddling cloth and kept in a cave.
  • "Jesus, he is the lamb for the sacrifice. He was born in a cave."
• The cave was the lower room, the garage or storeroom, under a one-room house; Luke's Greek word is kataluma.
• Mary's journey from Nazareth was about 150 km and took at least 10 days.
  • People traveled by day on the trade routes, resting every half day. Local Christian tradition remembers where she rested, drank from a well or slept, and the Byzantines built churches on those spots.
• The Milk Grotto near the Church of the Nativity (not in the Bible): tradition says Mary nursed Jesus there before they left for Egypt, a drop of milk fell, and the cave turned white.
  • Couples struggling to conceive take the white powder, mix it with water or juice and pray; the priest's office is covered with thousands of photos of families. Even Muslims come for a blessing.
  • Jews go for the same purpose to Rachel's Tomb or to Shiloh, where Isa said the Ark rested 369 years.

The cave (Isa)

• This cave is an example; the shepherds' actual cave would have been within about 200 meters, since the whole valley was one field.
• Used by shepherds in the first century and later by Byzantine monks with an agricultural monastery, destroyed in the 7th century and never rebuilt.
• In the Ottoman era (15th century–1914) locals took stones from the monastery ruins for reuse; stones with Latin carvings still show up in Bethlehem's old city.
• Q: How did they dig the caves out?
  • By hand with hammers and chisels: "the stone here is very soft."

How a cave home worked (Jeremy)

• Livestock came in through an entrance made just big enough for them, with stairs down from the house.
• The cave was where you cooked and did daily work like sewing and knitting.
• Now read the Christmas story for what the text says rather than the tradition; the birth account is mainly in Luke.

The Magi are a different story

• The Magi don't come for about two more years, which is why Herod orders the death of boys two and under after asking when the star appeared (Matthew 2:7, 16).
• Tradition says three because of the three gifts (gold, frankincense, myrrh), but there were more.
  • All Jerusalem is stirred when they arrive because these were men of great importance.
• They were pagans from the Parthian Empire, into astrology and astronomy (and human sacrifice), searching the skies for a sign.
  • Probably the lasting influence of Jewish officials in Babylon and Persia: Shadrach, Meshach, Abednego and "most importantly, Daniel."
  • The Roman historian Suetonius says even the Romans watched for a star signaling a great ruler from the east; they identified him with Vespasian, who conquered this land and became emperor.
• Matthew looks ahead to what comes next; Luke tells the birth itself.

The census and Joseph's family land

• Mary and Joseph lived in Nazareth; a census (for taxation) brought them to Bethlehem, and every man had to return to his own home (Luke 2:1–4).
• Land was never permanently sold: it returned in the 50th year, the Jubilee. So Joseph is taxed on his family's ancestral property.
• That means his whole extended family comes too — brothers and cousins, all descendants of David (Jesse, Obed, Boaz) with a share in the land.

"No room in the inn": the kataluma

• If his whole family is from here, why would Joseph need an inn? That's the first clue something else is going on.
• The word is kataluma, used several times in the New Testament and translated "inn" only here; Luke uses it for the upper room (he cited Acts 1).
• Luke knows the word for inn — pandocheion — and uses it in the Good Samaritan (Luke 10:34–35).
• There's no innkeeper in the text and no rejection of Jesus — yet "how many of us have seen Christmas cantatas... about the innkeeper who rejected Jesus?"

Tradition vs. the text: Jonah

• "We have to be people of the text and not the tradition," because tradition adds to the story and can shape our theology.
• His classroom example: students think Jonah told Nineveh to repent. He didn't — he said they'd be destroyed in 40 days, "drops the mic and walks out" (Jonah 3:4).
  • It's the pagan king who says perhaps God will relent (Jonah 3:6–9).
  • The sailors come to fear Yahweh through Jonah's sin, when they throw him overboard and see God's power (Jonah 1:15–16).
  • Everyone who comes to know God in the book does so "in spite of Jonah, not because of Jonah."
• In the same way, tradition gives us Jesus rejected by the world, cold and shivering in a barn behind an inn — "That's not what the text tells us."

Born among family, laid in a manger

• There's no room in the upper room — naturally, because it's the guest room and the whole family is in town.
• Birth is the most dangerous moment for mother and child, so you want "all hands on deck": the father, women who have given birth, midwives.
• The lower cave room holds far more people — and it's where the animals are kept, hence the manger (Luke 2:7).
• Locals understood this immediately; the English translators had never been to the land.
• "Jesus does not come into this world rejected and alone," but surrounded by people who love him and who will shape who he becomes as an adult.

The shepherds and the Passover lamb

• Shepherds normally grazed their flocks further out, but Josephus says Bethlehem was the staging area for sheep going to the Temple — the shortest distance, about 3.5 miles.
  • Passover requires an unblemished lamb, so you keep it as close to the Temple as possible.
• Jeremy disagreed with Opher's view of a summer birth: early church tradition and this narrative point to Passover season, roughly March 15 to April 15.
• Jesus is repeatedly called the Passover or sacrificial lamb. He is announced to the very men responsible for preparing the sacrificial lambs — "It's intentional."
• "In the city of David... good news of great joy" (Luke 2:10–11).
  • The joy is the same idea as Isaiah 53: the suffering servant's affliction pleases the Lord (Isaiah 53:10).
  • It is the joy of reconciliation, promised from the fall: the woman's offspring will have his heel struck but crush the head of sin and death (Genesis 3:15).

Application

• From the beginning mankind was told the Messiah would die; now he's announced to "the ones who prepare the sacrifice."
• Passover remembers God sparing Israel's firstborn from death; Jesus spares all mankind from death — "the second death."
• The shepherds' immediate response was to worship, "because they understand the gravity of what's taking place" — and it happened "in a cave just like this, somewhere inside this town."

Questions

• Q: So Jesus was surrounded by all of Joseph's relatives?
  • Yes. Luke doesn't spell it out because his audience assumed it; they had lived through multiple censuses, which is why he names the first one, under Quirinius (Luke 2:2).
  • They were at Jerusalem several times a year for the feasts anyway, so the travel wasn't unusual.
  • The census was probably in a Jubilee year, as land was returning.
  • They never left Bethlehem: two years later the Magi find them "in the house" (Matthew 2:11).
  • After Egypt they didn't return because Archelaus ruled Judea; he was so bad that people asked Rome for prefects instead — "We'd rather have them than Archelaus." So they went to Antipas' territory (Matthew 2:22–23).
• Q: So land sales worked like a lease?
  • Yes, and Israel still works that way: you buy land from the government on a 50-year lease and own everything on it, but never the land itself.
  • If you sold because of debt, the price depended on how many years remained until the Jubilee. It seems Joseph had sold his heritage at some point and was coming back to it.
• Q (from a group member): So Mary wasn't nine months pregnant, making that rough trip?
  • Right. Would the baby have survived that, and would they have risked it? Mary was already in the area visiting her kinswoman Elizabeth, only about four miles from here, where the baby leapt for joy (Luke 1:39–44).
  • Jesus and John the Baptist weren't cousins: Mary was of David's line (Judah) and Elizabeth of Levi. The New Testament calls them "kin" (Luke 1:36), like an in-law.

Walk up to Manger Square

Bethlehem's old city (Isa)

• Arabic greetings reverse the English order: Sabah al-khair, literally "morning good."
• Christian houses carry a St. George icon with the building date and the owner's name; one we passed reads 1935 with the name of a Christian family.
• Old cities here are always built on hilltops; Bethlehem's old city stretches across the ridge.
• Bell towers: the Lutheran church in the heart of the old city, and the Assyrian (Syriac) Orthodox church — "the only denomination who still worship in Aramaic."
• We passed the local Christian community leaving Catholic Mass.
• On Manger Square, the building with the Palestinian flag is the municipality. The mayor of Bethlehem must be a Christian, a rule dating from the Ottoman era.

Church of the Nativity & St. Catherine's Grottoes

Three churches under one roof (Isa)

• The basilica is shared: an Armenian corner, the Greek Orthodox main church, and a door to the Franciscan (Catholic) side.
• The columns are about 1,500 years old; the wall mosaics are about 800 years old, from the Crusader era, and once covered all the walls.
  • They show biblical events. The artist signed his name (Basilius Pictor) on the third angel in Latin and Aramaic.
  • They're made of gold-plated glass, green malachite ("King Solomon stone") and blue azurite, from King Solomon's mines in the south of the country.
• There are 50 limestone columns: four rows of 11, plus three in each wing, giving the building its cross shape. The silver chandeliers hang from the crossing and were a gift of Tsar Nicholas.

A family neighborhood in the first century (Isa)

• Erase the church and picture one-room houses over caves: "the cave is the garage. And the house is where you live" — a house for you, one for your brother, one for your cousins — a neighborhood owned by one family.
• It's still that way: everyone in Isa's neighborhood is from his family, and you aren't allowed to sell your house outside the family.
  • If you emigrate, you close the door and relatives look after it — open the windows, pay the electricity. If you ever sell, someone from the community buys it.
  • Outsiders will pay far above value — $700,000–800,000 for a half-million-dollar house — to buy into these neighborhoods.
• These houses belonged to Joseph's family.
  • Bethlehem normally had about 1,000 people; with the census he believes it swelled to 5,000–6,000, and every guest room was full of relatives.
  • With no privacy upstairs, Mary went down to the cave to give birth.

Swaddling cloth and manger (Isa)

• Travelers wrapped a cloth around the belly to keep warm and protect the stomach, usable as a bandage or even a burial shroud if someone died on the road.
  • Isa believes Mary used that cloth to swaddle Jesus.
• The manger was normally a wooden feeding box filled with hay at the far end of the cave, and Mary used it as a crib.

How the site was preserved (Isa)

• The Bible never names the exact spot; they follow oral tradition from early Christians who worshiped here, at Jesus' tomb and at Mary's house in Nazareth.
• About AD 130–135 Emperor Hadrian built pagan temples over those sites — and without realizing it marked them for the woman who came searching: Queen Helena.
• Helena, mother of Emperor Constantine, came about AD 330, demolished the pagan temple and built the first church in AD 333 — an octagonal church over the cave.
  • It was built by local laborers: "dealing with stone, that's our profession... from thousands of years."
  • The region was Byzantine then: "Greece, Turkey, the Middle East, we were all the same people," with the same traditions to this day.
• The Samaritans rose up against the Byzantines and burned the churches Helena had built, including this one.
  • Samaritans still exist — about 600, living in Shechem, with their holy mountain, Mount Gerizim.
• About AD 540 Emperor Justinian rebuilt it (the "Justinian church"); he also built the Hagia Sophia in Istanbul.
  • Hagia Sophia became a mosque, then a museum, then a mosque again; this basilica has stayed a church, which he said makes it the oldest church on earth still in use.

The grotto shaped like the cross (Isa)

• The church is cross-shaped, entered from the west; the cave lies beneath the east end. Its present shape (much altered over time) is read as Jesus on the cross.
  • The entrance and exit each have 14 steps: "you enter the cave through Jesus' left arm and you exit through his right arm."
  • The silver star marks the birthplace and symbolizes his head; the manger area is the heart, the rest the body.
• The star:
  • Given by the French; dated 1717.
  • 14 points for the 14 generations from Abraham to David, David to the exile, and the exile to Jesus — 42 in all (Matthew 1:17).
  • A Latin inscription says, in effect, "Jesus Christ was born here."
• In the middle you can touch the cave's bedrock. The marble is protection, because pilgrims used to break off pieces as souvenirs and blessings.
• We see only about 10% of the original cave, which was much bigger; it's shared by the Orthodox, Catholics and Armenians.
  • The original entrance was about 20 meters away. Mary would have looked for privacy and the warmest spot — the back of the cave, where the star is.
• A door at the far end leads to the Catholic part of the cave.
• A 12th-century mosaic is being restored by an Italian firm, Piacenti, through December; before the renovation the grotto was full of chandeliers, olive oil lamps and ornate icons.
• Some people leave walking backwards "so they don't give their back to the Holy of the Holies."

Mary in the Orthodox tradition (Isa)

• "For us Mary is a big deal": she is the Mother of God (Theotokos).
  • In their tradition she had no other children; she is "a virgin before, during and after," and the one called Jesus' brother is his cousin, not a blood brother.
  • Icons show three flowers — on her forehead and each shoulder — for that threefold virginity.
  • The Bethlehem Mary icon smiles, "like the Mona Lisa smile," because she has just given birth; the Jerusalem Mary icons are more serious.
  • She always wears red and blue: human, and bearing the divine nature.
• They believe she was taken up body and soul, celebrated recently at her church in Jerusalem.
• Mary knew Jesus' destiny and kept it in her heart. At Cana she effectively told him to "do your thing"; he said it wasn't his time, but "he listened to his mother" (John 2:3–5).
• There's a month of fasting for Mary in August.

Fasting and church customs (Isa)

• Lent is 40 days before Easter and another fast comes before Christmas. It's fully vegan: no meat, dairy or fish (fish is allowed on only one day) and no seafood.
  • Isa keeps just the first and last weeks. Many families never eat meat on Fridays, the day of the crucifixion — falafel, hummus, lentil soup.
• After giving birth, a mother doesn't enter the church for 40 days until she is clean; she waits in the space between the small door and the inner wooden door.
  • After 40 days the baby is presented: the priest takes a boy behind the altar, a girl only in front of it.
• The Orthodox sign of the cross:
  • Three fingers together for the Trinity; two folded to the palm for Jesus' two natures, full man and full God, "united, not mixed," united in Mary's womb.
  • Up, down, right, left — Jesus sits at the Father's right hand. Done three times, and babies are immersed three times at baptism.

