The Veteran Canuck

If you've been reading other blogs, you've probably already read about some of our adventures in the final four days of our Canadian group's adventure. But maybe I can hit a few notes that others haven't already sounded.

The three-day trip to Jordan was in some ways a fitting capstone to the whole two weeks. For one thing, the culture shock would have been immense had we gone there any earlier. Transitioning from North American to Israel was a big enough shift, and then going from Israel to Jordan was equally massive again. Partly this is due to the changing climate and topography as one moves east from the Mediterranean: it gets hotter and drier, and fewer things grow. Colours leach out and everything seems to turn one or another shade of grey or brown. In addition though, the human culture shifts too. Israel, as "foreign" as it obviously is in many ways, is still recognizably Western-influenced, if more via Europe than via North America. Jordan is definitely part of the Arab world, which has its own-- and very different-- set of norms governing everything from social customs to housing norms to bathroom standards to... well, you get the point. It was a good thing we went there last rather than first.

Archaeologically speaking too it was a good thing we went there last, for Jordan's ruins are if anything quite a bit more spectacular than most of what we had seen in Israel. There was, in fact, a very logical progression throughout our two-week stay. First we got acquainted with "our" Decapolis city, Hippos, whose ruins are fairly modest. There's a lot to see and learn about, but to be honest its remains are pretty fragmentary and impoverished. However, we didn't really perceive this at first since it was the only Decapolis city we knew! Only when we went to Beth Shean, a week into our trip, did we see a better-preserved city that was part of the same urban league that HIppos belonged to. As I wrote earlier, it was a real eye-opener to see Beth Shean's main streets-- both of them-- with many intact columns and shops, and even whole buildings such as temples and theatres fairly well preserved. Then, when we went to Sepphoris later the same day, we saw some first-class mosaics that again helped provide a wider context for the remains that we had been working with all week in HIppos. Hmmm. Both of those cities, Beth Shean and Sepphoris, opened our eyes in significant ways to the richness of life in the Decapolis.

Jordan did the same for us again, first at Jerash and then even more spectacularly at Petra.

Jerash's value, for me anyway, was the expanded scale of its ruins. It included not just one but two large plazas, each of them surrounded by a huge colonnade. The oval plaza, below, was my favourite.

Behind this, to the right of this structure but just outside the picture itself, is a fairly-intact Temple of Zeus. We didn't spend much time there at all, but it certainly gave us an impressed appreciation for its commanding position and grandeur. Even better though was Jerash's Temple of Artemis, which-- as others have related--includes a number of columns that almost miraculously resisted tumbling in the massive 749 earthquake because of the clever concave/convex ends on each of their drums. This design resisted lateral movement, but instead created a "rocking" motion of one drum against the next in seismic events. Here's a photo of one of our guys pushing on one of these columns-- yes, enough to actually make its movement visible, when we looked at a spoon shoved between the column and its base.

The proof that none of these columns ever fell, not even in the massive 749 quake, is in the fine quality decoration on these columns' capitals, which would certainly have smashed to bits had they ever tumbled to the ground.

The other most-impressive thing about this temple, which I actually didn't notice at the time but read about later, is that its complex extended on both sides of the main street! At the time, we were naturally focussed on the temple itself, which stands at the head of a massive ceremonial set of stairs ascending from the city's main street. But leading toward those stairs, across the main drag, is another whole section of ceremonial street-- a via sacra-- which created a processional way that was several full blocks long, and may have even extended further (though no one quite knows for sure). Wow!

As impressive as Jerash was, though, Petra was even better. No it wasn't a Decapolis city, and yes the state of its Roman-era ruins is more fragmentary than Jerash's, but the other dimensions of its remains are so unbelievably spectacular that it truly was, archaeologically speaking, the hands-down highlight of the whole trip.

No doubt you've seen pictures-- in books, or even in the Indiana Jones movies-- of some of Petra's more famous facades. They're rightly well-known, and truly more impressive in person than in photos. In fact, I'm grossly disappointed reviewing my pictures of the city, because they all look washed-out and feeble compared to the vivid memories that are still, a week later, burned in my brain. Not just the remarkably good state of preservation of these ancient ruins, many of them dating from before the time of Christ, makes them impressive, but also the wholly unexpected range of colour of the stone from which they are made. We saw reds (tons of reds!), yellows, and even blues, sometimes running in adjacent bands or swirls that were like a hallucination, so bright and whimsical they seemed. The photos below, as I said before, don't even come close to capturing the reality-- but maybe give you a bit of an idea.

Even better than these often-pictured buildings though was the "high place" that five of us hiked up to.  Our guide, Sami, told Doc Schuler a "back route" to take to get up there, which proved to be a wonderful suggestion, since along the way we got to see things that even the Doc hadn't seen before on any of his previous visits.

One of the highlights was the Tomb of the Roman Soldier, which is interesting enough in itself but even more fascinating because-- again-- it was part of a larger complex that extended across the "street" (in this case, a narrow path). To our modern mindset, buildings separated by a public road are always, always, always separate from each other, so it doesn't even occur to us to think of them creating a single space. But here too, as in so many other respects, ancient thinking was very different than ours. So across the street from the Tomb of the Roman Soldier is its spectacular triclinium-- a large rock-cut room with three massive raised-up areas on which dining-couches once stood. Upon these, diners (and partiers) would share banquets, drink, and good times while remembering and celebrating the dead who lay in the tomb across the street. What a neat discovery!

Several couches would have stood beside each other (end to end) on each of the three sides of this triclinium. Here, Steph demonstrates the posture diners would have adopted upon them.

Anyway, that complex lay enroute to the "high place"-- literally, the very peak of a mountain upon which sacrifices were made for centuries to the gods. We saw a somewhat-comparable facility in Tell Dan as well, but that one wasn't nearly as "high" as this one here in Petra, which features no walls or structure to speak of apart from the carved-out platform, a small (20 cm high) altar in its midst, and a larger (50 cm high) altar off to the side. Somewhat chilling were the drain-channels both in the main platform and in the basin next to the larger altar, both of which probably served to carry away not just rainwater but also the blood of the sacrificial victims. Holy crow!

Dr. Jim Gimbel beside the altar. The drainage channel is beneath his left hand.

It's one thing to see a large stone-built temple, as we'd seen them many places in many cities before this point. The pleasing architecture and fine craftsmanship of those places serves to disguise the stark business they were really about-- appeasing the gods by means of sacrifice, works-righteousness in naked form. But this high place wore no such disguise. Altar, slaughtering-table, platform, and that's it. And right on top of the mountain like this, the better to reach directly to the gods without any intervening space. It was quite an experience to see this.

Otherwise, Petra had a lot of other neat "highs" too, of course. As others have commented, the view from the mountain peak just west of the city is absolutely stunning, with an overlook of the Wadi Arabah that extends from the foot of this mountain range all the way west into Israel, and from north to south extending from the Dead Sea all the way to the Gulf of Aqaba (the northern tip of the Persian Gulf). I've stood atop high mountains before, but never one quite like this.

Within the city itself, several building details struck me as memorable and significant as well. One was the very clever method that the Nabateans who built this city (and civilization) came up with to earthquake-proof (or at least fortify) their buildings. The Romans at Jerash had their convex/concave columns, but these Nabateans used pieces of wood sandwiched between courses of stone to provide a comparable level of "flex." Smart! 

The layer of wood is near the mid-point of the picture, extending "around the corner" into both walls.

Another intriguing detail of a very different sort-- spiritual rather than mechanical-- was the baptistry in the Byzantine-era church off Petra's main street. As you can see, it was cruciform, all the better to visually represent our baptism "into Christ." As if that wasn't neat enough, it also had a small round basin beside it (toward the top right in this picture)  which may-- may!-- have been a feature used to baptize infants. Again, very cool!

I could go on and on, but I think the overall picture is pretty clear. Petra is probably the most intriguing place I have ever been in my life. I dearly hope I can get back there again someday!

Finally, after several hours in Amman and a series of border mis-adventures that other bloggers have already well-described, we got back to Ein Gev much later than expected on Sunday night before leaving at 6:00 AM on Monday for a very quick trip to Jerusalem. Again, you've read others' comments on the various sites we ran through-- almost quite literally in a couple of cases! For me though it was an interesting trip in a different sense, since this was my second trip to the city. Even thought I had been there only once, and two years earlier, it was enough that I had a good sense of the lay of the land and wasn't nearly so off-balance with its newness as I had been the first time. That, in turn, freed me up to experience the spiritual force of its commemorative sites more fully than I had before.

Within the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, for instance, I worried less about finding my way around and taking appropriate photos (though I still took some), and was consequently better able to let the reality of the place wash over me. This is where He died, this is where he was anointed, this is where he was laid, this is where he rose from. O Lord, have mercy! Even granting the lack of absolute certainty (were these really the right places after all?), it was a very powerful and moving experience. I'm so glad I had a chance to re-visit all of these places again.

