Fourth Letter, from Jerusalem
Dear Family and Friends,
Today is our second full day of three in Jerusalem. We arrived Friday evening—the beginning of
Shabbat—as we usually do and ensconced ourselves in rooms at St. George’s Cathedral
guesthouse. We had a few minutes to take
in the attractive dining room and bar with the lovely garden, then we hiked
down Nablus road and through the Damascus Gate until we reached the Western
Wall.
Up to this point the experience has been full of novelties
and adventure for our first-timers, but Jerusalem multiplies the exotic encounters. On these hikes I wear my big white hat (a
gift from David Johnson at Samford) so that those at the back can keep sight of
me, and I give a brief lesson on how to move through a crowd like a Middle
Easterner. But the sights, sounds, and
scents allure, and the group slows like rubberneckers on a highway. Well I can’t blame them. They are seeing architecture that dates from
the Crusades to the 16th century; smelling spices, coffee, and
unpleasant odors; and hearing vendors call out in Arabic and English. It’s a bit much to expect them to ignore all
of that for the sake of reaching a destination.
Saturday was a day of touring the Old City: Church of the
Holy Sepulchre, the fourth-century remains of the Sepulchre in the Russian
Alexander Nevsky church, down the Via Dolorosa to the Church of St. Anne and
the Pool of Bethesda, then back across nearly the whole Old City to the
Byzantine Cardo and the “Broad Wall.”
All of these things should show up in your study Bible maps if the
publishers are worth their salt, and of course there is far more to see than one
can take in during a morning.
Today most of the group left for the annual trip to sites
along the western shore of the Dead Sea.
I stayed behind and accepted James Tabor’s invitation to tour the UNC Charlotte
excavations at Mt. Zion, just outside the city walls southwest of the Old
City. They have structures dating from
the Early Roman period—including three stories of a Roman house!—through the
Ottoman Period, and it’s quite a puzzle.
But they are sorting it all out because the previous excavator, Magen
Broshi, left some unexcavated soil. That
was a real favor to the current team.
Tonight we’ll have our final, farewell meal at a local restaurant,
then tomorrow at various times people will begin heading for the airport and
several of us will drive back to Nazareth to finish working at the site. This year we have a kiln to preserve and some
balks to draw, then most of us will head home on Friday. I have been ready for about a week and am
hoping this week will fly. Daily Facetime
chats with Laura have blunted the pain of separation, but, you know, I will be
very glad to be home and returning to our routine of morning walks and
breakfast with an evening hour of a good Netflix T.V. series.
I told the group in our final lecture what I think we
learned this year. Here’s a digest of what
I said. Our westernmost Square, 25,
found what we interpret as the furthest extension of a stylobate foundation for
the synagogue. The ancient Shikhinians
made things a bit difficult for us by building on exposed bedrock rather than
digging foundation trenches. So the team
of 25 dismantled a section of the wall in hopes of getting solid dating
evidence for the synagogue. What they
got was enough for us to say, “The evidence doesn’t contradict the picture we
have been forming of a synagogue built in the late first or early second
century A.D.” Well that’s okay. We can only say what the data will
allow. Nearby Square 2, reopened after
six years, confirmed the extensive robbing of stones that happened after the
synagogue was abandoned. But they also
found a capstone for what is probably a grain silo still sitting in the silo’s
top. Maybe a narrow person can excavate
that next year (the opening is only 37 centimeters/15 inches in diameter).
In the eastern part of the field, Squares 20 through 24
confirmed that great disturbance happened in the 4th century after
the village was abandoned. Better than
that, from a pool—perhaps for levigating clay—in 23 and from the kiln in 24 we
are confirming that Shikhin produced pottery and lamps for export during the
period the synagogue was built. We have
no evidence for lamp production after about the middle of the second century,
but wasters of second, third, and fourth-century pottery forms confirms that
they continued to make jugs, jars, cooking pots, bowls, and just about all the familiar
Galilean forms along with many unfamiliar ones.
Square 20 gave us our first soil layers that pre-date 37 B.C., the year
we usually say begins the Early Roman period.
It is the year Herod began to rule as a client “King of the Jews” for
Rome. That team recovered at least two
surfaces, one on top of the other, from which no pottery or other artifact
dated later than Late Hellenistic. So we
have our first solid evidence of the expansion of Shikhin during the second
century B.C.E., probably due to the annexation of Galilee to Judea by the
Hasmonean dynasty. That is a common
enough phenomenon in villages of the Galilee that we should be surprised if our
evidence showed otherwise. It is unusual
only because we have not found many other layers that we can date cleanly to
the next archaeological period, when we are fairly confident another expansion
happened when people moved north from Judea.
Evidence of Jewish refugee communities fleeing Judea, settling in Galilee,
and integrating into the economy and other systems would back up our assumption
that this must have happened. That claim
mostly rests on a few literary references and some logical inferences. I am also anticipating what we’ll learn from
the work of my colleagues Betsy Dobbins and Brian Gregory (see the letter from
Week 1).
Thankfully this year we haven’t learned of any violence in
the country during our stay. But the
past has made us cynical, and we anticipate more rather than hoping for its
end. God forgive us for a complacency that
adjusts to reality rather than working to change it, with God’s help.
Pray and work for God’s peace in the world.
James
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