Nazareth, Israel, 24 October 2014
Dear Family, Friends, and Colleagues,
I’m supposed to be on my way to the airport, but I awoke at
6 am to find that my flight is delayed exactly 3 hours and 17 minutes. I’ll look for somewhere to lodge a complaint
if it ends up being 3 hours and 19 minutes.
When I do leave, I’ll be heading to NYC, where I’ll get to spend
the better part of a day seeing my Joanna (my youngest sister), Jonathan
(brother-in-law), my mother, and Leo, my newest nephew. Until now I’ve had to be satisfied with
photos and videos, but soon I’ll get to hold him for myself. I’m looking forward to meeting him.
It has been a fruitful trip.
My father did arrive, and I got much done that I needed to do. I spent many days hiking Shikhin’s hills, and
I was able to see archaeological features that others had told me about, and in
some cases mis-identified. Now I can say
with some confidence that of Shikhin’s three hills, the village, its synagogue,
pottery and lamp industry, as well as grape pressing, occupied the northernmost
hill. (If you fly to 32° 46.077'N / 35° 16.401'E on Google Earth, you’ll see
this hill. You’ll see Highway 77 to the
north, agricultural fields to the north, east, and west, and a modern village
called Hoshaya further to the east.
You’ll be able to click on links to photos of the ancient site of
Sepphoris [Tsipori or Zippori National Park] to the south, near the modern
village of Tsipori, which adopted the name of the ancient city.)
The middle hill had tombs and some grape pressing industry
as well. Now I know that the tombs
probably did not extend to the southern hill, which also supported some
industries that I can’t yet identify.
Jebel Qat, which is the hill immediately to the east, housed some tombs
and both grape and olive pressing.
Remnants of limestone quarries are everywhere, which, I reason,
supported the building of the city of Sepphoris, since the village houses used
fieldstones, whereas in the city they could afford to pay for nicely cut
stones. There don’t seem to be enough
tombs.
I’ve identified two more miqvehs, or ritual baths, and I
found a tomb that robbers had destroyed on the interior, probably looking for
treasure. They used a wrecking bar to
dig into the soft chalk, almost completely wiping out the ancient carved
“arcosolia,” or arched niches in the walls.
I found what remained of one, with the adze marks of the ancient workers
still visible in the stone. More lie
beneath the soil that has silted in over 1,600 years, so we still might recover
some information. I kept the wrecking
bar.
On Wednesday and Thursday my Israeli partner, Motti Aviam, graciously
toured my father and me to ancient sites.
We saw et-Tell (which the excavator, Rami Arav, thinks is ancient
Bethsaida, mentioned in the Gospels, among other places), el-Araj (another
potential site for Bethsaida), Magdala, Hamam, Huqoq, Khirbet Kur, Omrit,
Kedesh, and Bar ‘Am. Many people have
never heard of most of these, but they are crucial for understanding Galilee
from the Hellenistic through the Roman periods, during which Shikhin flourished
and was finally abandoned, never to see settlement again. It is also the time that gave birth to Christianity
and the Judaism of the Talmuds, so if you want to understand the beginnings of
those religions, it sure helps to know something about the people who lived in
this place in that time. Ideas, after
all, don’t float free in the ether, but are tied to bodies and objects, smells
and sounds, and other realities of human existence.
The same is true today, of course, as politicians and devout
people (sometimes they’re the same people, sometimes not) try to figure out how
in the world to solve the problems that beset us. It seems we can only make limited
progress. I don’t think that should stop
us. Jesus, after all, had no illusions
about human failings when he announced that God’s kingdom had already
arrived. That’s probably because he read the
Bible. For their part, the Sages, who
read the same Bible, reasoned hard about how to live out God’s Torah in a world
that did not cooperate with them. Later,
Muhammad would take up a similar task.
All three bequeathed their struggles to their various heirs.
So, pray for peace, and live to bring it about.
From Nazareth,
James
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