The iconostasis (Isa)

• The wall of icons (iconostasis) hides the altar — a tradition kept from the Temple.
• Three doors for the Trinity, with two icons on each side of the central door, always in the same order:
  • First on the right: Jesus as King. Second on the right: John the Baptist, shown with angel's wings.
  • First on the left: Mary as Queen.
  • Second on the left changes to show who or what the church is dedicated to: here the Nativity (Luke 2); at the Holy Sepulchre, the Resurrection.
• "The icons for us, it's an open colored Bible. We never worship the icon, but we honour it because it tells the biblical event."

Red ornaments, eggs and the skull of Adam (Isa)

• Olive oil lamps once lit the church; now it uses electricity.
• The red balls hang all year and aren't Christmas decorations. They symbolize the tomb of Jesus.
• Easter eggs are traditionally dyed only red (as in Russia, Ukraine, Romania, Bulgaria and Greece): red is the blood and the egg is the tomb.
• The egg also stands for the skull of Adam. In Orthodox, Catholic and Armenian tradition, Golgotha is where Adam was buried, not the skull-shaped hill at the Garden Tomb.
  • When the Roman spear pierced Jesus, his blood ran down through the earth to Adam's skull, "washing the sins of humanity."
  • Every crucifix must have Adam's skull beneath Jesus' feet, as on the cross above the iconostasis.

The Ottoman era and Islam (Isa)

• During the Ottoman era much was taken: the white marble that once covered the walls and columns was carried off to Jerusalem or elsewhere.
• The ascension mosaic: everyone — Mary, angels, disciples — is looking up, but the half showing Jesus ascending was chiseled away by the Ottomans.
  • In Islam Jesus is a prophet; they accept his birth but not his crucifixion or ascension, holding that God blinded the Romans and they crucified someone who looked like him — Judas.
  • Muslims may pray in this church but never in the Holy Sepulchre, which is "totally against their faith."
  • Next to it, doubting Thomas reaching for Jesus' wounds survives.
• Faces were removed from the 12th-century icons on the columns because images aren't allowed in Islam.
• Muslims honor Jesus as a good prophet whose message pointed to Muhammad, and say Christians removed the Bible passages that predicted him.
• The Door of Humility: the entrance was reduced to about five feet so the Ottomans couldn't ride in.
  • Manger Square was a market, and animals (horses, camels, donkeys) were brought into the basilica, damaging it; at the Ottoman peak (15th–16th centuries) the monks, a minority, could only shrink the door.
  • Christians were allowed to worship only in the upper area, with a wall separating it from the rest of the basilica.

Bethlehem's Christians through history (Isa)

• Their language had been Aramaic and Greek. When Islam came in the 7th century they were forced to become Arab, change their language and, for many, their religion.
• Those who stayed Christian, like Isa's ancestors, paid the jizya: "You pay me money so I don't kill you," handed over on your knees. "How humiliating." This lasted from the early Islamic era until the Ottomans.
• The British freed them from the Ottomans, and the most education came in the Mandate years (1920s–40s). But the troubles of 1948 followed: "the British took us out of the bottom of the well and then they cut the rope."
• Emigration: great-grandparents fled around 1914 to avoid Ottoman military conscription.
  • Chile has more than 500,000 Christian Palestinians from the Bethlehem district; immigrants founded the Club Deportivo Palestino (he said 1927).
  • Nayib Bukele, president of El Salvador, is of Bethlehemite descent. There are thousands in Honduras, tens of thousands in the U.S., and more in Australia, Norway and Denmark. He doesn't think they'll come back.
• "My Big Fat Greek Wedding" — "same traditions, same food, same drinks, we are the same people."

St. Catherine's and St. Jerome (Isa)

• The Armenians have the smallest part of the basilica; through their door is St. Catherine's, the Franciscan church.
  • The Christmas Eve Midnight Mass broadcast from Bethlehem every December 24 is held there. The Orthodox midnight service is January 6 and the Armenian January 17.
• Franciscan churches close from 12 to 2, so we only looked in; stairs lead down to the Cave of St. Jerome.
• St. Jerome (Hieronymus), a Croatian saint, came about AD 380, lived and worked in the cave next to the birthplace, and died and was buried there.
  • In the 12th century the Crusaders took his relics to Rome's Santa Maria Maggiore.
  • He translated the Bible into Latin — the Vulgate, the "common language" — which spread the Bible much faster in Europe.
  • In the 15th–16th centuries Martin Luther translated the Vulgate into German: "Martin Luther translated what was already translated."
• Symbols to spot:
  • Crossed arms = Franciscan.
  • The Greek Orthodox Tau-Omicron-like logo stands for Taphos, "tomb."
  • The double-headed eagle stands for God's nature and man's nature; countries like Georgia and Russia use it politically.

A living museum — Crusader art and graffiti (Isa)

• The Crusaders ruled for about 200 years and built a fortress beside the church.
• Knights carved graffiti on the columns, uncovered only a few years ago when the Italian restorers cleaned off centuries of incense soot: helmets, a wolf biting a helmet, and more on every column.
• Baldwin, a Crusader king, was crowned here in the 12th century (Isa said Baldwin II).
• Emblems painted on columns: a rooster, like France's team crest; armor with three dragons or lions, like England's.
• Icons of two Scandinavian kings, Canute and Olaf, who brought Christianity to northern Europe and were major donors to the Crusades (featured in the show "Vikings: Valhalla").
• The oldest part: the original 4th-century mosaic floor from Helena's church, about a meter below today's floor.
  • Justinian covered it and raised the floor; it was found only after an earthquake (Isa said 1927, the last one here) led to floor repairs.
• "It's not only a church, it's a living museum."

Leaving Manger Square (Isa)

• Much of what street vendors sell is imported, not local.
• The city council has seven seats for Christians and six for Muslims, so the mayor is always Christian — the only PA-controlled town in Judea and Samaria with a Christian mayor, a rule since the Ottoman era (1890).
• The Armenian monastery stands on this side of the church, flying the Armenian flag — "the first Christian nation."

Day 8 — Monday, Sep 14: City of David & Water Tunnels, Israel Museum, Davidson Center for Archaeology, Western Wall Tunnels (Kotel Tunnels)

The day ran from the hotel down the Kidron Valley to the City of David, through the water tunnels to the Pool of Siloam, west to the Israel Museum, back to the Old City through Zion Gate and the Jewish Quarter, and then to the Davidson Center, the Western Wall plaza and the Western Wall Tunnels.

Not recorded: The walk through Hezekiah's Tunnel and the dry tunnel (the recording cuts off as we split up), and the Shrine of the Book (Dead Sea Scrolls) at the Israel Museum. Several talks are missing their openings, including the Israel Museum model and the Pentecost teaching at the Southern Steps, and in the tunnels the Holy of Holies discussion is partly inaudible.

On the bus — to the City of David

Opher taught on the bus.

Jerusalem stone

• By law, every house and apartment building in Jerusalem must be faced with one specific limestone. Israel has four kinds of limestone, and this one is considered the best, "the queen of limestones."
  • You can build out of anything you like, but the façade has to be this stone.
  • The British made it a municipal law in the 1930s, and the Jerusalem municipality kept it after statehood. It gives the city its unique look and atmosphere.

3,000 years of Jewish presence

• There has been a Jewish presence in Jerusalem for over 3,000 years, since David conquered it.
  • Even under foreign rulers who banned Jews from the city, we know of at least one or two Jews living there. "There has been a continuous presence of the Jewish people in this city for over three thousand years."
• Old versus ancient: "old" means about 1,000 years old, and "ancient" means older than that.
  • The City of David is more than 3,000 years old. Some places we would see that day are about 3,800 years old or older, because something stood there before David conquered it.
• Jerusalem is "the most conquered territory on the face of the earth." Opher said he could list at least 40 different powers that conquered it, destroyed it and rebuilt on the same spot.
  • In parts of today's Jewish Quarter you're walking 40–50 feet or more above the original ground level.

The Old City walls and quarters

• Today's wall is only about 450–460 years old. The Ottoman Turks built it, and it's considered the only complete Ottoman city wall still standing anywhere in the world.
  • It doesn't follow the ancient walls. The ancient city covered much more ground than the Old City's roughly one square kilometer.
• The four "quarters" aren't equal quarters.
  • The Muslim Quarter is the largest, about two-thirds of the Old City, and most Old City residents are Muslim.
  • Arabic is still the most common language. Since the 7th-century Islamic conquest, Christians and Jews here also spoke Arabic, and some Old City churches still hold their liturgy in Arabic, the way a church in Poland worships in Polish.
  • The Jewish Quarter has about 15,000 people.
• The Armenian Quarter
  • Armenians are proud of being the first nation to adopt Christianity, before Rome made it the official religion. The first Christian pilgrims were Armenian, and they bought land in Jerusalem and elsewhere in the land.
  • In the early 20th century the Turks were massacring Armenians (the Armenian Genocide, which Armenians compare to the Holocaust). The land here was under Turkish rule, so Armenians here, fearing for their lives, built their own wall around their quarter. Once you're inside the Old City walls, you meet a second wall.
  • "There are lots of walls in Jerusalem, unfortunately."

Gates

• Gates are named for where the road leads.
  • The Damascus Gate was the most important gate for a long time. It's also called the Nablus Gate, because the road leads there too.
  • The Jaffa Gate leads toward Jaffa, and the Zion Gate opens onto Mount Zion.
• Near the Damascus Gate you step down to enter, because that was ground level when the Ottomans built the wall. Four hundred more years of destruction and rebuilding have raised the ground since then.
• A cleaned stretch of the wall looks lighter because it was sandblasted to remove "the gunk of the last four hundred years."

Israel's school systems

• Israel keeps separate Jewish, Christian and Muslim school systems. Israel inherited the arrangement from the British, who took it over from the Turks.
  • The Turks only cared about taxes: "Just give us our taxes and build a school in your neighborhood."
• The Jewish system is itself split three ways: secular, religious and ultra-religious. You attend the school in your district.
• People cluster by community, like Chinatown or Little Italy in New York. There are Russian neighborhoods in Israel, and religious families prefer religious neighborhoods (no driving on Shabbat outside the house, no non-kosher shops). So very few Muslims attend Jewish schools and very few Jews attend Muslim schools. It's a matter of where people live, not law.
• Integrated schools (from about the last 15 years)
  • Jewish, Christian, Muslim, Druze and Baha'i children share a classroom, with one teacher speaking only Arabic and one speaking only Hebrew. They learn each other's religions and celebrate everyone's holidays, in shortened form.
  • It began with one school in the north. Demand grew, and there are now at least four, two of them in Jerusalem. The kids grow up together "like normal societies should be."

The Kidron Valley and the north

• The bus drove down the Kidron Valley, the same valley we crossed near its end two days earlier on the way to Masada. It runs toward the Dead Sea.
• For thousands of years it was the city's geographic and psychological border. Nobody dared live on the far side.
  • The valley was once much deeper, with the slope and a wall above it.
• The Hinnom Valley on the other side bounds the city to the west and south. The Kidron and Hinnom protected the city on the east, west and south.
• There's no deep valley on the north. The Bible calls the north Jerusalem's weak point, and in 3,000 years of conquest up to the 1960s almost every invader came from the north.

City of David & Water Tunnels

The Temple Mount Sifting Project

• Construction of the underground Al-Marwani Mosque on the Temple Mount (below the Al-Aqsa Mosque) brought bulldozers in, and the excavated earth was dumped into the Kidron Valley.
• Students of Gabriel (Gabi) Barkai, Jeremy's former professor who recently died, started digging through the dirt piles and finding objects.
  • Barkai realized the finds were first-century, from the temple itself. His students went back for more, were arrested for trespassing, and he had to bail them out. He used the moment to say, "Look at this. We actually have remains from the first century."
• The Temple Mount Sifting Project grew out of that, sifting the whole pile.
• Opus sectile flooring: a recreation of the temple floor is on display.
  • It was Herod the Great's favorite decoration, triangular geometric tiles. It appears in his palace at Masada and even in his palace on the Palatine Hill in Rome. "That's how wealthy and influential Herod was."
  • Nothing of the temple still stands, but finds like this let us piece it together.

The oldest part of Jerusalem

• The City of David is the oldest part of Jerusalem. The "Old City" has nothing to do with David's day. Its walls are Ottoman and only partly cover even the first-century city.
• The Israel Museum model would answer questions such as: What city did David know? Hezekiah? Jesus? What city did Babylon sack?
• The city ran along the ridge above the valley and stopped short of the Temple Mount until Solomon's day.

Finds on display

• The Priestly Blessing, found across the valley by Gabi Barkai.
  • "This is the oldest written form of the Bible that we have." It dates to about the 7th century BC and quotes the priestly blessing of Numbers 6 (Numbers 6:24–26), so copies of Numbers already existed before the Babylonian exile.
  • For about 150 years many liberal scholars have taught that most of the Old Testament was written during the exile to create a national identity, and that Moses and David never existed.
• The Tel Dan Inscription (we had seen its find spot at Dan's gate, near Jeroboam's seat of judgment)
  • It was found in the early 1990s. An enemy king boasts of victory over Israel and calls the southern kingdom the "House of David," which is where the TV show gets its name.
  • Until then, David was treated as a legendary figure. Jeremy said the inscription dates to about 300 years after his reign, which shows his lasting influence. Finds like this are "the arguments that you use against modern scholarship" in apologetics for the Bible's reliability.
• A menorah medallion (later period) and the three symbols of Judaism
  • Wherever Jews lived, in the land or in the diaspora (Priene in Turkey, Corinth in Greece, Thessalonica in Macedonia), they left the same three marks: the menorah, the shofar, and the etrog (sometimes shown with the lulav).
  • All three point to the temple. The menorah was its central focal point, the shofar was blown there daily, and the etrog and lulav belong to its festivals. "There is always a drawing of the Jewish people to the temple throughout their identity and their history."
• Modern politics
  • The growing claim that the Jewish people have no claim here because the temple wasn't there is "a defiling of the image of Judaism," and it's a new argument.
  • Muslim theological books from the early 1900s grounded the Dome of the Rock's authority in the fact that Solomon's temple stood there.
• An earring from the tomb of the Queen of Adiabene
  • A friend of Jeremy's found it while excavating a nearby parking lot. She was a queen who came to the land and converted to Judaism in the first century.
  • For first-century conversion to Judaism, Jeremy recommended an article by scholar Jeffrey P. Garcia.
• Purity tokens (Jeremy bought a replica)
  • Purity requirements rose sharply in Jerusalem, because you were preparing to enter the temple.
  • After ritually immersing, a pilgrim received a lump of clay stamped with a word meaning "pure unto God," an "entrance ticket" into the temple. They've been found here both as flat disks and, more often, as quickly stamped lumps handed out in bulk.
  • Coming down from the Galilee, Jesus' first act in Jerusalem would likely have been to immerse and purify.
  • There was a whole economy around the temple, and these were charged for.
  • On the high holy days, 1–1.5 million pilgrims swelled a city normally estimated at 150,000–250,000.
• A golden bell from a high priest's garment
  • It was found by Jeremy's friend Eli Shukron. The high priest wore bells on his robe (Exodus 28:33–35).
  • At Shiloh, where Jeremy is on the lead excavation team and where the high priesthood was centered before Jerusalem, Old Testament bells were clay with clay balls inside.
  • By the New Testament the priesthood had grown rich, so this bell is gold, and it still rings.