Waiting to enter the "aedicula," the miniature building-within-a-building atop the stone which is commemorated as the tomb in which Christ was laid. (See the photo below and its caption, for more context.)   

If you know which doorway to go through, you can find your way--WITHIN the Church of the Holy Sepulchre!-- to this passageway leading to three rock-cut tombs from the first century AD, just a few metres west of the little building covering the place where Christ's tomb is commemorated. 

The place where Joseph of Arimathea is commemorated for anointing Jesus' body, just inside the entry to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. This large stone tablet was placed there in the early 19th century to replace one that had literally been worn out by the touch of generations of earlier pilgrims.  

And that's about it for now,  I think. Maybe I'll post again in a couple of days, more about my post-trip impressions. Thanks for reading along up to this point!   

Please note: Because of problems with the blog's server, and a three-day trip to Jordan followed by two days in transit back to Canada, this post was written much earlier than today, when I am finally getting it on-line. Sorry for the delay.   

Yesterday, Thurs 10 July, was the last day on the mountain for the eight of us Canadians. We leave this morning, Friday, for three days in Jordan, returning on Sunday evening and then leaving on Monday morning for a day in Jerusalem before flying home Monday night. Within our group, it feels both good and bad to be at this phase.

The good stuff flows from a sense many of us share that this dig really has been a tremendous success. A couple of people have mentioned their personal satisfaction at having risen above the difficult conditions, both climate-wise and work-wise. The hope now is that they can retain the strength and conditioning that an experience like this produces, once they get back to the softer and less rigorous life back home.

Another source of great satisfaction is the progress we've made on the dig itself. Hey, that's what we're here for! And it really has gone extremely well. Yesterday, in our squares (E-F, 0 and 1), we kept pursuing the north-west and north-east corners of the east-west wall. Ian and Bill worked in the east section, going deep--more than 2 metres below surface level--in a narrow trench. We were looking for either the bottom of the wall they were tracing, or its corner. The corner wasn't well-defined, but might have been there; it was hard to tell. And the bottom of the trench didn't seem to reach a clear bottom to the wall either, but again it was hard to tell. The presence of a layer of damp soil, uniformly along the whole trench, suggested that they were at least getting very close to bedrock (and thus the bottom of the wall).

Bill's back was giving him some trouble, especially from using the Arny-net so many times to lift out huge stones. When you're digging that far down in a trench, it's often a three-stage process to get those bad boys out: first, out of the narrowest / deepest part of the trench onto the little shoulder beside it, then onto a big stone protruding from the wall of the hole part-way up, then finally up to ground level. Whew! Not just Bill's back, but the entire bodies of many of us, are glad this kind of work is now done.

In our western area, again tracing this same wall, we made great progress despite--again--a number of very big stones that had to be netted out in three stages. Dan Westberg and I just kept chewing our way down, focusing especially on the corners to keep the hole going down neatly and also, more importantly, to acquire the maximum amount of information from each level we were reaching. The tendency is, of course, to dig a pit with a rounded bottom--but then you miss out on all the data that's just a few inches, or feet, to the right and left of the deepest part you've dug. It's not that hard to just keep working outward until you've got a nice rectangular pit. And then, if you find interesting things, you can even undermine the corners by a few more inches, if need be, to learn more. Got it?

By doing this, we too reached a layer of damp soil, at about the same level Bill and Ian had reached it farther west. Great! And then, as we kept chewing down bit by bit, we found what clearly seemed to be one of the bottom stones in the wall. It was fairly well-cut, being particularly flat on its bottom face. And under it was a layer of small stones, embedded in what seemed to be plaster. Hmm! Remember our earlier work in the wider trench just south of here? That's exactly what we found there too and diagnosed as bedrock--a vein of crumbly limestone marl, but bedrock all the same.

So Dan and I worked out from there, leaving everything in situ--exactly where we found it--and what a neat pattern emerged. Atop this crumbly limestone in several places were similar layers of small stones underlying larger ones. Other places there were somewhat larger cobbles, maybe fist-sized, serving the same function. And amid those cobbles were many pieces of broken pottery--something we hadn't found much of for quite a while, as we were going down. This is the typical Byzantine building-technique: set the bottom of your wall on a mix of smaller stones and broken pottery. So we were pretty sure this was "it"--exactly what Doc Schuler had wanted us to find. We found it!

Potsherds and cobbles, within a layer of damp soil, right at the bottom of the wall: Bedrock!

Doc was pretty excited, and so were we. I just love this part of archaeology, the investigative angle. You come up with a theory and then acquire data trying to either confirm or disprove it. If it's wrong, as it often is, you try to think of a better explanation. And so it goes, by trial and error, until you finally get enough confirming bits of evidence that you're pretty sure you've got it right. In this case, of course, we weren't trying to prove anything terribly significant: we found a set of old walls, set on bedrock, underneath what later became the North-East Church. What those walls were, why they were built, etc., remain a mystery. But we found them right about where we thought we would, and demonstrated that they are indeed the earliest occupation level under this part of the church. Those conclusions are about as definite as anything in archaeology can be!

Another very satisfying part of our day yesterday as the great celebration we had last night for the 25^th anniversary of Doc Schuler's ordination. He was completely surprised by it. Several of us had worked on the arrangements after Rhoda Schuler, his wife, alerted us to the occasion a few weeks ago; Nancy Endicott was the overall organizer, Jim Gimbel planned and led the rite, and I gave a short homily on "The Earthen Vessels of Ministry." All of this followed our normal Thursday evening devotion, which was led by the two high-school age boys in the group (Andy & Danny), and was followed by a time of appreciation for Mark's ministry, as presented by each of our digging-groups. We had asked them ahead of time to bring an object that illustrated in some way something they appreciated about Mark, and some were pretty creative. A bottle of water reminded one group not only of Mark's concern that we stay hydrated but also of his care for our welfare in every way. A jawbone with its teeth reminded another group of his determination to stay on-task and get to the bottom of things. Besides this sort of object lesson, another group wrote and sang a very funny song, "Old Doc Schuler Had a Dig." Hopefully somebody has posted it by now on another blog!

Chambers' crew (left to right): Gene Balding, Jim Gimbel, Ian Wemyss, SC, Bill Hayes, Dan Westberg, Harry Westberg. What a great group of guys!     

It was my birthday today-- and very nice to receive greetings by email from a number of family members and friends. Thanks, guys!

Lots of other things going on today too, of course. My birthday card from the group of diggers (all 30+ of them) arrived in a most unusual but appropriate way. I went back to our square after a water-break and picked up my turreah to do some more excavating in the corner of a hole I'd been working in before, and before too long suddenly came across something familiar-- the corner of a Ziploc bag. At first I thought, "Oh no, somebody did already dig up this area!"-- which isn't as odd a thought as it probably sounds, not only because the Israeli Defence Forces had cut at least one trench through this particular area during the 20 years they used the mountain as a forward base against the Syrians (1948-1967) but also because somebody had just suggested, earlier in the morning, that maybe the large trove of pottery-shards we were carefully extracting had been put there by earlier archaeologists! At the time that suggestion had been made, I thought "yeah, right," but as soon as I saw the corner of that Ziploc bag, I put two and two together and figured it contained somebody's old excavation notes.

It didn't, of course, but instead a rather touching card from the group, graced with a caricature of yours truly that I stoutly maintain is really very accurate but most other folks seem to think is quite exaggerated, especially around the shoulders. You who know me well can be your own judges.

One more birthday incident. As soon as we got up this morning, I was sorting my dig-clothes trying to decide what to wear today, and giving my roommate Darren Siegle the running commentary: "I think I'll leave for tomorrow the stuff I might end up leaving here and throwing away, and wearing my better stuff today so it can go into the laundry tomorrow." His lightning-quick reply: "Why don't you wear your birthday suit?" Then he said, "Happy birthday, Steve!" Funny.

We made great progress in our square today. I asked Doc Schuler for the day off, after he too greeted me while we were waiting for the bus first thing in the morning, but because he said no (evidently having no more sympathy for birthdays than he did for Canada Day), yes I spent my "natal day" (as he called it) doing the usual routine with picks, buckets, and turreahs. Our whole squad was working in the far north again, having wrapped up work in the trench late yesterday (see yesterday's post). Our goal was the same as what I had been working away at for a couple of days already, trying to identify where-- if anywhere-- the north-south wall turned and ran east-west. I thought I had spotted the corner the day before yesterday, but that was based on just one stone that seemed to be of the right quality and pointed the right way, and we needed far more evidence than that. So today we moved our "shade" over this area, extended it by another tarp-length so we could all work under it, and got to work. Bill and Ian worked in the eastern section, widening the square by about another half-metre to the north and then taking the area farther down. We cooperated on removing a whole bunch of humongous stones out of that area using "the Arny net"--an innovation that one of our veteran diggers, Dr. Major Arny Friend (ex-US Air Force meteorologist), came up with a couple of years ago. It's a big heavy-duty cargo net, nothing more, but employed in the right way it's both a labour-saver and an injury-preventer. You put this net underneath the big stone you want to move, gather whatever excess there might be on top of the stone, then get as many people as you need to loop their fingers through the holes in the net so everybody can lift at once. It solves the problem of having to get a grip on the stone itself, since they're often awkwardly shaped, and it also enables a squad of four or six people to lift a big stone from the bottom of a hole up to ground level, with half the crew standing down in the hole and the other half at the top-- the net is long enough to enable that. Very clever! And it's not just our Can-Am team that thinks so either; having seen how well it works, the whole Hippos team now uses the same technique.

