Erica Thornton, Eddie Padrino, Kathleen Hyland, and Sam McFarland
Posts
While I’ve been in Israel I’ve been writing Sunday School lessons for the Alabama Baptist newspaper. The general theme is giving, and today I turned in a lesson on generosity, for which I composed the following paragraph, I encountered this idea this very [Sunday] morning at the 6:30 Latin mass at the Church of the Holy Sepulcher. I, two other professors, and some students worshiped with a group made up largely of Catholics, but with a few Baptists and other Protestants like me thrown in. We invoked the Holy Spirit together, the celebrant pronounced Christ’s peace upon us and we responded in kind, we confessed our sins, passed the peace, were offered and received the Lord’s Supper, and were dismissed with a blessing. We then had to vacate the premises for the Greek Orthodox mass. The space in front of the sepulcher that had just welcomed us was now blocked off by metal barriers (which actually said “Police” on them, although I’m confident the police had nothing to do with regulati...
Week 2, 2011
I cannot help myself: every morning at 6 am, as I drive our van load of volunteers down into the valley that hosts the hilltops of Shikhin, I exclaim, “Look at that. Isn’t that simply gorgeous?” Oblique sunlight strikes the eastern slope and transforms thistles and tall grasses into golden down dotted with the green of olive trees and terebinth oaks. The ridge of hilltops ascends from farmland. If the Beit Netofa Valley were a sea, our site would be an island in a southern inlet. I’ve noticed that both the workers in the fields and the cows who eat the stubble of the harvested crops greet us with stares. I suppose we are a curiosity. I’m happy to give both a bit of respite from their daily routine. I’ve also learned that cows can be quite stealthy. The other day I set up one of Samford’s new survey instruments on a hill called Jebel Qat, for I wanted to shoot from a known Israeli survey point to one of our finds about a half kilometer to the west. I concentrated on leveling the instru...
First Entry of 2011
We have finished the first week of a brand new archaeological project. If you read the last entry or so from 2010, you’ll see that last year we closed out the University of South Florida Excavations at Sepphoris, which I co-directed during the final season. This year we are opening up a new site by surveying it in preparation for excavations planned to begin in 2012. I am directing the project, and David Fiensy of Kentucky Christian University is the Associate Director. The name of the site is Shikhin. I’ll talk more about the site later. The trip did not begin auspiciously, and since I have arrived in the country, things have gone about as I have come to expect. I have never missed a flight to Israel before, and certainly not with a student in tow. Now I have done both at the same time, and while Erica Thornton is certainly an easy travel companion, I don’t care to repeat the experience. In any case, we all arrived safely and all were greeted warmly by the hotel staff, who ...