Samford Summer in Israel

The Samford team, consisting of me (James R. Strange) and Aaron Carr, arrived in Tel Aviv without incident at around 6:30 pm local time on Tuesday May 25, having spent right at 12 hours in the air, most of which we slept. We were joined on the flight by three other Sepphoreans and around 150 crying infants. Earplugs managed that problem. The drive up to Nazareth was uneventful, and there we met others who had arrived earlier in the day, including four students from USF and UF. Aaron is the only male on the dig younger than 20, so one area supervisor has designated him as the person in charge of moving large stones. Soon a 16-year-old may join him in that honored position. This year the team is small, numbering only 17 at our strongest, but some are arriving late and the four Florida students leave after only two weeks. Hence, our archaeological goals, which were already quite focused, are now limited by our numbers: we will only take down three balks, and so we will wrap up the Univers

Yom Kippur has long since passed here in Israel (and everywhere else, I suppose), but I think this blog post is some kind of way of atoning for the fact that I never wrote one last year (at least that seems to be how Dr. Strange sees it). He also mentioned failing me (before remembering that I’m not here taking a class). But that’s neither here nor there. The flight was uneventful, but those are the best kinds of flights. I slept on and off, in between the watching of movies and the eating of meals, and though we were delayed an hour in our departure by a late connecting flight from Nebraska, we made it to Tel Aviv by 6:30 or so the next day (Tuesday, May 25, for those of you keeping track). Dr. James F Strange (affectionately known as “Abuna”) picked us up in Tel Aviv and drove us up to Nazareth, where we enjoyed a hot dinner of roast beef and the companionship of friends both old and new. It was off to bed after dinner, though I stayed up a bit longer, checking email and reading a bi