The archaeologists

• Excavations here were started by Benjamin Mazar. Eilat Mazar continued them. Jeremy took classes from her, calling her "one of the most amazing archaeological minds," and she died of cancer a couple of years ago.
• Today's excavators, like Ronny Reich and Eli Shukron, are "the rock stars of modern-day archaeology." Walking the streets with them is like walking with Tom Cruise.
• "If you're going to talk about the navel of archaeology here inside the land, it's this city."

David's palace

• The group stood at the Citadel area of David's city. The palace structure lies below.
• It's identified as a palace by a decorative capital (the original, or one of them, is below). The capital shows contact with other peoples and the building's importance.
• The palace stood at the highest point.
  • Judgment and everyday business happened at the city gates, not the palace. The palace was the king's home and the last place to fall back to.
  • Masada is the same: Herod's upper palace sits at the highest point, as a last line of defense.

The bulla of Jehucal

• A bulla is a clay seal pressed onto a rolled letter or scroll. One found here in the palace bears the name Jehucal.
• Jeremiah names Jehucal as a direct servant and emissary of King Zedekiah (Jeremiah 37:3).
  • Zedekiah counts as the last king before the destruction. Some would say Josiah, since after him Babylon made Judah a puppet state.
• A bulla with his name found in the king's palace tells us two things: it's probably the same man, and Jeremiah's testimony is believable.
  • "The Bible is chock full of historical realities that necessarily don't get noticed until we start looking at the archaeological remains."

The elite houses below the palace

• The houses just below the palace belonged to the most important, wealthiest families.
• A stone with a hole in it is "your 10th-century [BC] potty." A private toilet room was rare and marked you as elite. By the Greek and Roman periods, bathrooms had become luxurious and even had running water.
• One house has been restored with pillars holding up the roof.

David, Bathsheba and Uriah (2 Samuel 11)

• "In the spring of the year, the time when kings go out to battle," David sent Joab and all Israel to besiege Rabbah, which is modern Amman in Jordan, about an hour's drive away without the border. "But David remained at Jerusalem" (2 Samuel 11:1).
  • The first verse sets the tone. David is up to no good, sending others to fight while he stays home.
• David walked on the palace roof, "right up there," and saw a woman bathing (2 Samuel 11:2–3).
  • The slope of the hill means he could look down on the houses below. "Bathsheba is going to be somewhere inside our eyeshot right here."
• Who was Uriah the Hittite?
  • He was one of David's mighty men, who had David's back while Saul hunted him. David surrounded himself with outcasts, and Jeremy said a third of his mighty men were Hittites.
  • The Hittites were a fallen, scattered empire. The Trojans were ethnically Hittite. They fell when the Greeks attacked from one side while the Egyptians fought them to a stalemate on the other at the Battle of Kadesh.
  • After that, Israel was linked with the Hittites. During a later siege in the north, prices got so bad that a donkey's head sold at "Lamborghini prices" (2 Kings 6:25). Then the Lord made the besiegers hear a sound, and they thought the Hittites had come to rescue Israel (2 Kings 7:6).
  • Everyone in the ancient world knew everyone else's history, because they were all related. The Ammonites and Moabites descended from Lot, Abraham's nephew. The Edomites descended from Esau, Jacob's brother. Much of the fighting was "inter-familial."
  • Uriah was a proselyte. He came from outside, adopted Israel's world and God, and married an Israelite woman. As one of David's most loyal men, he lived as close to the palace as possible.
• David brought Uriah home from the front, made small talk and told him to go home and "wash your feet." Uriah slept at the palace door with the servants instead (2 Samuel 11:6–9).
  • "Hey buddy, you've got shore leave." Uriah turned it down and stood guard at the palace, though the enemy was miles away.
• Uriah answered: "The ark and Israel and Judah dwell in booths... Shall I then go to my house, to eat and to drink and to lie with my wife?" (2 Samuel 11:11)
  • Until the days of Jeremiah and Ezekiel, the Ark housed the Lord's physical presence. While it was out in a tent in the field, Uriah would take no comfort.
  • "You know, we talk about David being a man after God's own heart, but that is a statement that is made about David when he is a young man." In this moment, it's Uriah who is chasing after God's heart.
  • Jeremy asked Scott, a Navy veteran, how many people would turn down shore leave just because the country was at war. It "wouldn't happen." Uriah was fighting for God himself.
• David got Uriah drunk. Uriah still didn't go home. David then sent Uriah back carrying his own death order: put him at the front of the hardest fighting and pull back (2 Samuel 11:12–17).
• By Jeremy's reckoning, David had been on the run from Saul from about age 17 and didn't become king until his 40s. Uriah joined him early, probably while David was a mercenary for the Philistines.
  • "You not only sin against them, but in order to cover it up, you have them murdered. That is the reality of how far David has fallen in this moment."
• Nathan confronted David with a parable, David repented, and the child died (2 Samuel 12).

God's will and God's perfect will

• "God's will will never be thwarted." But God's perfect will can be altered by our sin.
  • Saul is the textbook case: God had a plan for Saul, Saul didn't follow it, and God raised up David.
• On predestination, Jeremy prefers to think of predetermination.
  • His cat of 17 years always jumps off the table when he sets her on it. He doesn't make her. He just knows her. "Now how much more does my creator know what I'm going to do in any given situation?"

The Davidic promise is really about Solomon (2 Samuel 7)

• David asked to build the temple and God said no: David was a man of blood (1 Chronicles 22:8).
• God's promise: "I will raise up your offspring after you... He shall build a house for my name, and I will establish the throne of his kingdom forever" (2 Samuel 7:12–16).
  • The promise isn't about David. His throne is established because of someone else.
• That offspring is Solomon, and Solomon's mother is Bathsheba.
  • 2 Samuel 7 comes before 2 Samuel 11. God already knew who Solomon's mother would be, and that she was married to someone else.
  • Solomon wasn't next in line. He had older brothers. He became king because David loved Bathsheba more than his other wives.
• "Just because we sin doesn't mean that God can't use that sin to make something beautiful."
  • Sin is still disgusting in God's eyes, and our sin removes us from his presence.

"Son of David" and healing

• On the road up from Jericho, Bartimaeus cries, "Son of David, have mercy on me!" He is asking for healing (Mark 10:47).
• Solomon was gifted with wisdom. Old Testament wisdom is more than being smart. It includes acting in the power of the Holy Spirit.
  • The intertestamental Wisdom of Solomon and Psalms of Solomon say Solomon could discern and cast out evil spirits, and heal.
• First-century Jews weren't looking only for a Davidic Messiah. They asked John the Baptist, a Levite, if he was the Messiah, and they followed Simon bar Giora, "the son of a proselyte."
  • So "Son of David" points to Solomon and the promise made to him. David heard the promise, but it was truly made to Solomon, who came out of a sinful relationship.

Application

• "God can take our most darkest moments in our lives and use them for something beautiful if we let him."
• The first key is what David did when Nathan came: repent, "and let God take care of the rest."
• Our past, even when it's horrid, doesn't keep us from doing amazing things in the kingdom. Sometimes it's the catalyst that drives us.
• None of us has murdered a friend who spent decades keeping us alive. "And if God can do that with David in this situation, what do you think he can do with you and your life and the things of your past?"

Opher led the rest of the stop.

Why the city was built here

• An aerial photo from the east (the Mount of Olives) shows where the Ottoman walls begin and where the City of David lay 3,000 years ago.
• The City of David isn't on the highest ground. The Mount of Olives, the temple hill and the western hill are all higher. The reason is water.
• The Gihon Spring: Gihon means it gushes out in gulps, not a steady stream. It was the main water source for roughly 2,000–3,000 years.
• A reconstruction shows the city from Solomon onward, since it includes a temple. In David's time there was only an altar and the palace.
  • The hilltop slopes diagonally, so from the palace roof at the top you could see every rooftop below. That fits David seeing Bathsheba.
• The Kidron (east) and Hinnom (west) valleys meet in the south and run together toward the Dead Sea.
• As the city grew it couldn't expand north (the temple), east or south (valleys), so it expanded to the western hill. The rich moved to this "upper west side," with the 6,000-square-foot mansions Jeremy had described.

Hezekiah's tunnel

• After the kingdom split, a king of Judah prepared to rebel against Assyria. Assyria knew a king was rebelling when his taxes stopped arriving.
• To prepare, the king (Hezekiah) walled in the newly settled area and moved the water source. A structure jutting out of the wall would tell an enemy, "Odds are you'll guess that it's the water."
• Two teams of diggers started from opposite ends, about 2,800 years ago, without GPS, and met in the middle.
  • An inscription marks where they first heard each other and met. The original is in the Israel Museum, and there may be a copy near the tunnel's exit.
  • The tunnel zigzags so the two teams couldn't pass each other in parallel. They probably followed and widened a natural crack. Look for chisel marks.
• The old outlet was destroyed so the enemy wouldn't know it existed. The water now flowed to a pool the city could reach.
• Seven or eight hundred years later, King Herod built a huge pool there for ritual immersion before going up to the temple.
  • The group would sit on the steps down to the 2,000-year-old pool. Its location and size are known, and excavators are still trying to uncover the rest of it.
• Q: People have argued with me that the City of David wasn't here but somewhere else. Where does that theory come from?
  • They don't want this to be the actual place, because then the Jewish people have a credible claim to the land. "You lie enough times, people will start to believe you."
  • With the 2,000-year-old pool and the original steps leading from it to the Temple Mount, "why would the City of David be anywhere else?"

Going "up" to Jerusalem

• The Hebrew for pilgrimage, aliyah la-regel, means going up by foot. From any direction, the valleys mean you walk up into Jerusalem.
• From the City of David you keep climbing to the temple. At the temple, every holier area had more steps, and fewer people could enter, up to the Holy of Holies. There only the high priest went, once a year on the Day of Atonement.
  • "It's not just a spiritual ascension, it's a physical one as well." When the psalmists look up to Jerusalem, they're describing real geography.

Warren's Shaft

• In the 19th century, when the British were bribing the Ottomans for permission to dig, Charles Warren excavated here, found this shaft and assumed water was drawn up through it by bucket.
  • "It made absolutely no sense back then, it makes absolutely no sense today." Opher called it "useless and meaningless."
• About a hundred years later, in the 20th century, the blocked passage was opened. It led to a pool or reservoir that people could walk around to fill their containers.
• Most homes collected rainwater from the roof into cellars or cisterns to get through the winter. The Gihon Spring supplied the rest of the year.

Idols in Israelite houses

• Overhead, archaeologists have found (though it isn't open to the public) the original 3,000-year-old ground level of the city and its houses. Eli Shukron, lead archaeologist here for about three decades, found about 90% of what's here, including the bell.
• Even with Solomon's temple just above, the Israelite houses contained idols, such as big-bellied fertility figures you rubbed for luck.
  • "The idea of one God is great. But we believe in a few others." Figures like these were common in Israelite homes throughout the land.
• The first two commandments address exactly this. After 400 years steeped in Egyptian paganism, the people believed in other gods. The ten plagues were also meant to teach the Israelites that there is only one God.
• Through the whole First Temple period (about 400 years), God battled the people's belief in "the one God, and his wife, and a few others."
• The exile and the temple's destruction purified the religion. God became more of a spiritual being, and idolatry was gone by the Second Temple period. "There are other ways to sin, obviously," but after that, "it literally is one God and nothing else."

The Canaanite pool

• At the bottom of the stairs is one of the oldest things on the whole tour: a pool and channel probably made by the Canaanites, about 3,800–4,000 years old.
  • David took the city from the Jebusites, who had probably taken it from the Canaanites.
  • It carried water from the Gihon Spring to a small pool.
• By David's time it was completely covered and the Jebusites were using a different system. The Israelites didn't know it existed.
• It was cleared out only in the last five to eight years. Even the archaeologists aren't sure of all the water systems here.

The spring tower and Jerusalem's rain (video)

• The reconstruction shows the tower that jutted from the wall to protect the spring from David's time until Hezekiah moved the water from the east side of the city to the south.
• The video noted that Jerusalem gets as much rain in a year as London, or more. It fills natural cavities underground, and the water forces its way up as springs that flow year-round.
• It also showed pilgrims walking through the Kidron Valley in peacetime, the palace, and Solomon's Temple, not Herod's.

