Day 5, Tuesday, January 14, 2014
Our cottage by the sea at Ein Gev Kibbutz.
We visited a partially reconstructed village dating to the 2nd century AD named Katzrin in the Golan Heights. It is considered an active village. They are farming and raising sheep. Today we ground olives and ate bread baked here.
A mosaic at the entry.
Avi Noam, the director of the site showed us how to grind olives.
We went inside a reconstructed house with a loft bedroom.
An oil lamp was our light.
The ceiling caused us to think about the man lowered through the roof that Jesus healed. My thoughts also went to the stories of Mary and Martha with Jesus in their home and how that would have felt. So many of the stories in the Bible are in a home.
This is the outside courtyard and cooking area - Considered a luxury today!
We were treated to fresh baked pita with cheese, preserves and olive oil.
One of the ladies demonstrated spinning and weaving with wool from the farm as it would have been done in Proverbs 31.
We completed our time sitting in the synagogue discussing how our culture has moved away from community and what we need to do to raise our children in and live in community that transmits our values.
Mt. Bental
Mt. Bental and Mt. Arvital are located on the Israel/Syria border. At one time, they both had active military bunkers. Today Mt. Bental is open to tourists. This is the view from the top looking over Syria and the UN border camp. The cultivated fields are in Israel. The rest is Syria. Our guide, Ronen, did a wonderful job telling us about the 6 day war when the Golan Heights were taken back by Israel. Currently, the border is delineated by mountains.
The entrance to the bunker.
Inside one of the rooms.
Caesaria Philippi
We hiked a trail up to Caesaria Philippi that ran along the river and had beautiful waterfalls and foliage. It was cool and refreshing and a pretty good hike. This is the ancient city at the base of Mt. Herman on the road to Damascus where we know from Mathew 16 that Jesus and the disciples traveled. From here it is 110 miles to Jerusalem and 140 miles to Damascus. It was a first century center of Paganism with temples to Zeus, Pan, and Caesar Augustus. Pan was a fertility god who was half man and half goat. The water that comes out of the cave here is a spring that is the headwaters for the Jordan river. It was believed that this cave was an entrance to the underworld, Hades. In Matthew 16, Jesus and the disciples come here. Jesus asks who they say He is and Peter answers that He is the Christ, the son of the living God. Jesus says to Peter that it is on this rock that He will build His church and the gates of hell will not prevail against it. Was he referring to this place physically or metaphorically? Maybe both..... Caesaria Philippi and Pan and Caesar are all gone.
Terry at the gate to Hades!
Niches for monuments to the gods.
The cave of the spring.
Tel Dan
There's a very large archaeological excavation at the site of the city of Dan. It was a city long before the Israelites were there and was improved and became a holy city for the northern Israelites after the kingdom was divided in the 9th century BC. This is city gate from that time.
But most interesting is this site of a temple or place of worship found that dates to Israelite times.
It matches the measurements for the temple and the locations of the worship elements as prescribed in the Bible almost perfectly. The bones found also strongly indicate a Hebrew temple. Since we aren't likely to ever excavate the Temple in Jerusalem (it has a mosque built over it), this is most likely the closest we have or will come to seeing the Temple.
The back side of the excavation at Dan is the border with Lebanon.
This is a mud brick gate also found at Tel Dan and currently being worked on. It dates to 1800-2000 BC (the time of Abraham) and is the largest we have found in the world. Remember that Abraham chased Lot's kidnappers to Dan.
Goodbye Kibbutz on the Sea of Galilee!
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