So that was Bill's and Ian's job. Dan and Harry and I worked in the western hole, about 3m over from the other two, doing basically the same thing except that our square needed widening by a full metre. In the process of doing that widening, we encountered what I called "The Pottery Barn"-- the stash of broken pottery-pieces that I mentioned earlier. It seemed odd that they were all stacked up as they were, and fairly large pieces too, so we figured it would be smart to keep them all-- every last small piece-- so that was what we spent quite a bit of time on, carefully getting out all of these pieces, even though that wasn't really what we had been looking for. The goal, again, was to find an east-west wall, and though it took most of the morning, we finally did find it.

As is so often the case, this east-west wall wasn't what we expected. We'd been looking for a wall like the one that ran north-south, namely built of well-dressed stones carefully aligned. As I mentioned a couple of days ago, I had instead found what looked like it might have been a wall of rough stones, aligned in the right direction but about half a metre too far south. So here's the deal: the builders changed the style of wall when they turned the corner; the two walls were indeed connected. The reason they didn't seem to line up is because the eastern piece (where Ian and Bill were working) was still standing upright, while the western piece (mine, Dan's, and Harry's) had tumbled over to the north. The fact it had tumbled wasn't easy to see, though, because the stones were irregular to start with!

And how did we know this part of the wall had tumbled? Well, that was my own bit of detective-work, actually, and great fun to figure out. Basically I just did exactly what Doc Schuler taught me to do: to expose large stones rather than remove them, to look at them carefully, and to try to figure out how they might have fit together. Basically, a cluster of stones just above the place where the wall we were trying to trace "disappeared" seemed, as I looked at them closely, to be related. They were all well-cut, lying close together, and--I noticed--lying at progressively greater angles from each other. It's hard to explain, but basically it seemed to me that, working up from the bottom, the angle at which each stone had fallen was an expansion of the angle of the stone below it, which made sense because upper stones would have fallen farther than lower ones and thus had more time to tilt. Do you follow?

The confirmation of this theory came about in the last half-hour of the morning when I finally dug down far enough to reach the northern end of the northernmost of the foundation-stones we were trying to trace. I reached around its end and found... nothing! No adjacent stone. But right on top of it was this whole intriguing pile of tumbled stone that matched it in size and shape. So that had been the corner, clearly. Heading east from this corner were all these irregular-shaped stones I've already described, forming a poorer wall. Bingo!

See the tumble? The foundation-stone is the long narrow stone near the bottom. Five well-cut wall-stones are splayed above it, three having fallen to the right and then two to the left.

This is the same area, looking east instead of north. The fine-cut stones are in the foreground, tumbled to the left from the foundation-stone, which is still level. See the three rough-cut stones aligned "up-and-down," directly above the lowest of the tumbled fine-cut stones?     

What we don't know, of course, is why builders would have done this. Doc's suggestion at this point is that this outer wall may have been built to shore up the older outer wall of the compound that is still standing just inside the newer wall. Ironically, what is now the inner wall (and older?) is still standing, while the outer (and newer?) wall, which looks much better, is tumbled-over. Curious.

So I'm not sure what we're going to be doing tomorrow, on our last dig-day before heading out early Friday morning on our three-day trip to Jordan. One more up the hill, one more down the hill, and that's it for our Canadian team for 2008. Hard to believe it's gone by so quickly.

How many more seasons will there be on this project in the future? Doc wasn't very optimistic for the longest time, since the present 10-year licence from the Israel Antiquities Authority expires after next year (2009) and it didn't sound like they were at all inclined to renew it. The fact that most of the major buildings that have been worked on so far have been churches, and the absence of any clear archaeological evidence of Jewish presence on the site, probably hasn't helped. But more recently it appears that the IAA might indeed renew the licence for another 10 years, provided that the University of Haifa (through the director of its Zinman Institute of Archaeology, Dr. Arthur Segal, who heads the whole Hippos project) finds two non-Israeli institutional partners. One could presumably continue to be Concordia University-St. Paul. The other?? 

At any rater, we'll have to see how things work out. As hard as the work is, the team this year too has had a tremendous time, forming close bonds with team members from all over North America, learning new skills, pushing one's physical limits, and basking in the total-immersion experience of living and working in the very land in which our Lord lived. I for one really, really hope there are more years ahead. 

Another interesting day, though in many ways totally opposite to yesterday, when most of what we were looking for / expecting / anticipating pretty much fell into place. Today, little did. Let me explain.

The first thing we noticed, while riding the bus up the hill at 4:45 am, was that there were NO clouds this morning. Every workday so far, we've been blessed with a rim of cloud over the eastern horizon that has not only hung around, most days, until about 8:00 am, but on some days has even intensified to shelter us until 9:00 or 10:00. By 5:30, the sky was bright all across the width of the Golan Heights, and by 6:01 it was cheerily peeking over. Beautiful, yes. But also bad news for diggers.

Then, at breakfast, we had NO cucumbers and tomatoes. This was truly inexplicable, since every meal at the kibbutz and up on the hill always features cukes and tomatoes in some form. They're usually available whole, but the form I usually enjoy the most is when they're all chopped-up into tiny pieces, mixed together. Anyway, this truly was traumatic, missing our cukes and tomatoes at breakfast. I wanted to take a picture of my breakfast, to share with people back home and in presentations later ("This is the kind of thing we ate every day up on the hill"), but the absence of these two staples completely ruined the first picture. But eventually, and thankfully, one of the other teams, which eats breakfast in a different old barracks building, eventually sent over one of their tubs of these two chopped-up staples, creating a mini-stampede. OK, it was just me and two other people... but you get the point. And below, I'm pleased to share with you two picture of breakfast on the hill: with, as well as without, cucumbers and tomatoes.

Sad breakfast--NO cukes & tomatoes... Hey, that's better!

Coming down from the hill, the next trauma was that we had NO bus waiting to take us back to the kibbutz. This was not good. Normally we start to walk down about 11:45 in order not to miss the bus's departure at 12:00 sharp. Noon came and went, and no bus. Ten minutes, twenty minutes, and no bus. Twenty-five minutes, and I noticed that Arthur Segal (the dig director) was sitting far away from the group on a big rock watching the road for the first sign of the bus. Doc Schuler said he (Arthur) was steaming mad. The rest of us were just steaming, for the absence of cloud had turned the day into an absolute scorcher-- the hottest dig day so far. Before coming down to the bus, the drill is that people get take their last water-break and then pour out the rest of the water in their jugs, to avoid carrying it back down the hill again-- well, here we were about 3/4 of an hour later without water. (Normally, we take a water break every 1/2 hour, religiously-- or on hot days like today, every 25 minutes.) Finally, just after 12:30, the bus showed up. I don't know what happened, whether it was the driver's fault, the dispatcher's, the boss's, or something else, but there are about 40-some people hoping like mad we never have to deal with that problem again.

At last-- the wheels are here!

So we were a half-hour later than usual eating lunch, which was no big deal except that part-way through the meal we suddenly had NO electricity throughout the whole kibbutz. As far as our lunch itself was concerned, this didn't really matter since it was bright enough in the dining-hall that we didn't need the lights, but obviously the outage of power meant that all the air conditioners were off, not only there but also in our rooms. Within a short while, we started to feel the difference. Again, it didn't amount to much of a problem overall since the normal drill for most of us is to go swimming right after lunch anyway-- and by the time we were heading down to the lake the power came back on. But again, it was another unexpected absence, in a day that was full of them.

You notice I haven't talked about the dig yet. Well, it too was a day of absences. My first job, beginning before the sun arose and then continuing until maybe about 9:00, was to dig down in the bottom of a "hole" that had been excavated two years ago, searching for the matching corner to the one I discovered yesterday. Well, all I found were pottery shards. There were lots of them, and some of them were actually very nice, but that wasn't what I was looking for! NO corner. The closest I came was finding one stone that was cut similarly to the ones in the wall and corner opposite, but none of the adjacent stones were "right" either in their finish or in their orientation. In fact, a crude wall did seem to appear exactly where I wasn't expecting one--parallel to what I was looking for, but right beside where it should have been. So much for that part of our theory.