Pool of Siloam

The site

• In Jesus' day this was a massive ritual immersion pool (mikveh). Pilgrims immersed here, then took the pilgrims' path straight up to the temple.
• The path separated purified pilgrims from the general population so they wouldn't bump into someone and become ritually impure again.
• The excavation moved quickly once the Israel Antiquities Authority funded it. "Archaeology is slow when you don't have a whole lot of funds."

John 9 — the man born blind

• The disciples ask, "Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents?" Jesus says neither: "that the works of God might be displayed in him" (John 9:1–3).
• Jesus spits, makes mud, anoints the man's eyes and sends him to wash in Siloam ("Sent"). He comes back seeing (John 9:6–7).
• It was the Sabbath, and that's the key to the whole story.

Why the Pharisees were confused

• The Sabbath rule: you cannot create and you cannot destroy. Jesus made mud, and John mentions it three times on purpose.
  • "In the minds of the people, Jesus just created. He just broke the Sabbath."
• It echoes the two schools of Pharisees discussed up north. The looser school prioritized preserving the person. The stricter school prioritized preserving the Sabbath.
• Only some Pharisees objected, and even they were split:
  • One group said, "This man is not from God." They weren't calling him a sinner. They meant he wasn't sent by God as "we" are, which is closer to calling him a God-fearer (someone who worships God but isn't part of Judaism).
  • The other group called him a sinner.
• The parents deflect ("He is of age, ask him") because confessing Jesus meant being put out of the synagogue (John 9:22). "We don't want to be kicked out of the synagogue, but you can throw our son out."

The healed man's testimony

• Called in a second time and told Jesus is a sinner, he answers, "Whether he is a sinner I do not know. One thing I do know, that though I was blind, now I see" (John 9:24–25).
  • "It doesn't matter. I see the reality of this." The point Jesus keeps making is that God isn't limited by the boxes we try to put him in.
• They revile him: "You are his disciple, but we are disciples of Moses" (John 9:28–29). He answers that no one has ever opened the eyes of a man born blind, and if Jesus weren't from God he could do nothing. They cast him out (John 9:30–34).
• Jesus finds him: "Do you believe in the Son of Man?" "Who is he, sir, that I may believe?" "You have seen him, and it is he who is speaking to you." "Lord, I believe," and he worshiped him (John 9:35–38).
  • That's Jesus' focus. He opened the man's eyes so that he could see him.

John's "Quentin Tarantino" technique

• Tarantino's movies show a glimpse of the ending at the start, and then the whole film explains how things got there. John does the same.
• Here, the disciples' opening question ("why was he born blind?") is answered at the end: so that the glory of God could be revealed "in him, to him, and through him."
• John does the same with the cleansing of the temple. Matthew, Mark and Luke place it right after the triumphal entry in the final week. John places it at the very start of Jesus' ministry (John 2:13–17).
  • It isn't necessarily when it happened. He puts it up front because that's the event that made the Sadducees enact the plan that put Jesus on the cross. Many wanted to kill Jesus, but "this is the one that actually succeeds."

"Are we also blind?"

• Jesus: "For judgment I came into this world, that those who do not see may see, and those who see may become blind." Some Pharisees ask, "Are we also blind?" (John 9:39–40)
  • They're curious, not rejecting him outright. They see their own deficiency and realize their theology might be wrong, because they can't explain what happened.
• Jesus: "If you were blind, you would have no guilt; but now that you say, 'We see,' your guilt remains" (John 9:41).
  • The very fact that they're questioning it shows they know the answer.

Application

• Sometimes God removes the things in our lives that make us blind "because he simply just wants us to see." Sometimes those things are placed in our path ahead of time so that we have a testimony at the end.
• "Sometimes God has to deconstruct our theology to draw us close to him."
  • That's hard today, when "deconstruction" has become a hot topic and a community for people who have walked away from faith on Instagram and TikTok.
  • But we all have preconceived notions, and sometimes God reveals himself so powerfully that all we can say is, "Maybe I got it wrong from the get-go. Maybe God is bigger than I originally thought. Maybe that shoebox I put him in isn't exactly what holds the infinite creator of creation."

Israel Museum

The model and its sources

• Josephus came from the priestly family, was related to the Hasmoneans and "knew the city very, very intimately."
• The model was moved here from the Holy Land Hotel. "It's basically like one big Lego set." Up close you can see where it was taken apart and put back together, even the glue.
• The builders make deliberate choices, and the model keeps changing.
  • The tile-style roofs have never been found anywhere in Jerusalem. The new white roofs had just been changed since Opher's last visit, as he pointed out.
  • An empty, dusty patch marks where a hippodrome used to be. Josephus claims one stood there, but no archaeology backs it up, "and it doesn't necessarily make sense."
• The theater shows Josephus was usually right.
  • Josephus described a theater, but scholars doubted him because nothing turned up where it was expected (today's heavily excavated center of the Jewish Quarter).
  • A few years ago a small theater, an odeon, was found near the Temple Mount. "Josephus knew what he was talking about. He just didn't necessarily get it in the right place."
  • He wrote in Rome under the patronage of the Flavian imperial family, so details may be "a little hazy inside his mind, but he does get it pretty, pretty well."

The temple through the centuries (viewed from the east, as from the Mount of Olives)

• Solomon's Temple was destroyed by the Babylonians in 586 BC and rebuilt about 70 years later, in 516 BC.
  • The rebuilt temple was "kind of pathetic." Those old enough to remember Solomon's Temple wept bitterly, because it was nothing by comparison (Ezra 3:12).
• The Hasmoneans were the first to really invest in it, enlarging the building and its courtyards.
• In the first century BC, Herod the Great, Rome's client king, expanded it enormously.
  • He also built temples to the Caesars, three of them to Caesar Augustus. The temple project kept the Jewish populace happy.
  • It was adorned in gold. "If you have not looked upon Herod the Great's temple in your lifetime, you have not seen a truly beautiful thing."
• The Antonia Fortress on the temple's corner began as a Greek fortress under the Seleucids, and the Romans greatly expanded it.
• Solomon's Portico, the colonnade along the edge, is where Jesus walked and talked with people, especially at the festivals (John 10:23).

Seleucids, Ptolemies and Hasmoneans

• After Alexander the Great, two dynasties fought over the land: the Seleucids, based in Syria, and the Ptolemies, based in Egypt. Things changed every time the land changed hands.
• The Ptolemies were loose with the people. The Seleucids were much stricter.
• That strictness led to the revolt that set up the Hasmonean dynasty against its Greek overlords. The Seleucids were being weakened by the relationship between the Ptolemies and Rome, so they tried to hold the city as tightly as they could, and built the Antonia.

The temple courts

• The outer court was open to anyone. Josephus describes a Court of the Women and a Court of the Gentiles in it.
  • The Israel Museum holds one of the two known inscriptions marking how far Gentiles could go. The other is in the Istanbul museum.
• The inner court was for Israel only. The Holy Place was for the Levites. The Holy of Holies was for the high priest alone.
• The Pools of Bethesda lie to the north, where St. Anne's Church stands today. Jesus healed the man lying on his mat there, who was waiting for the waters to be stirred (John 5:1–9).
  • "An angel of the Lord disturbs it, which they assume to be some type of earthquake or something like that."

Walls

• The Third Wall, which wraps around the north side to the three towers, did not exist in Jesus' day. It was built to prepare for Titus, who was bringing his forces down from the war in the Galilee to destroy the temple.
  • To picture Jesus' Jerusalem, mentally remove this wall. There were still parts of the city outside the walls.
• The older-looking houses stand on Mount Zion, a separate hill within Jerusalem.
  • When the northern kingdom fell to Assyria in 722 BC, many refugees fled south. Hezekiah settled them on this hill, and with Sennacherib coming, he built a wall cutting through the city: the Broad Wall.
  • The Broad Wall isn't on the model, because it lies below the first-century level.
• In today's Jerusalem, lines of paving mark the ancient walls: black brick for the first-century Hasmonean walls, and red brick for Hezekiah's walls. "As you're walking, you'll sometimes see pavement of red brick and black brick that goes in a line."
• The group would see the same area from the Mount of Olives the next day, across the Kidron.

Three valleys, two hills (viewed from the south)

• The Kidron Valley runs on the east. The Hinnom Valley (Gehinnom) runs on the south.
  • The Hinnom became equated with hell. Tradition holds it served as the garbage dump, so people avoided it, and it became a place of pagan ritual and burning.
  • Some sources place King Manasseh's child sacrifices to Molech here. That sin angered the Lord so much that even Josiah's righteousness couldn't stay his hand (2 Kings 23:26).
  • When Jesus speaks of hell in a Hebraic mindset, this is the term he uses. That ties back to the earlier teaching up north on Hades and Tartarus in the Greek world.
• The third, smaller valley is the Tyropoeon, which divides the two hills. Modern development makes the two hills hard to see today.
  • The first hill is the City of David. The second hill is Hezekiah's city. The city later expanded beyond them.

The Pool of Siloam and the City of David on the model

• The big open square at the bottom is the Pool of Siloam, with the pilgrims' path running up from it, which Opher pointed out to us.
  • The group came out of Hezekiah's Tunnel in the drainage channel area under the bridges, near the second-to-last bridge.
  • Archaeology puts the real pool a few meters to the left, but Josephus got the general location right.
• It was the largest man-made mikveh in the Jewish world, built or dedicated for that purpose around the first centuries BC and AD.
  • The Pool of Bethesda was bigger and deeper, but it was not a mikveh.
• The City of David was a very small part of first-century Jerusalem, maybe 10,000 of the 150,000–250,000 people.
  • Archaeologists can't determine much, because so much was destroyed or slid into the Kidron Valley.
• "Archaeology is the science of destruction." You have to destroy later layers to get to earlier ones. Here, erosion and earthquakes stripped away the later layers, which preserved the earlier ones.
  • That's why we saw few Roman remains that morning. They were washed away or removed to expose the Iron Age and earlier.

The tomb of David

• A nefesh (tomb monument) sits by the southern steps.
• There are two proposals for David's tomb: just outside Hezekiah's city, or right here south of the Temple Mount. Most archaeologists favor here.
  • David established himself in this area, and being buried far outside the city would have been a big deal. David bought the temple hill, but Solomon developed it, so this spot would have been just outside the city.
  • Peter's Pentecost sermon in Acts 2 alludes to it (Acts 2:29). Jeremy would explain the language at the Southern Steps. It may show where the sermon took place.

Gates and Herod's palace (viewed from the west)

• This is the first-century version of the Jaffa Gate, which we used the night before. Today's gate is Ottoman but keeps the name, because gates are named for where the road leads: Jaffa's port, Damascus, and the Gate of the Essenes, which leads toward Qumran.
• Jerusalem can't be attacked from the east, south or west because of the valleys, so invasions always came from the north.
  • Herod built strongholds at two choke points to push enemies where he wanted them: the Gennath Gate and the Jaffa Gate.
  • Three towers guarded the north side of his palace, and the palace lay just south of them.

Where Jesus was tried

• Pilate was "in the palace." Tradition puts him at the Antonia Fortress, but that doesn't fit how Roman prefects and procurators operated.
• Pilate came to Jerusalem at Passover for crowd control.
  • Passover celebrated the firstborn of Israel being passed over and Israel's release from foreign oppression. In the first century, the foreign oppressor was Rome. Can you see why there'd be tension in the Roman ranks?
  • He stayed in Herod's palace, where the praetorium was and from which he could run things, not in the Antonia with the soldiers.
• Why the Antonia tradition is so strong:
  • It arose in the medieval period, largely through the Catholic Church, because the Antonia was the quickest route from the Christian Quarter. Herod's palace sits in today's Armenian Quarter, which in the Crusader era was the Jewish Quarter, and communities didn't mix.
  • Traditions were set up throughout the land to control where pilgrims went, to keep them safe and to keep the money within a community. That's why several sites claim to be Bethany beyond the Jordan. "It's like what Opher said, why we have multiple different traditions."
• The route on the model:
  • Jesus was arrested in Gethsemane on the Mount of Olives. Gat Shemanim means the place of the olive press, where oil was made from the mount's olives.
  • He was brought to Annas, Caiaphas and the Sadducees, with some Pharisees. Their excavated houses in today's Jewish Quarter, near the theater, were on the next day's itinerary.
  • Then he went to Pilate at Herod's palace. Pilate learned Jesus was a Galilean and sent him to Herod Antipas, who was in town.
  • Josephus says the Herods stayed in the houses of their forefathers, the Hasmoneans, so Antipas was in the Hasmonean palace with the two towers.
  • Antipas did nothing and sent him back to Pilate, who sent him to Golgotha (Luke 23:6–12).

Where was Golgotha?

• The Church of the Holy Sepulchre has the stronger case, both archaeologically and by tradition.
  • In the 1800s Protestants were uncomfortable with it. It's shared by several churches, mainly the Catholic, Greek Orthodox, Syriac and Ethiopian churches, which don't get along, and fistfights have broken out.
  • A Muslim family holds the keys so the church can be locked when things get bad.
  • The "immovable ladder" has sat in the same place for centuries (dated sketches show it). It can't be moved unless every group agrees.
• So 19th-century explorers proposed another site: "Ah, this rock looks like a skull. This must be the place."
• Golgotha was a place of common execution, and crucifixions happened right outside the city gates, where the most people would pass.
• Jesus was buried in a garden, so much so that Mary mistook him for the gardener (John 20:15). The Gennath Gate stands right by the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.
  • The rocky area there was a quarry. Quarries were later used for tombs, and since this was outside the wall at the time, burial there didn't affect the city's purity.

Passover, calendars and the crowds

• "There's no such thing as nominal Judaism today. There's no such thing as nominal Judaism inside the first century." Groups celebrated differently and followed different calendars.
• In Luke, Jesus eats the Passover lamb the night he's betrayed (Luke 22:15). In John, the lambs are being sacrificed while he's dying.
  • This isn't a contradiction. Depending on whether you followed a lunar or solar calendar, you sacrificed on a different day.
  • Western Christians and the Greek Orthodox celebrate Easter on different days for the same kind of reason.
• The normal population was at most 150,000–250,000. Josephus says it swelled to 1–1.5 million at Passover.
  • Pilgrims had to stay outside the city. Jesus and his disciples camped on the Mount of Olives, like everyone else.

