Third Letter from Nazareth
Sunday June 5, 2016
Dear Friends and Family,
We have completed our second week of excavations and tours,
and exhaustion has arrived right on schedule.
The dig’s work makes demands on the body, even when people are drawing
top plans under shade. There is time for
rest in the afternoon, but the early mornings restrain the full effects of
sleep (even if people go to sleep at a sensible hour, but who wants to
be sensible during this sort of experience in the Holy Land?). For example, this Sunday morning it’s 8:25
a.m. On a weekday, by now we would have
been working for 3 ½ hours and second breakfast would be five minutes away. Today by 7:00 a.m. all of the crewmembers over
50 had eaten and while sipping their coffee and tea were remarking on how late
it was. By contrast, I have seen exactly
two undergraduate students. Neither said
much after “good morning,” and might not have gotten that much out if someone
else hadn’t said it first.
Yesterday we spent from 8 a.m. till 4:30 p.m. working
outside. I say that because, even though
we were not digging at our own site but touring others, our bodies only knew
that we were demanding calories as we hiked in the sun. It was 102 degrees Fahrenheit by the time we
left for the hotel.
That, by the way, is a temporary heatwave. When we started digging, high temperatures
rose into the 70s and finally made it to the 80s this week.
Veteran Alex Ramos and his crew opened a new square south of
the square from which the 2015 team pulled out 13 whole and complete or nearly
complete oil lamps. That discovery, and
the soil layers both in which and over which the lamps were found, created a
chronological conundrum that I asked Alex’s team to solve. Near the end of day Friday the crew found two
whole and complete lamps of the same type, so they are on their way. Alex flies out today and the team is now under
the direction of Toby Klein and Pam Reaves (who arrives later this week). We anxiously await the results of their
careful archaeology.
The only five-year veteran of the project, Rachel
Stivers-Bender, flew back to Japan last night, leaving the square in the
capable hands of Abby Day. They are completing
a square that contains a column drum, probably from the synagogue, that had
been reworked as the base for a slow potter’s wheel. The wheel was slow, not the potter. I mean that the potter turned the wheel by
hand rather than kicking with the foot. Surely
another nearby flat stone with grooves to direct water was also used in the
workshop.
Jill Marshall’s crew is laying bare the corners of two
adjoining rooms built in different phases, with a courtyard partially paved
with plaster on the other side of the walls.
Floors are always the devil to excavate, unless they are finely laid
plaster. This one ain’t. The team is getting good information,
however.
Under the direction of Teryn Gilbertson, the crew of I.13 finished
clearing out one cistern, which we have decided never held a drop of water, and
will probably finish the other this week.
The completed pit or storage chamber, as we are now calling it, held
fewer whole vessels than we had hoped, but it did yield four whole and complete
bowls. Well, they are bowls if you hold
them one way and lids if you turn them the other. They seem to be the right size to fit over
storage jar rims, and at least two are wasters, so they were made here. So we may have a new distinctive pottery
form. The team’s most important work,
however, will be in securing a date for the synagogue.
All this is to say that good archaeology is happening. Yesterday in a tour of Yodefat that Motti
Aviam gave us, the whole team got to see how a site moves from living town to
ruin to archaeological site to a preserved park, and how the lead archaeologist
decides how to present his or her work to the public. Motti said that he thinks this is even more
important than the articles and reports we write because it will reach more
people. That, in a way, is what I’m doing
with these letters. Not many of you will
read the scientific reports from Shikhin, after all.
Motti also remarked on how much money such site conservation
and presentation requires. Much of that
money comes from the government. In an
almost offhand comment, Motti estimated the price of one fighter jet that Israel
buys from America (it is astronomical), then said (here I paraphrase), “One day
when there is peace we’ll have more money to spend on archaeological sites.” It was not lost on me that one of his sons
and his son-in-law are fighter pilots, and that he spoke these words at a place
where Romans massacred most of a Jewish village’s population, sparing neither
women nor children. This morning as I
write in the hotel’s coffee bar I hear two women who clean the hotel
speaking. One is a Jewish Russian
immigrant and the other is a local Arab, probably a Christian, but I can’t tell
by looking at her. They are employed at a
hotel owned and run by an Arab Muslim family.
The language is Hebrew, which one speaks with a Russian accent and the
other with an Arabic accent. The
conversation sounds unremarkable.
When we give them permission, war, murder, and injustice
take up all the available space in our imaginations. Whether we get the reports from news media or
experience events firsthand, we can convince ourselves that fear and anger are
objective and rational, even necessary, responses. I think this is why God gave us the gift of
true reason, and of love. Because they
are of God, and because God is constantly at work, we can hope, and we can join
God’s labor of peace.
So let’s do that.
Begin by praying for peace in Israel and everywhere.
James
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