The wall I was looking for "should be" immediately to the left of my feet-- not directly under them!

The other thing we didn't find, partly because of the absence of this corner, was the temple we had been thinking we were piecing together. NO temple either! The nicely made new wall we traced over the last few days turned out to simply peter out, suddenly and most unexpectedly. As noted above, we haven't yet find the east-west wall linking this new wall we just found with its parallel wall on the other side of our square. So, partway through the morning, the word came down from Doc Schuler: "It's not a temple." Nuts!  That really would have been sweet--giving us not only a major Roman structure but also a rather nice illustration of the succession of one religion by another.

Further, as work in the trench area wrapped up today, we also discovered that "bedrock," at least in this part of the North-East Church, isn't at all what we expected it to be. NO big, solid mass of  immoveable rock on which long-lasting permanent structures could be built. Well, to be honest we did find a big chunk of stable stone at the western end of the trench, directly upon which the "new" wall I've been talking about, had been built. Right-o. But throughout the rest of the trench, what we found when we couldn't dig down anymore was a crumbly sort of limestone/gravel mix that I think goes by the name of "marl." At first when we reached it, we thought it was a layer of plaster floor--that's how crumbly it was--but then as we came upon more and more of it, extending farther and farther down, and very strangely configured into all sorts of lumps and bumps, Doc Schuler said he thought that this stuff actually was the bedrock that we'd been looking for. I wasn't convinced at first, but soon came to realize he was right. Careful work with a stiff brush (a broom-head) revealed that this marl was in fact a single contiguous mass extending practically the full length and width of the trench. At the eastern edge, opposite the wall that was set on solid stone, this crummy marly stuff had been cut by the builders into a trench, into which they had set a bunch of large solid stones to serve as a proper foundation for the wall they then erected on top. Very, very interesting! This was the first place in the whole church-complex that anybody had dug right down to bedrock, meaning it was the first opportunity I had had (or anybody else for that matter, except Doc Schuler) to see how the Byzantines "did" foundations. So, not at all what I expected-- but pretty cool all the same.

The ruler marks where the back-side of this wall stands upon solid bedrock, at one end of our trench.  

As if that wasn't enough, I also heard today, first through the grapevine then officially as well, that the pair of nails I discovered yesterday turn out to be modern rather than ancient. NO ancient nails (found by me, anyway)! How they made their way down into the bottom of a metre-deep trench, I have no idea, but that's the official word anyway. I suppose their manufacture should have given them away, since ancient nails tend to look pretty big and clunky compared to the ones we're used to, even when both types are heavily corroded as these ones were. I guess I was just so glad to have found something significant (see the photo in yesterday's post) that I let myself conclude they "had to be" ancient.

Finally, here's one more absence too, but of a different and much more positive variety: Today was the first day since I left Edmonton that I didn't take any medication for my cold. NO decongestants! I still coughed a bit, sneezed pretty often, and sniffled constantly, but most of that I think was due to the constant and pervasive dust. Shortly after coming down the hill, I was fine-- like most days. But that dust: oh my, that's nasty stuff. It's as fine as talc, and gets into absolutely everything. The stains in my shirt are so deeply set that I really do think they're permanent-- not from chemicals, dyes, or anything like that, but just from plain old dust. But at any rate, I seem to be done with the medications for now. Hurray!

+++

A closing thought, tangentially related to all of this: Darryl Schmidt and I ate supper together, and he lamented the fact that his group hasn't yet found anything "major" in their square. NO walls, NO mosaic, NO stairs, NO street, NO paved floor, NO coins... nothing but dirt and very big and very numerous rocks. "In fact," Darryl said, "the kids in our square figure that we've got about three breeding pairs of them down there--that's the only possible way they could be proliferating so fast!"

One more pic, just for fun: Bill Hayes, Darren Siegle, and I welcome another guest while enjoying an afternoon beer at the kibbutz.

The title about says it all regarding today's work: we dug holes and found walls. That doesn't sound very exciting in itself, I'm sure, but let me explain! Then, if you still think it's pretty dull, you'll at least have a better basis for that opinion. 

The holes we dug were actually among the most interesting and most difficult I've ever done (in all of my vast array of field experience-- 3 1/2 weeks so far!). The interesting part is because they're not just "autopilot" holes, in other words holes that we dig simply because we're assigned to a 5-metre square and that's what we do, dig it up. No, these are purposeful holes, dug with the goal of finding particular features that Doc Schuler thinks might be in those specific locations. He's not always right, of course, but for the most part his hunches are pretty good.

For instance, we spent all of last week digging down half a metre over the whole square, which amounted to moving something like 12-13 cubic metres of soil. The goal was to reach a layer of plaster floor that extended over that whole area. With that goal accomplished, one of our goals the last few days has been to sink a deep "probe" into a 1-metre wide trench spanning the centre of that square, in order to see what kind of structures--if any--lie beneath it. That's the biggest hole our team has been working on, this 1m x 6m trench.

For the most part, we haven't found much in that area, with the stellar exception of a COIN right at the end of the work this morning. The capitals reflect our excitement, for this entire area beneath the plaster surface is a "sealed" area, meaning that everything we find in it was definitely deposited there before a certain date, namely the time the plaster floor was laid. When was that? Well, we don't know. But this is where coins become so very important. If they can be dated-- and that's a big "if," depending on their condition-- we can then determine a fixed date before which the floor couldn't have been laid. See the logic? That still doesn't tell us exactly when the floor was laid, but it does help establish a particular date after which it was laid. This is why we are now (as of yesterday) sifting every bucket of soil that comes out of this trench. Any datable material at all, which most especially means coins, is extremely valuable in this kind of sealed context.

So we're hoping and praying that today's coin can indeed be dated. It's small and looks pretty rough, but until it's cleaned up it's pretty tough to tell. We'll see.

Apart from this coin, and quite a collection of large-ish pottery shards, the trench is mostly full of rocks and dirt. Go figure. The guys have been working really hard, digging around these big stones and hauling them out, which has been very tough work in the heat. It's a four-man operation, with two guys digging, one hauling buckets of soil to the sieve (which is in full sun, up on the "road," since there's no room for it in our square), and one guy running the sieve. They rotate around from position to position every half-hour when we take a water break.

The other holes we've been digging have mostly been my project, though others have helped out with it too. The reason is because they're mostly "diagnostic" holes, trying to trace where the walls of an earlier building might have been, underneath the North-East Church itself. They need to be dug quickly, keeping them as small as possible to facilitate that goal, and with care to observe what's going on so effort isn't wasted by heading off in the wrong direction. I'm no expert in this, of course, but I'm getting to the point of having learned enough to be able to do this well. Even more, I enjoy it!

Today was especially gratifying in this regard. Yesterday we traced a "new" and earlier wall about 3 metres northward from the trench area until the place where it disappeared underneath one of the walls of the church complex. First thing in the morning today, I started working on the other side of that upper wall, digging down to establish whether the lower wall extended still farther, or turned the corner underneath the higher-level wall. (Because these walls are generally about a metre thick, it's quite possible for this to happen.) At first it seemed that the wall I was tracing did indeed keep going north as far as I could follow it before it disappeared again beneath a 1.5 metre deep pile of rubble. But then I moved over a metre to try to locate the other face of this same lower wall, and bingo-- I soon found its inside corner. Exactly what we were looking for!

It's hard to explain this in words, but see the picture below. The first section of wall we found is on the right; we traced it from right to left until it disappeared under the wall that runs in this picture from top to bottom (in the middle). Then I traced it further from right to left, in the lower left of the picture just below the turreah (hoe). A metre above the head of the hoe is where the second side of the wall turns the corner, heading "up" (in this picture). See it?  

After all that, I spent more time trying to trace the other end of this same wall, about 6-7 metres south (to the right in the picture above). I didn't get very far though, between the heat and the depth and narrowness of the trench. Tomorrow morning, when it's relatively cool (before the sun comes up at 6:10), we'll get at it again and see what we find!

Here are few more little notes for our mutual fun and edification.

Pastor Darren Siegle, at breakfast: "You know, I don't think Jesus got it quite right when he said that a city on a hill couldn't be hidden. We're hunting like crazy and still haven't found it all!"

Heading to the dining hall for supper with Bill Hayes, we chatted for a minute with an elderly kibbutznik who asked us what was new on the hill, then proceeded to tell us that it was him, Maier Tuchinsky, who commanded the platoon that took the hill from the Syrians sixty years ago next week (18 July). He offered to tell the story to our group, if we wanted-- a request we promptly relayed to Doc Schuler, who said it was a great idea except that the last time he heard Maier tell the story to a group he kept switching from English to Hebrew, which was quite disconcerting. Hmmm.