Crucifixion

• Crucifixions were placed right outside the gate so the arriving crowds would see them. "Crucifixion is crowd control."
• The men crucified with Jesus weren't thieves. The Greek word is lēstēs, revolutionaries.
  • Josephus uses the word again and again for his countrymen in the Great Revolt.
  • Barabbas, whose place Jesus took, is described with the same word, and there it's translated correctly (murderer, revolutionary).
  • The King James Version was the first mass-printed Bible, and James's reign faced civil strife between Catholics and Protestants, including the Gunpowder Plot and Guy Fawkes.
  • One of the men on the cross is forgiven: "Today you will be with me in paradise" (Luke 23:43). "If you're King James... do you want a revolutionary, somebody who rises up against the authority of the land, to be able to find salvation? No." So, Jeremy said, the translators used a far less common meaning, "thieves."
• Other messianic hopefuls
  • Acts 5 mentions others who rose up.
  • Paul was arrested at the temple after a Nazirite vow and mistaken for "the Egyptian" (Acts 21:38). Josephus says the Egyptian raised a force (Jeremy said 5,000), fought the Romans, lost and retreated into the desert, with people following him in the hope he'd overthrow Rome.
  • Rome moved against anyone who might attract a following, and crucifixions along the road made the point to everyone entering the city.
  • After Spartacus' slave revolt, Rome crucified huge numbers of slaves along the roads as a warning.
• Crucifixion was done at eye level, not hoisted high, so onlookers would witness the suffering up close.
  • The Romans were proud of it and left behind many works about it.
  • It could last a long time. Josephus tells of finding three childhood friends who had been on crosses for days; he asked the emperor to take them down, and only one survived even with care.
• Before the Sabbath of Passover, one of the holiest Sabbaths of the year, the leaders asked Pilate to have the men taken down. Their legs were broken to hasten death (John 19:31–33).
  • Jesus was already dead because of the brutality he'd suffered at Pilate's hands before the cross.
  • The men beside him died "relatively mercifully" compared to most of those Rome crucified.
• "One of the biggest identifiers of Jesus as a Jewish man in the first century is the fact that he hung on a Roman cross."

On the bus — Israel Museum to Zion Gate

Opher explained Israel's parliamentary system.

How Israelis vote

• Every citizen 18 and up votes on the same day. Residents of Area A aren't Israeli citizens and don't vote.
• The Knesset (parliament) has 120 seats. The total of valid votes sets how many votes one seat takes, and each party gets seats by its share.
• You vote for a party, not a person. There are dozens of parties to choose from, around 70 this year.
• Each party submits a numbered list of up to 120 candidates. If a party wins 5% (6 seats), its top six names get in. One party never wins everything, because "we got two Jews, we got three opinions."

Building a coalition (Opher's mock election on the bus)

• Opher cast group members as party leaders ("King Opher" with 25% on a "benevolent dictator" platform, plus a women's party, a young people's party, a sunscreen party and others) to show how it works.
• A government needs a majority of at least 61 seats. Usually the largest party negotiates with the others to form a coalition. Winning the most seats alone "doesn't mean anything."
• The small party that gets you from 60 to 61 holds all the power. "The fact that you're a small party does not mean that you have less power. Sometimes it means you have all the power."
• A big coalition (for example, 83 seats) is stable, because a party can leave and you still have 61. The last few governments had only 61–64, which gave five- or six-seat parties enormous leverage.
• He said the ultra-religious parties have played the system best in Israel's almost 80 years.
  • They focus on funding for their Torah students and exemptions from military service, and will support either side on other issues in exchange.
  • With around 12 seats at most, they've been in government for all but about eight years.
• The leader has 30 days to form a coalition, plus 30 more if talks are hard. If that fails, the country goes to new elections.
• The Knesset is elected for four years. If a coalition partner walks out and the government can't "reshuffle the deck" to reach 61, it's new elections again.
  • Opher said nearly every government has fallen before its full four years, usually when a small party votes with the opposition.
• The opposition can still pass laws. For example, an opposition member passed a law setting a minimum age and an awareness course for electric bikes after seeing children injured. Opposition laws pass on non-ideological issues, not the big ones that divide Israel.

The president

• The president's role is representative, "kinda like the Queen of England."
• The president is elected by the Knesset, not the public, and is usually a senior, well-liked longtime member.
• A candidate needs the backing of 10% of the Knesset (12 members) to be nominated.

Questions

• Q: How soon can a coalition fall apart?
  • It could be as little as two weeks.
• Q: Isn't that manipulation?
  • Opher said the ultra-Orthodox are about 10% of the population but can secure an outsized share of the budget. It isn't bribery; it's how the coalition system works.
• Q: Are there term limits for prime minister?
  • No. Each party chooses its own list. If a party leader heads the list, wins the most seats and forms a coalition, he's prime minister again, however many times that happens.

Zion Gate

• Opher: the mountain gets today's name, Mount Zion, from a church, and the Ottomans named their gate for it: the Zion Gate.
• Just inside, we followed the wall the Armenians built around their quarter out of fear for their lives during the massacres of Armenians, then walked into the Jewish Quarter.

Davidson Center for Archaeology

Standing on the first-century street

• The group stood at first-century level, 30–40 feet below today's streets by the Western Wall.
• This area suffered badly when the Romans destroyed the temple in AD 70.
• Jesus sometimes spoke of the temple as himself, and sometimes of the literal temple. On the Mount of Olives in the last week (the Olivet Discourse), he warned that Jerusalem would be destroyed because it rejected peace, and that not one stone would be left on another (Matthew 24:2).

Why the stones came down

• Herod covered the temple in gold. Gold melts at a relatively low temperature, so when the temple burned, the gold melted down into it.
• You can spot Herod's masonry by its "little square inside a square" (a flat, framed face). There's no mortar between the blocks. They're held together, even 2,000 years later, by precise engineering.
• The melted gold ran into the joints. After the fire, the Romans pried the stones apart to get the gold and threw them over the side.
  • "Guys, this is the remains of the temple up above." One stone crashed straight through the street pavement.
• The temple itself stood about as tall as three Domes of the Rock stacked on top of each other.
• An arch once shaded this busy spot and served as a way into and out of the temple. It's called Robinson's Arch, after the man who identified it.

Jesus and the money changers

• The scene is usually placed on top of the Temple Mount, but the Mishnah says money couldn't change hands up there. This street was still part of the temple complex, so it's the natural spot.
• The rooms along the street were exchange shops. They connect directly back to the houses of the high priests, the 6,000-square-foot mansions we would visit the next day.
• The half-shekel tax
  • Every man paid a half shekel a year for the temple's upkeep, and it had to be paid in Tyrian shekels.
  • The Tyrian shekel had Hercules on one side and an eagle on the other. It was a pagan coin with graven images.
  • Jewish-minted coins avoided images that could be worshiped. They used an anchor, a geometric pattern, a flower or an amphora.
  • The Tyrian shekel was required because it had the highest silver purity in the ancient world. Elsewhere, coins were gradually mixed with cheaper metals, like U.S. quarters that used to be silver and pennies that used to be copper.
  • Nobody carried these coins day to day. They were imported. "Imagine if, in order to get into Freedom Church on a Sunday, Pastor Benito said, I want you to get me X amount of Guatemalan pesos." And he's the only one in town who has them, at his own exchange rate.
• Sacrificial animals
  • Passover required an unblemished lamb. A lamb wasn't going to survive a seven- or eight-day walk from the Galilee unblemished. "Sheep are stupid. There's a reason why we are likened to sheep inside the Bible again and again."
  • So pilgrims sold their lambs up north and bought one here, at a markup "like going to the grocery store or going to Disneyland." The shepherds at Jesus' birth near Bethlehem were raising sheep to be sold in Jerusalem like this.
• The temple leadership "essentially become a mafia."
  • The high priesthood no longer passed from father to son. It was bought and sold every year, because the high priest could monopolize all of this.
  • Their 6,000-square-foot houses compare to a tiny average home of the time. Levites weren't even supposed to own wealth or land.
• The same danger exists today: "If you've ever heard about the prosperity gospel," monetizing the gospel is "a very, very dangerous thing."

"A den of robbers"

• Jesus quotes Isaiah, "My house shall be called a house of prayer" (Isaiah 56:7), then Jeremiah, "a den of robbers" (Jeremiah 7:11).
• Jeremiah had prophesied that the temple would be destroyed by Babylon and the chief priests' line cut off. Quoting him to the priests of his own day, Jesus is saying God will do the same to them.
• That's what happened. When the temple fell, the Sadducees (the chief priests who profited from it) disappeared as a class. The Pharisees became the rabbinic class, and the priests (kohanim) lost political control.

Why they killed Jesus

• "Make no mistake, it's not Jesus' theology that results in him on the cross." It was his countercultural attack on their influence and on the wealth they had taken from the people.
• They were afraid of him. That's why they arrested him under cover of darkness: "Day after day I was with you in the temple, and you did not seize me" (Mark 14:49). Arresting him in public would have caused a riot.
• He showed that worship should be as God commands, not as the leaders command, and that worship shouldn't devastate people financially. "The Lord calls us to sacrifice, yes, but he also calls us to worship as he sees fit."
• Others had tried to kill Jesus before, like his hometown of Nazareth (Luke 4:29). This was the moment that drove the leaders to the decision that succeeded: "Otherwise, we're going to lose our power, we're going to lose our wealth, we're going to lose our influence."

The trumpeting place and the rooster

• A fallen corner stone came from the spot where a priest stood and blew the shofar to start the temple's day. The original inscription is in the Israel Museum.
• Peter was told he would deny Jesus three times before the rooster crowed. Jeremy said roosters weren't allowed in the city, because they made it unclean.
  • He said "rooster crow" was a term for the shofar blast that opened the day, around the time a rooster would normally crow. Wherever Peter was that Passover morning, hearing it made him realize what he had done.

Pentecost happened here, not in the Upper Room

• Christians, and Pentecostals especially, associate Pentecost with the Upper Room. But Jeremy said the text "absolutely... does not" place it there.
• The Upper Room is in Acts 1, after the ascension from the Mount of Olives, when Matthias was chosen.
• Chapters and verses aren't in the original text, and some breaks are guesses. Acts 2 opens with a conjunctive kai ("and/when"), which tells a Greek reader "different time, different place."
  • Luke knew his audience might miss it, so he spells out a new day as well: "When the day of Pentecost arrived, they were all together in one place" (Acts 2:1).
• The rushing wind "filled the entire house where they were sitting" (Acts 2:2). But "house" doesn't mean a home here.
  • Luke wasn't there. He enters the story at the "we" passages (Acts 16, at Troas) and relied on eyewitnesses, as he says at the start of his gospel, one of them Mary.
  • His Jerusalem sources thought in Hebrew, and in the Old Testament the temple is called "the House of the Lord" and "the house upon the mount."
• Pentecost is one of the three pilgrimage festivals, with Passover and Booths. Passover and Booths last about a week, but Pentecost is short, so pilgrims would be at the temple.
• These steps were the gathering place when you weren't inside offering sacrifices.
  • At age 12, Jesus was found at the temple "sitting among the teachers" (Luke 2:46). You stand to read Scripture and sit to teach.
• The crowd came from every nation: Parthians, Medes, Elamites, Mesopotamia, Judea, Cappadocia, Pontus, Asia, Phrygia, Pamphylia, Egypt, Libya, Cyrene, Rome, Crete, Arabia (Acts 2:9–11).
  • The trip took about 28 days from Thessalonica and about 40 days from Rome. After a trip like that, you'd be at the temple, not in the city's back streets.
  • "Does it make sense that you have that diverse of a people group... inside just the random streets of the city in some upper room? No, but does it make sense that you would find them here gathered at the temple?"

Peter's sermon and the new Sinai

• Mocked as drunk, Peter says it's only the third hour (9 a.m.) and quotes Joel: "I will pour out my Spirit on all flesh..." (Acts 2:14–21).
• Sinai had a rushing wind, fire on the mountain and smoke, the visible presence of God (the Shekinah). The early church saw Pentecost as "the new Sinai. What God did back then, he's still doing to this day."
• The Holy Spirit wasn't new. In the Old Testament the Spirit came on individuals for a specific time and purpose: Bezalel to build the tabernacle and the Ark, Samson, Saul and other judges.
  • Now the Spirit that fell on the heroes of the Old Testament "now falls upon each and every member of my body."
• The Spirit isn't given to keep God's wonders "inside the four walls of this church." It's given "so that the world might know that God is alive today," the same yesterday, today and forever.
• The preacher is Peter, who had denied Jesus only weeks before, now proclaiming, "This Jesus... God raised him up" (Acts 2:22–24).
• "Repent and be baptized every one of you" (Acts 2:38). About 3,000 were baptized (Acts 2:41).
  • Where do you baptize 3,000 people? Not in an upper room. The Pool of Siloam couldn't hold the festival crowds either. Mikvaot line this area, which is why signs mark a "path of the mikveh." "Right in front of your very eyes."

Application

• "If you want to see the place that is ground zero to your identity as a Christian... you are in ground zero for what makes Freedom Church, Freedom Church."
  • Freedom Church's growth isn't Pastor Benito, "as much as I love him." It's the power of the Holy Spirit in the church.
• "We might be 6,500 miles away from Freedom Church. This is what starts it all": these stones, where you sit today and where believers sat 2,000 years ago.
• All that was required of them was to receive and go, and they took the gospel to the ends of the earth. "The call for Freedom Church rang out here 2,000 years ago, and it still continues to ring out."

