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Fourth Letter from Jerusalem
Dear Family, Friends, and Colleagues,
This year the incident that kept me from this log on the
fourth weekend was the illness and one-night hospital stay of a volunteer (Dear
Samford Administrators: not a Samford student), who appears to be restored to
about 95%.
We have finished our excavations and are now in Jerusalem,
from where we traveled for dinner last night to a lovely tent restaurant near
Bethlehem. We had to leave our rental
vans and walk through the Israeli checkpoint, since Avis would cancel our
insurance were we to drive into the West Bank.
The two guards we saw were behind what I assume is bulletproof
glass. Both appeared superlatively bored
and were fiddling with their phones. It
would have been a different story had we be been Palestinians, even Christian
Palestinians, as our dinner hosts were.
The archaeology of Shikhin continued to present challenges
this season. The evidence of pottery
production at a huge volume challenges notions that its residents were peasants
who only grew and made enough for their own consumption and use. The variety of forms made challenges the
argument that Shikhin exported only jars. The number of lamp molds found—we are now up
to 15, if we haven’t lost count—challenges the idea that lamps were made only
in cities, and it presents us with the possibility that Shikhin became a
northern lamp production center after 70, as I said last time. With one lamp mold found last week, we now
know that Shikhin’s kilns produced the well-known “winged,” “darom” (southern)
oil lamp. Earlier I posted photos of two
broken ones found during our first week.
In layman’s terms, that’s a really big deal. We have also now uncovered the foundation
stone (it’s a really big stone) for the double threshold stones of the
synagogue. We can tell it’s for the
threshold because, although the foundation stone is narrower than the threshold
pieces, the builders cut the bedrock so that stone and cutting together
accommodated the thresholds. To our
surprise, the foundation is in the stylobate, which means that the stylobate
has been transmogrified into the exterior wall of the building. That means we have to re-think the position,
and maybe the orientation, of the synagogue.
Oh well, that’s how we form, test, and revise hypotheses in archaeology.
This has been an exceptional dig season. We had an unusually cohesive group of curious,
hard-working, smart, conscientious folks.
We typically can count on asking one person who has never dug before
—often a graduate student—to come as an area supervisor, which means he or she
is responsible for the archaeology in one of our squares. Often we
will ask one or two new volunteers to take over supervision of a square after
two weeks of training. This year, at the
start of the dig, not one of our area supervisors had a lick of archaeological
experience. Only one volunteer had any,
and our most qualified veteran (our field supervisor) didn’t arrive until the
second week. In my experience, that is
unprecedented, and Abuna and Motti agree with me. I confess to having felt some consternation
about our situation before we began. I
shouldn’t have spent the energy. These folks
did it: they read the manual and asked many questions and helped to train one
another as they went. And the
archaeology got done and done well. It
is a matter of pride for me that, by the end of the dig, three of five Samford
students had directed the excavation of their squares.
This morning James F. (Abuna) Strange and I led a walking
tour of some ancient sites in the Old City.
We began by taking people to see Byzantine paving stones on Christian
Quarter Road. The pavers have been
lifted about 3 meters to their current position, but they are still bearing
foot and tractor traffic all these years later.
From there we went to the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, where we did our
best to distinguish fourth-century construction from 13th century
walls and columns. People may return
later to view the tomb of Jesus itself.
Usually there is a long line. Of
the two sites that pilgrims visit as the location of the genuine tomb, Gordon’s Calvary cannot
be the place and the Holy Sepulcher has a decent pedigree of pilgrimage pre-dating
the fourth century, so I tell folks it’s not a bad choice. In the end, however, we cannot know. The pilgrims, however, don’t ask me, and as
usual many were busy anointing and kissing the stone of unction where,
according to tradition, Jesus’ body was prepared for burial.
On the Via Dolorosa, which we walked in reverse (i.e. to the
east), we saw a pilgrim group bearing a cross in procession and singing in
Spanish to guitar accompaniment. I assumed
that different members of the group got to carry the cross on different parts
of the way. I told Abuna that at one
time these sorts of practices (anointing the stone; bearing a cross) struck me
as alien and had no meaning for me. I
guess as a Baptist I had no box into which to sort these kinds of pious acts,
other than one labeled “silly” or “superstition.” Today I don’t think I could carry the cross
without weeping. The veneration of the stone
moved me as well, even though I don’t think it’s the stone.
I don’t quite know what to make of these shifts in my
religious attitude. I have known Jews of
no particular religious conviction to burst into tears at the sight of the
Western Wall of the temple mount, which we saw last night on Erev Shabbat. Maybe this is something like that. Perhaps I’m simply less cynical than I was
twenty years ago.
At the end of the Via Dolorosa we saw the Pool of Bethesda,
made famous by a healing in John 5. The Byzantines and later the Crusaders
erected churches over the pool, which still collects water from two separate
sources, using very high arches to support their superstructures. Nearby is a much later Church of St. Anna,
the mother of Mary. It has astounding
acoustic properties, and even standing outside we could hear a pilgrim group
singing hymns in four-part harmony inside.
It was lovely.
I’m now sitting on the front porch of the Notre Dame Center
in Jerusalem, in the cool breeze of the late afternoon, with my empty
cappuccino cup at my elbow. Most of the
group will fly out late Monday night, and I and a few people, including my
parents, will return to Nazareth to spend a few days finishing up the things
that always remain to be done after the close of a dig. We will feel a bit lonely at the site after
so many weeks of busyness and hard work and laughter. A
dinner at Motti’s and Nurit’s home, high up near the Lebanese border, will
help. Still, I’m ready to be home with
Laura.
Until next year, continue to pray for peace.
James
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