It occurred to me today that our our team in squares E-F 0-1 has only seen one scorpion so far, with 7 full days completed. And that was just a tiny one, about 2 cm long, on the first day. Two years ago we saw a lot of big ones on a regular basis. We still see their tracks pretty often, in the soft dust first thing in the morning after they've been out hunting during the night, but the critters themselves are pretty rare. Curious.

And finally here's another pic of me in our square yesterday with a nail that I found on the plaster floor. I found another one today in the deep trench I was digging in the extreme north part of our square, and altogether our team has found five or six nails thus far-- quite unusual. In the absence of any more coins, nails will do quite nicely!

And more finally still, to really wrap things up, here's a photo of all of us Canadians, taken last week on Canada Day. From left to right: Ian Wemyss, Dan Westberg (Canadian citizen, though living in USA), Bill Hayes, me, Quinn Moerike, Katie Anderson, Darren Siegle, Michelle Heumann, Jenn Shack.

See below for an actual PHOTO in today's blog. Yes, no kidding!

Yesterday, Saturday, I had a couple bouts of weakness verging on nausea as we were travelling around the southern Galilee by bus. Thankfully neither of them amounted to much, or detracted from the joy I'm experiencing on this trip and through this work.

It's a perfect combination of elements, maybe not for everyone but certainly for me. Hard physical work that challenges the body and gives it a good workout. Multi-faceted learning about cultures, peoples, and practices buried deep in the past. Expanding links with the Christian community, including both the brothers and sisters working on this Concordia team and those who built this North-East Church and worshipped in it centuries ago. And, most powerfully of all, a meditative and deepening connection with Christ himself.

I experienced this in a pretty concentrated way yesterday when we visited the Church of the Annunciation in Nazareth and observed and listened in on a Mass in progress in a small chapel on the main floor, which is built right atop the ruins of a Crusader-era church. This modern church was masterfully designed, integrating ancient elements into its own spacious and beautiful layout; the consonance of the architecture both old and new was undoubtedly part of what moved me so much. More than that though, the liturgy too was a vehicle for faith, as its rhythms and intonations--even in some eastern-European language I didn't recognize--associated me, a mere bystander, with the community that was actually taking part. Maybe it was the combination of all of those elements--the modern church and its worshippers, doing the same kinds of things there in that place where other people had worshipped centuries ago--that built up to a spiritual peak, but at any rate I was deeply moved for just a bit there, and brought to spontaneous and unexpected prayer. Powerful stuff.

What I'm wondering about now, though, is whether that kind of experience is surprising and unexpected, or not. I can argue it both ways. On the one hand, it's not surprising at all. Here we are in Christ's homeland, after all, seeing the places he saw and mirroring in our own experience most of the elements of daily life that he too was familiar with (climate, topography, vegetation, sights, sounds, etc.). Many people come to Israel expecting and hoping for a deeper spiritual connection with Christ precisely because of these parallels.

On the other hand, though, it does surprise me a little bit to feel more connected to him here than I usually do at home, because I have absolutely no doubt in my mind that he is equally present there as here. The title of a recent book by Eugene Peterson and Marva Dawn springs to mind: "Christ Plays in a Thousand Places." The phrase is drawn from a poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins, if memory serves, but regardless its source its sentiment is so true. Christ isn't present here in Israel any more than he is in Canada; Edmonton is just as much "his city" as is Jerusalem. We can all rely on his helping presence at all times, wherever we are--because he's not confined to any particular place or time anymore, but reigns as Lord of all creation, head of the Church and ever-present companion to all of its members until that day finally comes when at last we will see him face to face. I wrote a paper on a topic something like this at seminary, and the comfort of this insight has stuck with me ever since. So no, in this sense it really doesn't make sense to me at all that I--or anyone else--should feel any closer to Christ here than sitting at the kitchen table back home. Know what I mean?

Maybe the reason for this surprising state of affairs is related to something we heard about in a special lecture one night last week. Jonathan Reed, professor of religion at LaVerne University in California and avid integrator of archaeology and the New Testament, gave a talk on "Marble in Israel"--which was a whole lot more stimulating than it sounds! His interest was not so much what marble actually is in geological terms but rather what it is in social terms: namely, any sort of polished and decorative rock that strikes those who see it as being "foreign" or "imported." In these terms, marble ain't just marble, but also granite, alabaster, and several other types of stones as well. All of these, Reed said, communicated to their ancient viewers strong messages about culture, wealth, and power. Buildings clad in them shouted out "Rome!" even though, in geological terms, there was nothing intrinsic to the stone itself that meant anything like that at all.

Do you see where I'm going with this? There's nothing intrinsically different to any of these stones here in Israel--marble, granite, basalt, or limestone--that make them any more closely linked to Jesus than any of the stones back in Canada. Rock is rock and dirt is dirt, and if it comes down to it, we've got much bigger lakes and mountains in Canada than anybody born here in Israel can even dream about. But somehow these particular rocks and dirt, mountains and lakes communicate "Jesus" to us who know him, much more clearly than those we encounter anywhere else. It's not the elements themselves, but the connotations they bear, that give them their special (and in this case spiritual) power.

So Jesus isn't "actually" any more present here than he is at home, no. But because it was these rocks and hills and waters that he lived among, not those at home, we more readily think about him and perceive his presence here than we do at home.

Anyway, very quickly, here's where we went yesterday--the places that prompted all this heavy thinking. First we spent about two hours walking about Bet Shean, which was Hippos' nearest sister-city within the Decapolis, about 40 km south and a bit west of here. It was a much more ancient city than Hippos though, going back at least 3000 years B.C. and including, in its oldest section, at least 15 levels of civilization, one atop the other. Best of all, it's the largest archaeological site in Israel, occupying 120 acres (if I remember right) and including three major intersecting streets from the Roman and Byzantine eras that are still complete with most of their paving and columns. Spectacular! Apart from Pompeii, which is of course preserved in its entirety exactly as it was when Vesuvius buried it in 79 AD, this is the biggest and most splendid ancient city I've ever seen. Even though it's probably a little too far south to have been one of the places that Jesus visited, it sure did help us understand the kind of world he and his companions and followers lived in.

Yours truly, at Bet Shean

From Bet Shean we went to Sepphoris (in Hebrew, Zippori), which is just 6 km north of Nazareth, where Jesus grew up. While he and his parents were living there, Sepphoris was in the process of being rebuilt as a splendid new capital city for Herod Antipas after the death of his father, Herod the Great, in 4 B.C. Hmmm. The fact that the Gospels describe Joseph as a "teknon" (basically a "construction worker") suggests to many that perhaps the practical reason the family moved north from Egypt after Herod's death was so that Joseph could find steady work building this city. Or maybe he helped fill a vacuum in smaller places around Sepphoris itself, when other tradespeople were siphoned off to work on that great project. At any rate, it's hard not to think of some close association between Jesus and Sepphoris, both chronologically and geographically. Again, the city and the village are so close you can easily see the one from the other.

On its own terms too, Sepphoris was great. Its synagogue includes a very famous set of mosaics, so important they're preserved under a new building erected over the ancietn ruins. I was so intrigued with them that I bought a book about them in the gift-shop later. And there are two other splendid sets of mosaics in Sepphoris too, most famously the set that depicts a whole series of scenes associated with the god Dionysius, the god of wine and regeneration who seems to have been regarded as Sepphoris' special patron. These mosaics carpet the floor of a very large triclinium, a "dining-room" for special guests where lengthy and sometimes-raucous entertainments were held. The various panels include something like 1.5 million tessarae (tiny blocks of stone), in 23 colours. Some stones are so small they can scarcely be distinguished from more than a metre away, and all of them are so artistically arranged that one thinks more of a fine-quality oil painting than a bunch of inset stones. Amazing.

The other set of mosaics is in "the Nile House" which is actually an enormous public building with Egypt-themed mosaics in every room, each one more impressive than the last. The craftsmen even had enough of a sense of humour to show, in one panel, a mouse escaping from a predator cougar by running out of the picture--leaving just its back legs and tail visible inside the frame!

After seeing those two cities, Beth Shean and Sepphoris, we rounded out the day by stopping at Nazareth as I described above. Although the modern city has grown to become the biggest city in Galilee, in Jesus' day it was nothing more than a tiny handful of houses--maybe 20 families at most. So our interest in going there wasn't archaeological (there's nothing there!) but rather spiritual, to connect with the events that happened there rather than the buildings or particular places in which they took place. As I said above, it was a great experience all around.

