Day 03 - Jerusalem Area Tels

When we wake up we find ourselves on the top of a small mountain.

Since our travel bus arrived last night at 10:45, we had all taken our luggage and gone to our rooms by the light of some street lamps. This morning, in the light of day, it was immediately obvious that the hotel complex where we were staying was perched in a perfect spot overlooking Tel Aviv, which sits on the northwestern end of Israel.

“On that day I swore to them that I would bring them out of Egypt into a land I had searched out for them, a land flowing with milk and honey, the most beautiful of all lands.”

Breakfast is one of the first indications that we’ve left America. There is a wide assortment of choices laid out on the buffet, many of which look unfamiliar. Since many places in Israel adhere to kosher food standards, dairy and meat are not served in the same meal. Libby informed us yesterday that dinner often contains meats and breakfast often has dairy, eggs, fruits, and vegetables.

 Thankfully there is also coffee.

 Every morning starts early (6:00 is what I would consider to be early) so our group can have a chance to start moving before the sun makes things warm. Luckily we started our trip with an easier day; a high of 87 in-between the Judean hill country and Tel Aviv, as opposed to the high of 104 which we will experience tomorrow near the Dead Sea.

After a short breakfast we thank our hosts and gather outside to hear Rod and Libby introduce us to the land. The hotel is a Christian-run establishment with a small traditional Israeli family “garden”.

Sidebar - translation is tricky.

Ancient Hebrew has very few words, relative to English, with which it tried to communicate a huge variety of ideas to both us and its original intended audience in the scriptures.

This is one way in which many of us westerners get ourselves accidentally stuck with an incomplete or sometimes incorrect understanding of scripture.

A garden in this case is not like a park or a European palace’s back yard. This is a family farm with a vineyard, threshing floor, wine press, olive press and a watchtower.

“He [God] plowed its land and cleared it of stones. Then he planted it with the choicest vines, built a watchtower in the middle of it, and dug a wine vat in it; He expected it to produce good grapes, but it produced only wild ones.”

Isaiah 5:2

The garden is a place of agriculture and post-agricultural resource processing. A place where two or three generations lived in the same house, caring for the same land and a place where Sabbath is spent. Eden was a garden, Israel is a garden and I’m sure heaven will be a garden too.

As we soon find out, seeing the traditional garden is a good introduction to the land of Israel, both in terms of our Ancient Paths tour, as well as modern day. During our bus ride to the next location we can see many farms and a few gardens, complete with family housing, along the road.

The land looks and feels like the coastal regions in southern California. 

Since this is a rabbinical-style tour, Rod and Libby ride the line between giving us enough information for us to be prepared, but not so much information that we know where we’re going.

Upon the bus's arrival we hop out, walk through an empty field, and start bushwhacking our way up a steep hill.

The hill turns out to be a mound of dirt which had settled on top of an ancient city.

All throughout Israel (and I imagine throughout the rest of the fertile crescent) there are mounds similar to this one called tels, which are un-excavated ancient cities. In the area around Tel Aviv, it seems that many of the unutilized hills are tels, since the land cannot be used for agriculture.

We already heard about the garden - the basis of ancient society. After the group’s introduction to tels, now it seems that it was time to learn about cities.

As the group stands on top of this particular tel, we can see Tel Aviv to the northwest and the Judean hills to the east. The coast near Tel Aviv looks inviting, populous, and lush, but despite the Israeli-centric Biblical narrative with which I’m familiar, it becomes immediately obvious that Israel did not possess the best land for agriculture in this region. “Israel was a mouse in a world of cats” says Rod as he paces back and forth, facing the rich coastal plains and then the comparatively dry and rocky-looking mountains. “Babylonia to the east, Assyria to the north, Egypt to the south, and the Philistines (the mysterious Aegean “sea people”) to the west. You have to be really tough to hold the coastal plain, which is where all of these empires intersect, but Israel never conquered it.”

Perhaps they could have inherited the coastal plains if the conquest of Canaan had gone differently, but as always, God still shows his hand in our failure.

Israel depended on God’s provision of rainfall for crops and His military protection against the much larger and more technologically advanced cultures which surrounded them.

Now that we’d seen the difference in agricultural quality of the land just 5 miles on each side of this hill, it was time to learn the significance of what was beneath our feet.

As we walked around the top of the hill, we could see that one corner was partially excavated. We were standing on the ancient city of Gezer, which was something similar to the “Chicago” of the region. One excavated portion contained the city’s multi-chambered gate system, which we stopped to visit.