The Southern Steps and the gates

• The Mishnah (Jeremy cited tractate Yoma) preserves how the temple operated day to day and on the high holy days, written after the temple was gone.
• The steps alternate long and short, a form of crowd control. You can't rush up. You have to take your time.
• There were two sets of gates, one for entering and one for exiting. Part of the exit archway is visible above.
  • Today there are three openings. The Crusaders reworked the area into a fortress. The Temple Mount meant little to them. Their holy site was the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, and many of them persecuted the Jews of the land.
• The stones here are preserved first-century stones. Jesus came to Passover every year as was his custom (Luke 2:41), and this was the way in.
  • "This is one of the only places that I can absolutely guarantee to you that Jesus would have stood on where you could stand."

The tomb of Pharaoh's daughter

• Across the valley, on the rock beyond the houses, stands a small square, house-like tomb with a door, dated to about 1000–900 BC. Jeremy said it contains Egyptian hieroglyphs.
• The lower tombs were for royalty. The Hasmonean princes are buried below in the nefesh monuments, which we would drive past the next day.
• It's believed to be the tomb Solomon built for his Egyptian wife, a princess the Bible doesn't name (1 Kings 3:1). A freestanding 3,000-year-old tomb is rare, since most were cut into the rock.

Western Wall Plaza

Opher explained the wall and Jewish practice.

What the Western Wall is

• The southern wall of the Temple Mount runs along the Davidson Center, and the corner there is where the Western Wall begins.
• The Western Wall is Judaism's holiest site, "at least nowadays."
• For a long time only a narrow strip of the wall was accessible to Jews, so traditions formed around praying there.
  • Jews are supposed to pray toward the Holy of Holies, which was up where the golden Dome of the Rock stands. At the Western Wall that means praying up and a little to the left.
  • Many people just stare at the wall, thinking it's the temple's wall. "It's not. Let's get that clear once and for all." It's a retaining wall that held up the platform the temple stood on.
  • In the first century the street along it was basically a shopping center. Nobody prayed at the wall, because they had the temple.
• Today it's considered the largest open-air synagogue in the world, so men (the northern section) and women (the southern section) are separated.
  • Shoulders and knees must be covered, and men need a head covering. Paper hats and kippot are handed out, and you return them when you leave.

"Judaism for Dummies": the denominations

• Nobody used to dress the way the ultra-Orthodox dress today. "This is just a tradition."
• Modernization in 18th- and 19th-century Europe (the Industrial Revolution, and later radio, TV and the internet) drew three main reactions:
  • Ultra-Orthodox: modernity is the worst thing that could happen, so enclose the community, keep modern things away from the children and hold to the forefathers' way of life.
  • Secular: modernity is the best thing. "People like myself." No need for a kippah to show you're Jewish. You pick and choose traditions, like a Passover meal with family, maybe fasting on Yom Kippur, "but the following day I might eat a bacon cheeseburger."
  • Orthodox: traditional life and modern life can go together. They shut off the TV and all electrical appliances for the roughly 25 hours of Shabbat, pray three times a day and wear a kippah, but have cell phones and the rest.
• Later, especially in the U.S., Jews in big cities often didn't have a synagogue within walking distance. To stay connected and keep Judaism alive for their children, they drove to synagogue on Shabbat. That became roughly Conservative Judaism, between Orthodox and secular.
• Every denomination today falls somewhere between the very strict ultra-Orthodox and the not-strict secular.

Religious dress

• Religious Jews wear an undergarment with fringes (tzitzit), sometimes tucked in. That's the "hem" the woman with the bleeding touched on Jesus' garment (Matthew 9:20).
• The black suits
  • In the 19th century, a rabbi taught that the Messiah was on his way, and it would be rude to meet him on the street without your best clothes.
  • The best attire then was a black suit, white shirt, tie and top hat. They've dressed that way every day since, "literally waiting for Messiah to come greet them on the street."
• Sidelocks
  • All people are the image of God, so Jewish law forbids shaving below the cheekbones on both sides.
  • Some rabbis permit electric razors and some don't. The strictest only trim with scissors.
  • Remember Samson, who lost his hair and his connection to God? "We want to show that we never lose our connection," so a strand is left above the cheekbone, visible even under a hat. It's left from the first haircut, around age five, and a lifetime of twirling it makes it curl.
• Women's hair
  • A woman's hair is considered one of her most attractive features.
  • Once married, a religious woman shows her hair only to her husband and immediate family. She covers it or wears a wig.
• Hats
  • Each ultra-Orthodox community and rabbi has its own style. There's a whole book on ultra-Orthodox dress, with an entire chapter on hats.
  • Hats are among their most expensive clothing, and some cost $3,000–$5,000. On flights, they wear a small kippah and keep the hat in a special box.
• Q: What does bar or bat mitzvah mean?
  • "Bar" is for a boy and "bat" is for a girl. Until 13, parents are responsible for the child and take the blame when the child slips up. At 13 you're of age to keep the rituals and to take the consequences yourself.
  • At the end of a bar mitzvah, the father traditionally says, "Thank you for ridding me of this burden."
• Q: What are the hats made of?
  • Some are synthetic and some are fur. It depends how much you want to spend.

Western Wall Tunnels (Kotel Tunnels)

Yanai, our Western Wall Tunnels guide, led this stop.

Mount Moriah

• The model shows Jerusalem's most important mountain, Mount Moriah, the site of the binding of Isaac.
• About 800 years after Abraham came David, then Solomon, who built the temple. For about 1,000 years (minus about 70) there was a temple on this mountain, and a whole culture grew up around it.
• Yanai's family name is Cohen.
  • The kohanim came from the tribe of Levi and were the priests in the temple. "Two thousand years ago, in my family, [we] didn't need to send our kids to be tour guides. We had a job."
  • According to tradition, a third temple will be built on Mount Moriah when the Messiah comes, and "my people will get their job back." That's why Judaism still keeps the name Cohen.
• The Dome of the Rock
  • In Muslim tradition, it's associated with Muhammad's night journey, and the dome covers the rock where they believe it happened.
  • Jews call it the Foundation Stone, the site of the binding of Isaac and the center of the world. That last idea is a later tradition, not in the Bible.

From Abraham to Herod

• Abraham lived about 3,800 years ago. His descendants went down to Egypt as 12 brothers and came back as 12 tribes that settled the land.
• They were Israelites, not yet Jews. The name "Jews" came only after the destruction of the kingdom.
• God "fires" Saul, and David, Yanai's favorite biblical character, becomes king.
  • David had blood on his hands. The temple is to be a place of peace, so he isn't allowed to build it.
  • He took the city by force, but he bought the temple property from Araunah the Jebusite (2 Samuel 24:18–25). Araunah offered it for free, and David insisted on paying full price.
  • It's a "reverse negotiation" of Abraham buying the cave from Ephron in Hebron (Genesis 23). Hebron was the Israelite capital until David.
• The biggest difference between the First and Second Temples wasn't size. It was the presence of God and the Ark of the Covenant.
  • "The biggest gift that my people gave the world is the Ten Commandments," the only words God himself wrote, kept in the Ark in the Holy of Holies.
• The First Temple stood almost 400 years until Babylon destroyed it. Jeremiah prophesied a return after 70 years, and after Persia took over Babylon's empire the Jews came back and rebuilt.
  • When the returning exiles saw the Second Temple, the older generation, who remembered the First Temple's glory, wept, while the younger generation rejoiced (Ezra 3:12–13).
• There's little information on the early Second Temple, but a great deal (archaeological, Latin, Jewish and Christian sources, even measurements) on Herod's rebuild. Yanai prefers to call it the "renovated" Second Temple, because Herod completely rebuilt it.

Herod's platform

• Herod came from a family that converted to Judaism, and Jews always looked down on him. He wanted to be the greatest Jewish builder in history, "even bigger than King Solomon himself."
• His design was too big for the mountain, so he undertook one of the biggest building projects in the history of the land and of the Roman Empire.
  • In the north he cut into the mountain and used the stone for the temple itself.
  • In the south the slope dropped away. He used the Roman solution of a series of arches, like the one over our heads, to hold up an artificial plaza.
  • It's like Caesarea, where Herod built a port with no natural harbor.
• Massive retaining walls held the platform, and on it stood probably the biggest temple in the Roman world, one of the great achievements of the empire.
• Building began around 20 BC ("depends where you ask"), and it was destroyed in AD 70. Jesus predicted its destruction just before his execution under Pontius Pilate.

Remembering the destruction

• The temple's destruction is still mourned in Jewish tradition.
• At a Jewish wedding, just before the groom breaks the glass, the rabbi recites, "If I forget you, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget its skill... if I do not set Jerusalem above my highest joy" (Psalm 137:5–6). Then the glass breaks and the celebration starts.
  • The chuppah, the canopy held up on four poles, is a symbolic Jewish home. Under it the couple remembers Jerusalem.
• Some Orthodox homes leave one part of the wall unplastered as a reminder that Jerusalem still needs to be rebuilt. There are fast days too.
  • "Maybe you built a house for you in Texas, but you still have a job to build your national home in the land of Israel."

Why the tunnels are underground

• For centuries after the destruction, the mount was largely abandoned. Then the Muslims built the Dome of the Rock and the Al-Aqsa Mosque.
• Herod's great bridges and passageways into the Temple Mount were no longer standing. Instead of rebuilding them, the Mamluks built their own city leaning against the Western Wall, which gave them easier access to the mount.
• "I call Jerusalem a lasagna," layers of cultures built one on top of the other. The group was standing under a Second Temple period bridge, with the Muslim Quarter on top. From the street you can't see the bridge at all.
• Israeli archaeologists dug this tunnel. The group walked along the bridge, reached the wall, followed it north and ended at the foundations of the Antonia Fortress.
• Mainstream Christianity places the first and second Stations of the Cross at the Antonia, the fortress Herod built above the temple so the Romans could watch the courts. Jeremy places the second station at Herod's palace by the Jaffa Gate, which Yanai called "challenging" mainstream Christianity, as with Jeremy's Pentecost teaching.

Questions

• Q: Can non-Muslims go up on the Temple Mount?
  • Yanai said non-Muslims haven't been allowed into its buildings since around 2000, for political reasons.
• Q: Can an Orthodox Jew enter the Dome of the Rock?
  • No. He might be ritually unclean. Even when the temple stood, only the high priest entered the Holy of Holies, once a year on Yom Kippur.
• Q: If a third temple were built, where would it go?
  • Yanai's answer was that in Jewish belief that would come only in the messianic age, when today's disputes would no longer apply.
• The ultra-Orthodox and modern Orthodox differ over the state, which is key to understanding Israeli society.
  • The ultra-Orthodox say Jews aren't meant to build a secular state, let alone the temple, before the Messiah.
  • The modern Orthodox say we can't stay in Europe waiting for pogroms. Build the state first, and the third temple will come.

Roman graffiti and the women's section

• Here there's 2,000-year-old Latin graffiti left by a Roman soldier. The Romans were in Jerusalem about 200 years, and soldiers love leaving their unit's graffiti, just as in the Israeli army.
• The Muslim Quarter was built against the wall, so only the open stretch was accessible to Jews for centuries.
• At the open plaza, men pray in the north, closer to the Holy of Holies. Women objected that this wasn't fair, so the authorities gave them a women's prayer section here in the tunnels, which is why we couldn't go all the way to the wall at this point.

The Odeon and Herod's stones

• The group passed a small theater that may have been an odeon from the time of Hadrian. Hadrian renamed Jerusalem Aelia Capitolina and Judea "Palestine."
• They also passed a highly decorated room that was probably an assembly hall.
• "I think the most moving thing that we can see there is the perfect conditions of the stones."
  • At the open plaza, rain and wind have worn the Western Wall stones. Here they look as they did.
  • Jesus' followers mostly came from the north and had never seen a Roman city. Seeing these walls, with the framed stones that were Herod's signature masonry, shows how spectacular the temple was. Visitors came from all over the Roman world to see it, not only Jews.
• A model shows the temple, its inner wall and the outer retaining and protective walls. In the southern part, archaeologists place where Jesus overturned the tables.

The Western Stone

• The group was asked not to lean against the wall. It's the Western Wall, close to the Holy of Holies.
• The largest stone is about 13.5 meters (over 40 feet) long and weighs hundreds of tons, "fifty African elephants."
• The walls were fortifications as well as retaining walls. The Romans knocked the stones down into the street we had seen at the Davidson Center, but this one was too big. They damaged it and still couldn't bring it down.
• Yanai once asked Dan Bahat, a leading Jerusalem archaeologist now about 90 and still coming to the dig, how they moved it into place. His answer boiled down to: no one knows. "The archaeologists up until today don't know."
  • Yanai later served with Bahat's son in the army, showing how "Israel sometimes seems like a small village."

Warren's Gate, sealed

• Here the Herodian stones give way to "ugly modern concrete."
• This gate was traditionally the synagogue of the Western Wall, and the passage runs toward where the temple stood.
• When archaeologists entered to research it, Muslims protested that Jews were digging under their holy sites. After an international uproar, Israel sealed the gates with concrete.
• "If you ask me, it's a terrible mistake." Yanai said that without research here, some of the mountain's secrets may never be known.

Facing the Holy of Holies

• The group passed the point closest to the Holy of Holies, where women stand praying, and was invited to take a moment for their own prayer. "Us Jews, we open those places for everybody." For Jews, "it's a very, very big deal."
• Jeremy explained the Holy of Holies:
  • In the Old Testament it held the Ark of the Covenant. Once a year the high priest entered and put the blood of the sacrifice on the mercy seat to atone for everyone.
  • When the Roman general Pompey forced his way in, he was shocked to find an empty room. The Ark had disappeared in the Old Testament period, most likely destroyed by Babylon, in Jeremy's view.
  • Outside the curtain stood the table of showbread, the altar of incense and the menorah, which became the temple's central piece after the Ark was lost.
  • The curtain is the one torn when Jesus died: "Jesus uttered a loud cry and breathed his last. And the curtain of the temple was torn in two... 'Truly this man was the Son of God!'" (Mark 15:37–39).
• Yanai, using his Atlas of the Temple: there were actually two curtains. The high priest entered between them from the south, walked to the north end and turned left into the Holy of Holies, so the curtain never had to open to public view.