And now today we got back to work on our own dig, Hippos. The downside to today's work is that we lost two guys, Jim Gimbel and Gene Balding, who were re-assigned to help start work in a new square. We missed them a lot! However, we got off to a good start anyway. After last week's grunt-work, levelling off an extra-large square (6m x 6m) down to the depth of about a metre, it was exhilarating to start work on our "deep probe" in the same area. We started this probe by outlining a metre-wide trench running from east to west near the north edge of the square, and excavating the plaster floor that we had dug down to, all the way across the square, last week. The plaster was about 20 cm thick in most places, and hard to chop and scrape through with our turreahs. Once through it though, we shifted to a different mode of work, no longer just hauling away our buckets of fill-dirt for disposal but now sifting each bucket-full to make sure nothing significant was missed. The reason? Anything below the plaster floor had been "sealed" at that level since whenever the floor was made--which makes the objects found below this floor especially valuable in dating that level. Cool! Even though we didn't find anything significant in this area yet, we remain hopeful we will, when we get to spend more time on it tomorrow and in days to come.

The other and even cooler thing we found is a "new" wall--actually an older wall than any we've dealt with in this whole church complex so far. Its top course of stones lay just beneath the plaster floor, running north-south and built of large, well-dressed stones lined up perfectly straight and true. Best of all, its northernmost stone extends beneath (and perpendicular to) the lowest stones in the wall that defines the outer edge of the church-complex. Do you follow? What this means is that this "new" wall is older than the wall of the church-complex, and thus belongs to an earlier structure, atop which the church was built!

Is it maybe one of the walls of a Roman temple? We don't yet know--but it might be, and just that prospect itself energized our whole team as soon as it became clear what we had found. This was exactly what Dr. Schuler was looking for when he decided to have us make this "deep probe" in this area, and here we found it almost immediately on the first day of the work. Super!

And that's probably enough--or more than enough!--for now. We were again blessed with morning clouds that lasted until about 9:30, shielding us from the worst of the heat until late in our work-day. Our 8:00 breakfast was good too: as on most Sundays, the highlight was cold French Toast, in addition to the usual fare of cold eggs, cucumbers and tomatoes, olives, and bread. And the lake was as refreshing as always during my quick dip and clothes-washing, right after lunch. So again, it was a very good day all around.

Today was awesome. One of my favourite things is seeing new sights, and especially in 2006 our visits to some of the significant sites around the Kinneret (the Hebrew name for the Sea of Galilee) were really formative. Today we toured two more places, very different from each other. Boy did I ever enjoy them both!

Getting to them was a bit of an adventure, though. I'd been working on this for a couple of days already, through our local "fixer" Efrat, who also helped me in many ways when I lost my passport on the earlier trip (a long story). The arrangements were tricky because the number of people we wanted to take on the trip was constantly going up: we started with the eight of us Canadians, then added five spaces because it was cheaper to hire a 13-seater bus than to rent two small cars. but then 15 people signed up, so we had to come up more space, so negotiated a 20-person bus instead. Then 22 people wanted to go!-- but it was too late and tricky to change it again, so stuck with the 20.

The further issue was that the driver, I was told, spoke no English. Hmm. As it turned out, things worked out just fine; sign language and very simple English did enable us to communicate what we needed to. As the day progressed, he eveb gained confidence and tried to tell me some "tour-guide" things along the way, which was neat even though I didn't quite catch it all. Right toward the end of the trip, too, he ventured to write something down for me in Hebrew, asking me to get somebody to translate it back at the kibbutz. I assumed it would be something about our group ("What nice people you are," etc.) but as it turned out the message was something along the lines of "Don't get angry with yourself, or you will punish yourself for the stupidity of others." I still have no clue what that has to do with anything; we got along well, I thought, and nobody from our group had become angry to my knowledge. Maybe he was moonlighting as a philosopher?

First stop today was Gamla, one of the fortified towns that rebelled against the Romans in 67 AD and was fairly promptly destroyed. Lots of places suffered that fate, of course, but none in so spectacular a manner as Gamla, which is perched on the side of a cliff much like Hippos' only more so. What a place to build a town! It housed about 9000 people, apparently (according to Josephus), all of whom but two women were killed in the battle, either by the Romans or by throwing themselves over the cliff.

Anyway, Gamla's attraction was much more than just the military history, as interesting as that was. The hill on which it perched is framed to the north and the south by two deep wadis (ravines), each of which has a fairly good-sized waterfall a little ways upstream as the river pours over the edge of the Golan Heights. These ravines, and the ruins themselves, now form a major nature preserve that's home to almost all of Israel's remaining population of vultures. They're huge, and absolutely beautiful-- not at all like the buzzards I picture in my head when I think of vultures. Four of them flew down to Hippos a couple of mornings ago and cruised around "our" wadi for a while, floating on the updraft and soaring-- at one point-- right over the edge of the cliff where we were digging, maybe ten metres from our square! Anyway, Gamla is a terribly beautiful place in its own right. What a treat to see it.

Its ruins were the biggest highlight for me though. I saw several miqvaoth, the plastered ritual baths that observant Jews used daily around the time of Christ. A couple of them were in houses, and sized for one person at a time, but outside the synagogue was a really big one that could have accommodated quite a few people at once. And the synagogue itself was tremendous! It's the earliest one in Israel, and is quite unusual in that it is oriented toward Jerusalem rather than strictly east-west. The reason, Doc Schuler told me, is because synagogues began to be built just before the big revolt not just for religious reasons but as a way of claiming a town's loyalty to Jerusalem rather than Rome. I took a whole bunch of pictures of all of this, of course, for personal keepsakes but also for teaching purposes. Hope I get a chance to use them.

From there we drove along the Golan all the way north to Tel Dan, which is right at the border with Lebanon. The roads became narrow and very twisty as we wound down the Golan into the valley on the south side of Mt. Hermon, which is the highest point in Israel and actually supports quite a skiing industry in the winter. Then, at Tel Dan, we got to see some really neat stuff too. This site too is in a nature park surrounding the springs that channel the melt-water from Mt. Hermon into the Jordan; the Dan River that results from those springs is one of the four sources of the Jordan River. Anyway, this cold melt-water just sort of boils up from a number of springs, and supports quite a tangle of brush and forest. Compared to the lushness of the West Coast, or other places like that, it really wasn't much of a garden, but compared to the rest of Israel, it really is! Taking off our shoes and wading around a bit in the deliciously cool waters was super.

Again though the ruins were the best part for me. The oldest structures at Tel Dan are close to 4000 years old-- a triple-arched gate that was built in Canaanite times and is the oldest such structure in the Middle East. Some of the more adventurous ones among us ventured to walk right up and touch the mud-bricks, discovering in the process that they too included straw in the mud (just like the Egyptian bricks made by the Hebrews). This gate doesn't really lead to anything anymore, but not far away is another triple gate built by the Israelites in the 9th century BC when Jeroboam split the northern part of Israel off from the southern part. As part of that split, he set up two golden calves to worship, one of them at the "high place" here in Dan that we saw today. Crazy! I'd probably heard about all of this before, but had forgotten most of it-- yet again, as with so many sites, now that I can picture the place, I think the story too will spring to mind pretty easily. I hope so, anyway.

It occurred to me several times today that connection-making of many kinds is one of the greatest blessings on this trip. Linking myself to particular sites is really exciting, and I suppose the most obvious kind of connecting that's going on. Anchoring my faith more closely to the places and the "realia" of Jesus' life and ministry is deeper and a lot more profound, sort of like the connection that we make when we get to see and touch things that once belonged to relatives who have died. It's not that the thing we see or touch "is" them, but it calls them to mind and somehow, on the emotional level, forges a bond between us and them. And then, on another level again, as we undergo all these experiences together I find myself drawing closer to the other people in our group, too. I've mentioned before the fun we have while we're digging, and the special little moments that take place in the midst of the dirt and rocks. But sharing together our faith in Christ helps us to "become" the body of Christ in a powerful way. It happens in our congregations too, back home, but there we always seem too busy to talk and listen. But here, without any distractions apart from the common things we share-- from the earliest hours of the morning until sunset and bedtime-- the links develop more quickly and strongly by far. Social scientists know that this happens in any group, not just Christian ones, but especially for us who share a common faith this is an immensely powerful and moving experience. I'm so thankful to be able to enjoy it.

At home it's so easy to be a loner, to feel rootless, to be disconnected from the environment, to just drift. Here, for these short weeks anyway, it's different.

The challenge will be maintaining this openess to listen and care, this readiness to slow down, this focus on the Lord and his call, when the pace picks up and work piles up and the schedule gets crowded and.... Lord, have mercy!  

Best intentions of writing yesterday too, but it didn't work out-- a construction worker in Jerusalem went berserk with a front-end loader at noon yesterday, killing three people and injuring dozens more as he crushed several cars and flipped over a bus with his machine before passersby shot and killed him. Terrorist, or lone crazy-guy? Who knows. It was enough, at any rate, to prompt Dr. Schuler to cancel our planned trip to Jerusalem. We had planned to leave this afternoon, Thursday, for two nights' stay, but in light of the immense security lockdown that automatically follows any such incident, the journey suddenly seemed to be a very bad idea. Families at home would no doubt appreciate knowing we had followed the old advice, "Better safe than sorry." The security situation here is just completely foreign to us who are, well, foreigners in this way too!