This gate system had an impressive 6 chambers, where people were welcomed into the city, found work, did business, and carried out judicial judgment. These sorts of activities can be seen in the book of Ruth, when Boaz goes to the city gate in order to claim Ruth and an inherited plot of land, or in Genesis when Lot is a city official in Sodom.

In the center of Gezer are some excavated standing stones. In our Bibles sometimes these are called Ebenezers. These particular stones were most likely set up by Canaanites and included a small square trough which was probably used for ritual infanticide.

It’s already been a long day of teaching and learning in the sun, but it’s only around 9:30.

A short bus ride later, we’re on top of another Tel. This time we’re definitely in Israelite territory, in the hills. After hiking up a steep but short trail it is revealed that we are in Bet Shemesh, the hometown of Samson.

Everyone on the trip knows this story well, how Samson is easily corrupted by his pride and reckless action, but we soon learn that the story becomes even more overt when we see the translation of the names in the story.

Samson’s name in Hebrew is close to “bright rainbow”, whereas Delilah’s name is “dark night”. This is ultimately a story about how a particularly strong Israelite (armed with a Nazarite vow) fails to affect the world outside of God’s chosen people, but instead falls easily into breaking every one of the vows of a Nazarite and is defeated by Israel’s enemies.

Once again, in Bet Shemesh we are standing on a large hill facing Tel Aviv, the coastal plain where the Philistines lived. Even Samson, with all of his raw God-given power did not push far into the plains before succumbing to the pressures of its people and abandoning God and Israel.

Next, we travel another short bus ride to another tel, but this time we’re not focusing on what’s under the ground. Instead we find ourselves resting under an olive tree and finally facing away from Tel Aviv, towards the mountains which separate the Judean hills from the desert.

The valley below us is where Goliath challenged Israel, where the tribes of Israel were set up on one hill and the armies of the Philistines were set up on the other.

The brook, where David might have collected his giant-slaying stone is a small, dry crack in the earth running through some nearby fields. While on top of this tel, the story and significance of David and Goliath is rehashed. The sophisticated Philistine sea people, with more advanced methods of warfare and metallurgy are pitting themselves against a scraggly bunch of hillbillies whose king is afraid to lead their armies.

When Goliath is described, we think of him as tall because he was 6 cubits, however in the Jewish mind many numbers have symbolic significance. Seven is the number of God - perfection, however the number six represents humanity.

With this spin on the story, we’re seeing a human (almost as if he had a basketball jersey with a 6 printed on it) challenge God’s people. In the Biblical order of the story, David had just been anointed as God’s chosen king, and therefore represented God. The thing that confirmed his victory was David’s faith that God is stronger and would choose to save His people.

When we continue David’s story we get on the bus again and hike to a cave called Adullam before we see a herd of goats, as well as their shepherd trotting through the countryside.

This particular cave is known for being a refuge for some zealots who led a short-lived crusade against Rome, but for the purposes of our journey it was a time to think about how David lost everything and had to go from place to place while hiding from Saul after he became jealous of David’s fame.

The sun has now passed its zenith. Surely it’s been at least two days already since we climbed Tel Gezer, but we have one more stop before the day is over.

Tel Lachich (the ancient fortified city of Lachich) is the largest we’ve seen so far. Even as we’re approaching, we can see a partially-excavated ancient brick wall extending around one hundred feet into the sky from the bottom of the hill.

There’s a ramp and an obviously-marked entrance, but Rod leads us up a series of bare dirt switchbacks on the side of the tel instead. Upon reaching the top we are greeted by some metal sculptures of people holding bows. The path that we have just taken is an unexcavated siege ramp, which was used by the Assyrians to invade the city.

Most tels have multiple layers of excavation; one layer for every time that an invading army burned and looted the city. Tel Lachich has an impressive 47 burned layers of archaeology, which is about double the number of layers as Tel Gezer. This city was in high demand, and guarded an important trade route. So important, it seems, that it was taken and re-taken 47 times throughout its history.

Lachich is important in the Bible because its destruction was a clear signal to the newly-crowned King Hezekiah that it was time to set the nation of Israel on track again. They very quickly stopped their idol worship and rebuilt the temple in order to save themselves from the Assyrians who had just laid waste to Lachich. This is a harsh reminder that when Israel abandoned God they were extremely vulnerable to any conquering army which might decide to stroll through.

Lastly, after a full day of hiking we boarded the bus again and rode for an hour and a half to get to the lowest above-ground place on earth - the Dead Sea.

I’m happy to report that, for the first time in my 28 years of life, I can finally float!

Carson & Rachel Wiens