Walking the wall

• The tunnel runs above the original street level, because it had to be dug over the heaps of stones the Romans knocked down.
• Look to the right at the beautifully chiseled Herodian stones. Beneath your feet in places is "silent evidence for the destruction of Jerusalem."
• Where the tunnel meets the original street level, the paving stones were laid by masons 2,000 years ago.
• The column drums show how columns were assembled: each drum was lifted with a wooden crane and stacked.

Day 9 — Tuesday, Sep 15: Mount of Olives Overlook, Garden of Gethsemane, Jaffa Gate, Via Dolorosa, Wohl Museum, Church of the Holy Sepulchre, The Garden Tomb

The last day ran from the Mount of Olives overlook down past Dominus Flevit to Gethsemane, then into the Old City and along the route out of the city to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, and ended with communion at the Garden Tomb.

Not recorded: The Jaffa Gate and Tower of David area (the planned teaching on Pontius Pilate and Jesus' trial), Via Dolorosa (Part 1), the Wohl Museum (Herodian Quarter), the meeting with Moshe, the rabbi, at his shop, and the farewell dinner. The Mount of Olives recording starts partway into Opher's Temple Mount history, and the Garden Tomb recording goes silent a few minutes in, so Pastor Benito's communion and the worship that followed are missing.

On the bus — to the Mount of Olives

The call to discipleship

• The trip has moved us through stages: first experiencing the Bible, then piecing it together and seeing how connected it is, "not just of the Bible, but of the whole world outside of the Bible as well."
• The final stage is discipleship: we're called not only to be disciples of Christ but to go out and make disciples.
• The group now knows more about the Bible, and has experienced more of it, than many pastors.
  • On a pastors' trip last year with Pastor Benito, pastor after pastor said, "I didn't know this, I never saw that."
  • Most seniors on his annual Bible college trip say they learned more on the trip than in four years of Bible college.
• "Your responsibility now that God has met you inside the land after he's called you here, you don't get to sit on the sidelines."
• This isn't something new but "a new stage", the start of a level of discipleship that disciples others even more.
• The trip was never meant to be a vacation. Its purpose was to build a bigger church at home: a people focused on the great commandments and the Great Commission, to go, make disciples, and be his church to the ends of the age.

Dress codes at holy sites

• Modest dress is needed for the Church of All Nations. The outside is not strict, but a nun or priest inside sometimes is.
• Enforcement depends on who is working the gate, "just like TSA."
  • The Mount of Beatitudes was notorious for one nun who wouldn't let you in if she could see your ankles.
  • Some men at the Western Wall refuse even a hat and insist everyone wear the kippot provided, which creates bottlenecks.

Mount of Olives Overlook

The Temple Mount from Solomon to Herod (Opher)

• Solomon builds the temple on the mountaintop where the Holy of Holies and the foundation stone are, where Abraham took his son to be sacrificed. It stands 400+ years.
• The Babylonians destroy the city and the people are dispersed. They start being called Jews instead of Israelites.
• About 50 years later the Persians take over and let the Jews return. They rebuild the temple on the same spot.
  • Over time they beautify it to look like Solomon's, though not exactly. In Ezra and Nehemiah the elderly remember Solomon's temple as more impressive.
• The Hasmoneans, after defeating the Greeks, expand the temple to take up the whole mountaintop.
• Herod the Great, "greatest builder that ever lived", clears the area around the mountain and builds four huge support walls (north, west, south, east) holding up a platform. That platform is today's Temple Mount.
  • About 144 dunams, or 36 acres: 27 American football fields, 22 European football fields, or 36,500 ping-pong tables. "Choose whatever you want to imagine."
  • The platform is the same size today. The Holy of Holies never moved, and Herod built his temple (the one Jesus saw) almost in the center.
• The Romans destroy the temple and most of the surrounding walls. Nothing is built there for about 600 years.

Why the Christians left the Mount empty

• When Rome adopts Christianity, the center of holiness moves from the temple site to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, the two large silver-gray domes just past the golden dome. That is only about 200–300 yards away.
• The ruined Temple Mount served as an argument: Jesus said the temple would be destroyed, and there is no temple, so the prophecy came true.

How the Mount became holy to Islam

• In the 7th century the ruling Umayyad dynasty did not control Mecca and Medina.
  • Pilgrimage to Mecca, circling the Kaaba (a black stone, possibly a meteorite, associated with Abraham) seven times at the right time and in the right order, earns the title Hajji. For most Muslims it is a once-in-a-lifetime journey.
  • The round trip took six to eight months. The Umayyads feared the Christians would reclaim the land while the faithful were away, so they needed a substitute for Mecca.
• They needed a holy stone tied to both Abraham and Muhammad. They already had the foundation stone, where in Islam Abraham takes Ishmael (not Isaac) to be sacrificed.
• Jerusalem is never mentioned by name in the Quran. But "anything that is holy to Jews, automatically holy to Christians, automatically holy to Islam."
• Quran chapter 17: Muhammad travels from the holy shrine (Mecca) to al-Aqsa, "the farthest place." The Umayyads declared the whole Temple Mount to be al-Aqsa.
  • There he prays, then ascends to heaven to negotiate with God over how many daily prayers Muslims should say. God starts at 500, Muhammad gets it down to 50, and then Jesus and Moses appear beside him and help bring it down to five.
  • He wakes back up in Mecca; it was a dream. But once the spot was linked to Muhammad and Abraham, "it's holy forever... Cannot unholy."
• Where the stories come from:
  • Abraham also bargains with God, over Sodom and Gomorrah, from 50 righteous people down to 10 (Genesis 18). "Apparently Mohammed's a better negotiator."
  • Two figures appearing beside a glorified figure echoes the Transfiguration (Matthew 17).
  • Islam takes a story from the Jewish text and one from the New Testament and makes them its own, the same layering seen all trip with holidays, pilgrimages and dates.
• The official link: the Umayyads said Muhammad stepped on the foundation stone as he ascended. Inside the Dome of the Rock they show his footprint.
• In 8th–9th century Muslim literature there was a debate over which was holier, Muhammad's birthplace in Mecca or the place he ascended. It was a political dispute between factions.
  • Today there's no question: Mecca and Medina are first and second, and this is the third holiest site in Islam.
• Where he prayed they built the silver-gray dome, al-Aqsa. The golden dome sits right over the foundation stone.
• Today's Islamic claim that there was never a temple works against Islam, because without the temple there is no link to Abraham and the holy stone.
  • Opher has Islamic books and articles from the 1930s that describe where the temple was and say that's why the Dome of the Rock is there. "Politics changes everything, but religious wise, this is exactly where it used to be."

The eastern wall and the Golden Gate

• Parts of the wall nearest the viewpoint are Hasmonean, original stones from about 2,200 years ago. Up close you can see where Muslim-period repairs used different-sized stones.
• The two blocked arches are today's Golden Gate. It is Crusader-period, about 800 years old, with a very ancient gate underneath.
• Whether that lower gate is the original is debated:
  • On the Day of Atonement, before the high priest entered the Holy of Holies, there was a ceremony involving the ashes of a red heifer. With every part of the temple open that day, from a specific spot on the Mount of Olives you could see through the gate straight into the Holy of Holies.
  • The line from the traditional Golden Gate to the golden dome doesn't work that way, since the platform is about the same as 2,000 years ago.
  • His view, shared by some archaeologists: the original gate stood a little to the left and was destroyed by the Romans.
  • Other archaeologists say the Golden Gate is the original and the temple stood farther north, where there is room to rebuild it without touching the Dome of the Rock. Opher doesn't believe it: "I'm just giving you all the options. You decide for yourself that I'm right."

The underground Marwani Mosque

• Jeremy: the Marwani Mosque, dug out under the southeast corner, is the source of the fill that let archaeologists reconstruct the temple's opus sectile floor tiles.
• The patchwork and discoloration in the corner of the wall marks where it was dug. The mosque is much bigger than al-Aqsa and is entirely underground.

The Ascension and the "ends of the earth"

• The synoptic witness means reading Matthew, Mark and Luke together for the full picture. Each includes things the others don't.
  • The synoptics focus on Jesus' life. John is more theological and spends half his gospel on the last week.
• After the resurrection Jesus goes north to Galilee (Matthew and John), including the scene of casting the nets on the other side (John 21). Then he returns to Jerusalem for Pentecost (Acts 2).
  • About 40 days of ministry, of which about three weeks are in the Galilee. This is where the Great Commission and more miracles come.
• Luke and Acts place the Ascension on the Mount of Olives, after his command to be witnesses "in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth" (Acts 1:8–12; Luke 24:50–51).
• Acts follows that outline: the Spirit falls in Jerusalem, then the gospel spreads to Judea (the region they were standing in), then Samaria.
  • Israel's political right still calls the West Bank "Judea and Samaria", as Opher has said.
• The "ends of the earth" means people the gospel hasn't reached, not just places.
  • At Pentecost the gospel had already gone out through Jews from Mesopotamia, Rome and Egypt (Acts 2), but not in full force. The Egyptian church later sent out its own missionaries.
  • Barnabas and Saul go first to Cyprus (Acts 13), a place that had probably heard something already, because it was Barnabas' home and he had access to its people.
• We know people who have heard the gospel but may not understand it or have seen it lived out: "the call to bring the gospel to the end of the earth still exists for us today."

The triumphal entry (Palm Sunday)

• Media depictions nearly always get it wrong. "I actually haven't seen one that gets it right yet."
• Jesus sends disciples for the donkey's foal: "the master has need of it."
• It didn't happen in the city. The crowds came rushing out of Jerusalem to meet him as he came over the crest of the hill, on the road we were about to walk. It shows how popular and well known he was.
• It ties to the Davidic promise from the City of David: Jeremy said the same thing happened when Solomon rode to be anointed at the Gihon Spring, with branches and cloaks laid before his mount (1 Kings 1).
  • The crowd was likening Jesus to Solomon. Whatever others claimed about other would-be messiahs, they were saying he was the heir whose throne is eternal, as promised in 2 Samuel (2 Samuel 7), even with no palace or throne in the city to see.
  • "Hosanna" means "God save us."

"The Lord remembers"

• He thinks Luke, not Mark, was written first.
• Luke is the only gospel that opens by focusing on John the Baptist, not Jesus. (Matthew opens with a genealogy, Mark jumps into the story, John with theology.)
• The angel's first word is the name of John's father, Zechariah, meaning "the Lord remembers." It is one of his favorite plays on words in the Bible (Luke 1).
  • It is the first word from a divine messenger in about 400–450 years. There were Spirit-filled healers in that time, such as Honi the Circle-Drawer and Yochanan ben Zakkai, but no prophecy, no canon, no angelic messenger.
  • After the Persians, then the Greeks trying to wipe out the Jews, then the Romans, the message is that the Lord has not forgotten.
• What he remembers is the promise going back to Genesis: one who would break them free, not from worldly powers, but from sin and death. "The day that death enters into the world is the day that God makes the promise that Jesus is to come" (Genesis 3:15).
• As forerunner, John signals that the promised one has come. The crowds were proclaiming that the one who holds dominion over life and death was walking among them.

The triumphal journey

• He prefers "the triumphal journey": the whole road to Jerusalem showed who Jesus was.
• John the Baptist, before his execution, sends disciples to ask, "Are you the one?" Jesus' answer: look around, the blind see, the mute speak, the deaf hear (Matthew 11:2–5).
• Along the way he heals the blind man leaving Jericho (Mark 10:46–52) and heals lepers while passing through Samaria (Luke 17:11–19).
• The journey shows God's goodness and grace in full "before we see the horror of what's to come."

Dominus Flevit

First-century burial

• In the Old Testament a person was "gathered to his fathers." The body was laid on a bench in the family tomb, and a year later the bones were swept into a central pit with generations of relatives.
• In the New Testament period the bones instead went into an ossuary, a stone box (stone keeps purity), and the ossuaries were stored in a room of the tomb for generations.
• This produced the kokhim-style tomb, shaped like a hand: a preparation chamber in the palm, the entrance at the wrist, and burial slots like fingers.
• Ossuaries only need to be as long as the femur (the longest bone) and as wide as the hip bone (the widest).
• Many are inscribed with names, including biblical ones. The ossuary of "Miriam, daughter of Caiaphas" is in the Israel Museum.
  • First-century names came from a small pool (Miriam is Mary), so identifiers were added. Jesus is Yeshua (Joshua), a common name, hence "Jesus, son of Joseph, of Nazareth."

Jesus' burial

• The legs of the men crucified next to Jesus were broken to hurry their deaths before sundown, because it was a Passover Sabbath, one of the holiest of the year.
• The body was prepared but they ran out of time. The women planned to return at first light Sunday, since Saturday night was too dark.
• Joseph of Arimathea was very wealthy and gave Jesus his own newly cut tomb.
  • The first person buried in a tomb is the one it is always associated with.
  • Executed criminals were usually dumped in a field. Jewish law barred burying them in the family tomb, and a new tomb was hugely expensive. That is probably what happened to the two men beside Jesus.
  • Joseph could petition Pilate for the body, which shows his influence. Joseph and Nicodemus were leading, wealthy Pharisees and disciples of Jesus.
  • He says Josephus names two families spared in the Great Revolt's destruction of the city: the sons of Joseph and of Nicodemus, "the hand of the providence of God on them."