One of the suggestions about how we should fill these two suddenly-vacant days, Friday and Saturday, was that we could spend at least one of them working "overtime" up on the dig. You can imagine how much enthusiasm that generated from the group! Personally though I wasn't quite sure whether to take Doc Schuler's remark as a compliment or an insult: "Well," he said, "we might get one or two crazy types who'd actually do that. Betcha Chambers would do it!" And actually he was right: I probably would!

Today, especially, reminded me why I love this work so much. Most of this week has been pretty dull: as I've mentioned before, we spent endless hours chewing through bucketful after bucketful of dirt, just plain old dirt. There were hardly even any building stones in it, which is extremely rare since the more normal pattern is to clunk your implements on big rocks constantly. So many of the rooms in this North-East Church were small store-rooms or single-person sleeping rooms, there are walls everywhere. And where there's no wall, there's "tumble" from the walls all around that came crashing down in the huge earthquake of 749. So stones are just part of the deal, all day, every day-- everywhere else except in square F-1! The upside is we had clear sailing with very few impediments all week. The downside is that we had bucket after bucket of "nothing": very few pot-sherds, and just the odd little piece of glass or bone. Yawn.

But today was different-- at last! All week we were gnawing across this 5m by 5m square, plus an adjacent few square metres "just for fun" (hah). From the surface level it was pretty much all pick-work for the first couple of passes across the whole area, with Dr. Jim Gimbel from Concordia-St. Paul proving to be The Pick-Master par excellence. After we complimented him on his speed and technique, time and time again, he fessed up that he had learned to swing the thing as a kid, helping his Dad, who was their church's janitor, dig graves in the church-yard. It wasn't too bad in the summer, Jim said, but in the winter they had to burn straw-bales on top of the frozen ground for several days sometimes before they could even dent the ground with a pick. Here, of course, it's the other end of the temperature scale completely: after the day's first round of pick-work, Jim's shirt was soaked-through across the shoulders; after the second round it was wet down to his belly, and after the third round it was dripping all the way down!  

Not only is Jim good, though, he's also almost comically keen to pick up the pick and have a real swing-fest. Time and again he'd ask, "Do you want me to work that area over with a pick for a bit?" After a while, it wasn't really necessary-- and Jim knew it-- but hearing us answer "No, it's actually as soft as butter" just didn't cut it for him. Sometimes I thought I saw him twitching, if he hadn't been able to get in a few good blows within the previous half-hour!

Hmm. I wonder if all that pick-work has something to do with the fact that we didn't find a whole lot of pottery-pieces that were big enough to keep. Think there might be a connection? :)

Anyway, as I was saying, the pick-work was pretty much finished a couple of days ago except for isolated hard-spots here and there. Then it was a matter of loosening, sifting, and bucketing the whole square-full of dirt. We got a good rhythm going after a while, starting off in the morning in the areas that would later be exposed to full sun, then moving under the shade of our large overhead screens when things heated up later on. We'd get three or sometimes even four guys working beside each other, kneeling in parallel and filling buckets wedged between their knees then hoisting them up onto the ledge of unexcavated dirt in front of them. From there, another guy or sometimes two hauled the buckets over to the edge of the square, where they were either dumped into a wheelbarrow for carting to the edge of the cliff for disposal, or carried by hand to a closer dump-site. We'd switch duties regularly, every half-hour in the early part of the morning when the weather's fairly cool or every fifteen minutes later on when the sweat's really flowing. Again, because there wasn't a lot of pottery or other valuables, we got into the groove of moving pretty quickly. Doc Schuler even said, in an unguarded moment this morning, that we had done "spectacular" work this week! None of us could imagine him, who's normally quite unflappable and understated, giving higher praise than "spectacular."

Finally, today, we actually did find a few pretty spectacular things too. Since the coin that Ian found in the first ten minutes of the first day, we hadn't had much to boast about. But once we finally got down to the bottom of our square, this morning, we found a number of nifty items right at the level of the crude plaster floor that we found there. We found four iron nails-- four!-- two of them in fragmentary form missing their heads, but the other two full and straight, between three and four inches long and very well preserved. I found two of these and Jim Gimbel found the other two. Gene Balding, meanwhile, found a partially folded-up strip of metal that we first thought to be lead but then, on closer examination, realized was actually copper. Then, a few minutes later, he found a small rectangular tablet or slab of lead, about 20 x 35 mm and between 1 and 2 mm thick. None of these items were, of course, anywhere near as spectacular as the glass amulet that Darryl Schmidt found in his square a few days ago, or even the beautiful wall that the crew in A-0 has been working on the last couple of days. But after a week of schlepping nothing but dirt, dirt, and more dirt, six pieces of metal (plus a few very interestingly shaped shards of glass as well, from the bottoms and sides of fancy vessels), for our crew at least this was really pretty spectacular.

Within our team, I've already touched on Jim Gimbel's skill with a pick. He's also a very funny guy, sparking off comments made by others among us with quirky and creative wit. Ian Wemyss is like that too, I've been discovering, which is interesting since I've had him in class all year yet have hardly gotten to know him much at all until now. And Bill Hayes-- what a good-spirited, clever guy he is, always ready to jump in with a joke or wry comment. In fact, I guess I could pretty much say the same for all of us-- the other guys being Gene Balding, Dan Westberg, and now Harry Westberg too the last two days. We've warned each other a couple of times to quit having so much fun when Doc Schuler comes around, lest he decide to break up our "Gang of Seven"!

I've got to say a bit more about Harry Westberg, one of the most amazing seniors I've ever met. He's 85 years old-- yes, I typed that correctly, a full 85 years old. But what a going concern he is. Yesterday he spent several hours carrying rocks that we dug out of the square, taking them across to the "dump" on the other side of the tractor-road. Today he ran one of the wheelbarrows-- not just for a half-hour shift like the rest of us, but the entire morning up until the last half-hour, when he went back to carrying rocks again. I asked him repeatedly how he was doing and the answer was always "fine." We tried to get him to slow down, and take smaller loads, and ask for help if he needed it, etc. etc. etc., but he just kept working away with as much energy and good humour as the youngest one among us. Absolutely unbelievable.

Speaking of age, we had guessed a few days ago that our group's average age was probably about 50. We actually did the math on a water-break, later, and calculated it to be 51.3. But that was before Harry joined our group-- he brought it up pretty close to 60! The funniest part was (we joked) that he also brought up the productivity ratio at the same time.

And that's the story behind this post's title, "a couple of downs, and a step back up." The big down was the cancellation of the trip to Jerusalem. A down of a different sort was our group's gradual progress from surface level down to the plastered floor, more than half a metre below. The step back up was the great good fun we had, all week long. And that's quite enough for today.

Plenty of fun to report today; heavy work has a lighter side too.

The Canadian appeal for a statutory holiday went about as far as we thought it would, which is to say not very far at all. Dr. Schuler's instant answer, after hearing the end of our petition, was "Not a chance." I was actually more worried that he'd say "yes" and we'd have to figure out what to do with ourselves all day, so the no suited me fine, and the whole point was just to have fun anyway. The way Quinn and the others wrote it up made sure we got lots of laughs as he read it aloud to the whole assembled group, including references to Canada being the land of "good government, good order, good hockey, and good beer," and to her founders having taken their stand "not on the basis of force-of-arms but with the inspiration of a case of scotch." Oh, Canada!

Here are three great quotes from work today, too (mandatory, unpaid slave-labour that it was), two of them involving Ian.

First, after Gene made maybe a bit too big of a deal out of his monogrammed rock-pick (a gift from somebody in his congregation), Ian said that he certainly didn't have one of those, though he'd written in his name on his underwear with permanent marker, if that was close.

Second, when Dan asked if there were traditional Canada-day activities our crew was planning for the afternoon, Ian told him that pottery-washing at 5:00 pm followed by supper and bed was pretty typical of how most Canadians traditionally celebrate.

And finally, this from Gene, part-way through the morning's work: "D'yuh know what ah'd be if ah wudn't a Baptist? Ashayamed!"

The level of levity reflected well the lighter workload today, and also the continuation of this surprising stretch of good weather ("just like a beatiful Canadian summer day," I told Dr. Schuler at lunch). Again we had cloud-cover until after 10 am, meaning that we were barely even sweating at all for the first few hours. The work was a lot easier than yesterday, too; we had the pick-work done in F-1 before 6:00, and after that it was just a matter of using turreah and bucket, over and over again. There were a few large stones along its eastern perimeter, but otherwise the whole work-area was nothing more than dirt and fist-sized stones that were quick and easy to dispose of. The downside was that there were very few significant "finds." I came up with the spout of a small jug, which was kind of cool since I'd never found one of those before, and two guys each found an intact jug-handle, one of them quite large and relatively ornamental, but otherwise that was about it. Just steady, monotonous work. Three guys worked on their knees from the south edge of the square northward in order to be shaded by the screen on the north side by the time the sun came out. Two guys worked standing up beside the north edge of the square, working from the east and west edges toward the centre. And the last guy carried the buckets of dirt filled by the other five, dumping them into the road just west of our square so the backhoe could pack them down to improve the road surface. At water-break, every half-hour, we'd rotate around. And that was that.

Actually the best diversions today came from other squares. One was in another "F" square to the south of us, where the crew was hauling very large stones out of rubble into the middle of the street and piling them there until the crew of big strong guys (yes, us!) came down to haul them away. We did that twice, each time taking turns loading these big heavy suckers into our wheelbarrows then trucking them up the hill past our own square onto the rock-pile. And the other diversion was in another "0" square to the east of us, A-0, where Arny's crew was poking around outside the church's apse looking for evidence that the street continued beyond it to the north. Sure enough, they found a beautiful wall, about a foot beneath the surface: carefully-cut stones in a perfectly straight line all the way across the square. Even though they've only gone down one course, it's already clear that it's probably the best-built wall in the whole North-East Church complex--definitely not put together by the same people who built everything else!

And that's about it for the day, right there. The physicality of the work, the conviviality of the company, the beauty of the scenery, the simplicity of the routine: it all adds up to an experience I'm once again thriving on.

The most troubling dimension is simply how long the opportunity to do this kind of work will be here. I knew before the trip began that there was some question whether the Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA) would renew the dig's permit past the 2009 season, but I didn't know until last night how doubtful that renewal appears to be. Apparently there's some strife between the IAA and the National Parks Authority which shares jurisdiction of the site, but the bigger problem seems to be the lack of obviously Jewish structures in the ancient city. For most of antiquity it was a Gentile city, not Jewish, and by the time of its destruction it was pretty much wholly Christian. For a time, some years ago, it looked as though the excavators had indeed found a synagogue in the south-west domestic quarter, but it turned out to be just another church instead. So it's not that the IAA has anything "against" Hippos: the city just doesn't have enough going "for" it, in terms of Israel's present-day national interest. Sad.

Due to technical problems last night, I lost my first attempt at writing up yesterday's events. Below is today's version, which extends through most of today's happenings too. Enjoy!

* * *

Yesterday was the first digging day of the season, which meant that we actually only dug for the second half of the morning. The first half was spent gathering equipment, setting up the heavy metal frames for the sun-screens, listening to talks about safety and appropriate use of our tools, and showing the first-timers some of the basics of archaeological technique. Tedious as most of these tasks were, we were blessed with beautiful weather conditions: cloud cover that protected us better than any sunscreen, and cooler temperatures than we had any reasonable right to expect. It was still warm, for sure, by Alberta standards, but in objective terms that meant no more than about 28 degrees. Even later, when the sun came out, it still didn't get much more than about 32.  Nothing to complain about there at all!

Yet still it felt plenty hot, no question. For academics, church-workers, and office-types like the majority of us are, heavy work of any sort in this type of humid heat is unaccustomed toil. I actually felt just fine, apart from this heavy cold that began about a week ago and stubbornly persists. The dust aggravated my cough and made me kind of wheezy by the time we got on the bus to head down the hill again at 12:30 (half an hour later than usual, due to some scheduling problems with the bus company). But otherwise I fared much better, it seemed, than a lot of folks. It's one thing to anticipate hard work in theory, but quite a different thing to encounter its gritty monotonous in reality.

Actually though it wasn't wholly monotonous, in our square anyway. We returned to F-0, or at least it was a return for me to a place I spent a great deal of time in two years ago. The "baulk" we had left at that time, separating F-0 from E-0, now had to be removed as part of this year's larger project of opening up the whole of the church's atrium area. Only a metre wide by five metres long, this baulk was a perfect place to train our team: we knew pretty well already that there weren't any major structures to deal with, just a few tumbled stones from the 749 earthquake amid a lot of relatively loose rubble. So the guys got to practice their technique with pick, turreah, and trowel in a fairly benign environment. Along the way, we had a good time chatting and getting to know each other too, since our group of six was fairly mixed. From our Canadian group there were three of us: me, Ian Wemyss, and Bill Hayes. One prof from Concordia-St. Paul, Dr. Jim Gimbel, director of church-work programs. One prof from a conservative Anglican seminary in Wisconsin, Dr. Dan Westberg. One retired Baptist pastor from Arkansas, Gene Balding. It was fun, chatting and laughing plenty throughout the hours of work.

It was also downright exciting, too, a few times--especially when, about ten minutes into the work, Ian found a small bronze coin just a couple of centimetres from the surface. Neither he nor most of our group first realized, of course, how significant a find this was ("You mean this doesn't happen every ten minutes every day?"), but as the hours went by and it remained a single coin, the reality of its rarity began to sink in. During the whole of the 2006 season, we found just one coin in the entire site (the North-East Church)!

Anyway, the digging part of the day ended by lunchtime and, arriving back at the kibbutz, we had a hearty and surprisingly good meal in the dining hall before heading down for a dip in the lake. The water level is very low this year, as I mentioned before, but the swimming is still pretty fine, with an absolutely perfect water-temperature, neither too cool to be chilly nor too warm to be anything less than marvellously refreshing.

I didn't swim long though since I had other things to attend to: first a much-needed, very long nap (two full hours!) and then a rather frenzied final hour or so of work on my sermon. Since it was Sunday, we were gathering for worship down by the lake at 6:00, and since it was the first time we were doing this in this season, I wanted to get things off to a good start. And thankfully we did, I think; more people than I expected commented on how much they appreciated my message. I was especially glad to hear this since Quinn, my roommate and one of our CLS students, had been ribbing me earlier about writing my sermon on the day I was going to preach it: "Is this how you're going to teach us to do this in homiletics class this fall, Dr. Chambers?" My answer seemed to satisfy him at the time: "No, I've actually been thinking about it all week and decided not to write it out until we were here on-site so I could tie it in more closely to our community life." The fact that the sermon actually did go well was more satisfying to me.

Supper was the usual lighter fare--salads, bread, cereal, and fruit--and then I finally had time to do a bit of writing before bedtime arrived at 9:00. A long but satisfying first day, all around.

Today was similar but hotter and faster. We again enjoyed cloud-cover for the first couple of hours, but then it heated up to a more normal operating temperature of perhaps the mid-30s. The work was far more arduous too: no more toying around practicing our technique, it was time to move some serious dirt!

First was the cleaning-up of yesterday's square, F-0. The baulk disappeared early, but then we had to level the floor of the two squares it had formerly separated, since the level to its west was about 15 cm higher than the level to its east. It seemed a simple job, until we started doing it and discovered several big stones just beneath the surface in the south-west corner of the square. Hmm: what was that all about? Without taking that area down quite a bit, and disturbing the newly uniform level we had achieved all the way across the area, there wasn't much we could do beyond articulating the edges of each stone and letting Dr. Schuler have a look. As we move farther, though, into the adjacent square, F-1, we'll definitely want to see if those stones are part of some larger structure.

For that was today's major project, moving 5 metres south into F-1 and starting to work our way down from surface level. This is the most brutal work in the city, opening a new square like this, partly because surface-level soil always tends to be compacted more firmly than the earth that's farther down, and partly because this particular part of Hippos was driven over countless times both by Israeli army vehicles from the late 1940s through the late 1960s and, more recently, by the archaeological expedition's backhoe. Pickaxes are the order of the day for sure, followed by a round of turreah-work gathering the clods into buckets then carting them over to the side of the cliff, followed by more of the same. Making it even more difficult was the fact that we aren't preserving any baulks in this square: normally, these one-metre wide swatches reduce the area to be dug by about 20%.

So we definitely worked hard, no question. On one of our water-breaks, we were resignedly figuring out whose turn it was next to do the pick-work when I commented on the fact that it was us, the oldest group, doing this, the hardest work. I'm not sure whether that observation helped or hurt us, though; I said it thinking it might spur us on to still-greater efforts, but for some at least it seemed to just magnify the soreness of their backs and muscles. Anyway, we did the best we could, and got the top 3-4 inches cleared from most of the square by noontime. That was enough for one day for sure.

After the requisite meal, swim, and nap (much shorter than yesterday's), I planted the seed of an idea among our Canadian group that maybe we should lodge a formal petition to Dr. Schuler to give us tomorrow off as a statutory holiday in honour of Canada Day. So, amid their visiting, e-mailing, reading, and the like, a suitable appeal was drafted for submission after tonight's devotion. Stay tuned, tomorrow, for a report on how it was received!