The stone: square, not round

• Only three tombs in Jerusalem have a circular rolling stone, and all belonged to royalty: cousins of Herod the Great (we would see it later that day), the queen of Adiabene, and a prince.
• Joseph was rich but not royal, so the stone was most likely square, the more common kind. It was easier and cheaper to cut, since a round stone must be sanded to roll. The first-century tomb in the Holy Sepulchre has an entrance cut for a square stone.
• "Rolled" still fits: ropes were tied on each side, and three or four people pulled it end over end.
• A round stone gave anyone easy access. That's why the women ask, "Who will roll away the stone?" (Mark 16:3).
• The synoptics say it was rolled away. John says it was taken away, as if tossed aside, which shows the power of what happened to a stone that was sealed in like a cork (John 20:1).
• In the tombs you still have to bend down to look in, just as the disciples bent and saw where he had lain (John 20:5, 11–12).

Why they didn't recognize him

• Mary asks the "gardener" what he has done with the body (John 20:15).
• His own story: he grew up believing in healing as a pastor's son, but the first time he actually saw a leg miraculously healed, "it rocked me to my core."
• The disciples had seen a mangled body on the cross. Three days later they weren't expecting to see him, like meeting someone you know in a place you don't expect.
• Jesus looked like any other first-century Jew. That's why Judas had to identify him with a kiss, even though he'd been teaching in the temple every day that week.
• Recognition came when he showed what they expected, his wounds, to Thomas (John 20:27). On the road to Emmaus they said, "Did not our hearts burn within us?" (Luke 24:32).
  • "Their spirits knew the calling of their master... even if the senses denied it." Our souls will know the power of the Spirit even when our senses deny it.

Jesus wept twice on this mountain

• Dominus Flevit means "the Lord wept."
• The better-known time is in Gethsemane. He tells the disciples to stay awake, and three times they fall asleep.
  • They'd just had the Passover meal with two to four cups of wine. He agrees with the modern four, though some scholars say two. "Some holidays... you are commanded to enjoy the fruit of the vine."
• The first time is here, around the Olivet Discourse, weeping over Jerusalem (Luke 19:41–44). He weeps not for the buildings but for the hearts of people, especially those claiming loyalty to him, who could have changed course and chose not to.
• He believes Theophilus, the recipient of Luke's gospel, was the second-to-last high priest before the Great Revolt. Luke was showing him that he had the answer to the coming catastrophe.
• War was inevitable from the time Judas of Gamla (Judas the Galilean) rose up after Herod the Great's death. It took about 70 years to come.
  • He compares it to the American Civil War, foreseen from the 1830s, and to World War II after Versailles: "You don't have the instability, the chaos, the abuses... and not have civil war."

Application: the power of love

• A friend told him, not meaning offense, that Christians are foolish because only their Messiah holds the answer to all the world's problems, loving your enemy, and they don't live it.
  • Love would solve terrorism in the Middle East, the conflicts in this land, and the divide between Republicans and Democrats.
• "Did you know that love is more powerful than the Holy Spirit?" After listing the gifts of the Spirit, Paul says, "I show you a more excellent way," and then writes on love (1 Corinthians 12:31–13:13).
• The church is "far too busy arguing about things that don't really matter" to have a voice. Jesus wept because three years of showing that love conquers everything lost out to petty arguments and the desire to be right.
• In 2008 John McCain stopped a supporter who called Obama a Muslim out to destroy the country: he's "a family man" and we just disagree on direction. Today debates are traded insults, and pastors post horrible things over politics.
• Political systems pass away. The Jews in Babylon didn't revolt; they stayed loyal to God even to death. Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego accepted the furnace (Daniel 3), and it changed Nebuchadnezzar.
• Tradition holds that even Manasseh, the most wicked king of Judah, who is said to have had Isaiah sawn in two, came back to the Lord through the example of people like Isaiah.
• "Are we the ones that are making Jesus cry?" when he says you knew the things that make for peace and chose not to do them.

The church

• It was designed by Antonio Barluzzi, who also built the Bethlehem church where we sang.
• A window looks out on the Dome of the Rock with a cross in it: Christianity's roots remain right below, no matter what happens here.

Garden of Gethsemane & Church of All Nations

The site

• It is one of several places claimed as Gethsemane, and probably covers most of it. The Church of All Nations has an olive press at its center.
• Gethsemane means "place of the olive oil press." Olive presses in nearby gardens suggest this lower area is the place.
• One tree here is 1,500+ years old, and its roots may be 2,000 years old, from about the days of Jesus.

"His only begotten Son" and the binding of Isaac

• "Begotten" in John 3:16 is deliberate Old Testament language. Isaac was the begotten son, the one the promise rested on, though Abraham also had Ishmael.
• Isaac's life centers on one story: Abraham offering him on Mount Moriah (Genesis 22). Mount Moriah, the older name before Zion, is the Temple Mount across the valley.
• Judaism calls it the Akedah, "the binding of Isaac," and the binding is the key to the story.
• Media portrays a little boy confused about the sacrifice, but:
  • The young men left with the animals are called by the same word used for Isaac, which suggests a young man of about 17 or older.
  • Life expectancy then ran into the hundreds, so he was still young. Early Jewish tradition puts Isaac at about 33.
  • Abraham was advanced in years, and Isaac carried the wood because he was the stronger.
• Abraham binds him so he won't flinch and ruin the sacrifice. If Isaac hadn't been willing, he could have overpowered his father and run.
  • "This is not just a test of Abraham. It's a test of both of them." Isaac submits because the Lord commanded it.
• Isaac is said to be 33, the same age as Jesus, and both are called the begotten son to draw a direct parallel.

Jesus chose to stay

• The arresting party came with torches, so Jesus would have seen them coming and had a head start.
• Behind the hotel at the top of the Mount of Olives, about 15 minutes' walk puts you in the Judean desert. "You walk an hour, nobody will find you." Jesus chose to confront them instead.
• Judas' kiss was needed because Jesus looked like everyone else, and the hillside was full of pilgrims camping for Passover.
  • Line Jesus up with 99 Gentiles and you could pick him out. Line him up with 99 Jews and "we would not be able to distinguish who Jesus was."
• Jesus tells Judas, "Do what you came to do" (Matthew 26:50). He had prayed, "If there's any way for this cup to pass... but I submit myself fully to your will" (Matthew 26:39), knowing crucifixion was hours away.

Peter's sword and Malchus' ear

• Peter is not a wild man flailing. He cuts off the ear on purpose, to show he knows how to use a sword: "come at me."
• These were temple guards, not Roman soldiers, armed with daggers rather than swords. Rome, fearing revolt, kept good weapons away from any organized force.
  • He compares it to the US giving allies older equipment, such as Vietnam-era M16A2s, dated police handguns, and not its most advanced F-35 even for Israel.
• Malchus was the high priest's servant (John 18:10).
  • Under Herod the high priesthood no longer passed father to son from Aaron; it went to the highest bidder, "a mafia" (the wealth shows in the priestly houses of the Wohl Museum).
  • To learn the business you sold yourself into service to the chief priest, "an unpaid intern, basically."
  • A priest had to be physically whole: all ten fingers and toes, both nostrils, both eyes, both ears. Cutting off the ear ended Malchus' investment and his career.
  • A deliberate strike at the ear, rather than the head, takes skill: "Peter knows what he's doing."
• Jesus intervenes: he could call down legions of angels, yet he submits to the Father's will (Matthew 26:53). By sunrise he is on a cross, dead within hours.

Application: the Son gave himself

• John 3:16 means not only that God gave his Son, but that the Son gave himself, choosing at every step, because it was God's plan from the beginning.
• Isaac didn't know about the ram. He may have trusted that the Lord could bring him back.
• Christ saw each of us at every step toward the cross. When an ancient audience read John 3:16, everything that happened here came to mind and gave the verse deeper meaning.

Via Dolorosa (Part 2)

Hezekiah's wall and the Gennath Gate

• Looking down to Iron Age ground level, you can see the outer face of the Iron Age wall.
• Pavement markers show the old walls: red brick for Hezekiah's wall, black stone for the Hasmonean/New Testament wall built in the 1st century BC, which stood in Jesus' day.
• The black-stone wall turns a corner and then there is a gap before it resumes. The gap is the gate: the Gennath Gate, "the gate of the garden."
  • Gates are named for where they lead: the Damascus Gate to Damascus, the Jaffa Gate to Jaffa, this one to the garden.
  • Everything to the left of this point was outside the city.

Tracing Jesus' route

• The first-century road can't be followed exactly, but this is close.
• From the Cardo, where we stopped before the Wohl Museum, Jesus would have been out of the city in about four minutes.
• The group took a slightly longer path out and to the left. Jesus would have had a shortcut of only a couple of minutes to the site of the Holy Sepulchre.

Church of the Holy Sepulchre

Why the tradition is early

• The church dates to the same time as the Church of the Nativity, about 1,700 years old. It was built after Christianity was legalized, when Helena came and asked local Christians where these events happened.
• It is a pre-Byzantine tradition, kept while being Christian was still illegal and before pilgrimage existed, so it carries weight.
  • Once Byzantine pilgrimage began there was money in it, and locals said "It happened here. Now give me $20," like paying $20 to be baptized today.

The archaeology

• Early church writings say that after Rome took the city in AD 136, at the end of the Bar Kokhba revolt, Hadrian utterly destroyed the tomb and built a pagan temple over it.
• In the basement, closed to the public (he has been down many times), the church rests on pillars from a pagan temple.
  • Holy places stay holy: the Temple Mount became a temple to Zeus when the city was renamed Aelia Capitolina.
• The Edicule, the "little house" in the Greek Orthodox area under the dome, is venerated as Jesus' tomb. Archaeologically it can't be, because the tomb was destroyed. "Somewhere within eyeshot is where it happened."
• It checks every box:
  • First-century tombs here mean it was outside the city, since you can't have tombs inside.
  • It was a place of burial, right along the main road into the city from the north, where crucifixions would be seen.
  • Early sources say crucifixion and burial were feet apart, and the Gennath (garden) Gate points to a garden nearby.

The Garden Tomb comparison

• The Garden Tomb, outside today's Old City, is where Protestants felt more comfortable. It has no historical reliability, and even its guides say it is a later tradition.
• Its venerated tomb is a seventh-century BC tomb. They claim Joseph of Arimathea reworked it, but the gospels say it was a newly cut tomb.

Six churches in one

• Six denominations share the church, and each uses its territory to connect itself to the story:
  • The chapel just inside to the right is claimed as Golgotha, the rock of the crucifixion. That is later speculation.
  • A Russian Orthodox pillar is claimed as the scourging pillar. Pilgrims put their ears to it to hear Jesus' cries, though the scourging happened at Herod's palace. He calls it "pseudo-faith."
  • The stone of anointing, where the body was supposedly prepared, is only about 300 years old.
• The immovable ladder has been in the same spot at least since 1536, as early explorers' sketches show. It proves the denominations don't get along.
• Needed restoration was under way; parts of the church had been falling apart. Each church may work in its own area.
• Crusader-era graffiti is carved near the entrance.

The first-century tomb

• At the back is a true first-century kokhim tomb, "a perfect example" of what Jesus' tomb looked like.
  • The entrance edge is cut for a square stone.
  • You step down into the central preparation area. Because they ran out of time, Jesus' body was left there, not yet placed in a niche. It would have gone into the niche on Sunday, "however, his body is not there."
  • Today it's lit by candles; then it would have been an oil lamp.
• Q: The niches in the wall?
  • That's where the body was placed to decompose for a year; then the bones went into ossuaries like those seen that morning.
• Q: So the stone was rolled?
  • Same verb: a rope tied on each side, pulled so it rolled.
• Q: Why were Roman soldiers guarding the tomb?
  • They feared someone would steal the body.

Armenian chapel and the Holy Fire

• An Armenian Orthodox chapel caught fire but its altar survived. It is considered miraculous and has stood there for a few hundred years. The chapel is still used on holidays such as Easter.
• The Holy Fire ceremony before Easter happens in the central area. Orthodox and Catholic leaders light it and pass the flame through the building.
  • Rivalry over who sits in front and who lights it sometimes ends in fistfights.
  • "I have seen more fights, more contention inside this building than anywhere else... I see Christians fight Christians more than anybody else."
• The line for the Edicule is normally hours long, like the Church of the Nativity. With no line today, he let us go in.

The first to proclaim the resurrection

• We assume the women were first, but it was the Roman soldiers, who reported to the chief priests (Matthew 28:11–15).
• The chief priests paid them to say the body was stolen. By covering it up, they were the first who truly believed Jesus had risen. That's why Matthew includes the account.
• In Mark's gospel the women are afraid to go back and tell the others (Mark 16:8).

The Garden Tomb

The stone

• Look how smooth and plain the stone's sides are. A stone that isn't ornate makes the women's question, "Who will roll away the stone?", easier to understand.
• He likes to end trips here because, compared to the history of the Holy Sepulchre, it's "much more our speed" for remembering what Christ has done.

Communion

• Communion is tied to Jesus' death and to Passover. John presents Jesus as the Passover Lamb: the Lord passed over houses marked by the lamb's blood and death was stilled from the firstborn. For us, it is the second death we are saved from.
• At his last meal before the betrayal (not his very last, since he spent 40 days with them afterward), he says, "Do this in remembrance of me." Whenever you eat the bread and drink the cup, you "proclaim the Lord's death until he comes" (Luke 22:19; 1 Corinthians 11:26).
• Jesus is fully God and fully man. As a man he lived the life none of us could, without shame, sin or blemish, and still chose the cross, "because the cross was our destination."
• How he puts it to his university students: "It was a debt that we couldn't pay. And it wasn't as if the debt just disappears, somebody else had to pay it."
• Every communion remembers "I owed a debt that I could not pay," and one who paid it: "forevermore I am free."
• He handed off to Pastor Benito to lead communion to close their time together. "Neither me nor Opher are truly the leader of this."

All recordings

Every recording from the trip, in order. Recordings marked no content were accidental.