Did anyone see where this last week went?

Well as ya'll know this was quite a full week for me. Due to rain, our travel day was bumped from Wednesday to Thursday, making a paper and a quiz all happen around the same time. But I survived, keeping my streak of missing one question for stupid reasons. How could I forget it was the Sorek and the Cesalon valleys? Sheesh.

But yesterday was fun. We spent about 75% of the day in the West Bank. Before that portion of our excursion we went to the Mount of Olives, roughly where Bethphage would have been, which is just north of Bethany, which is where Jesus' friend Laz and his sisters were from. Then we went to the other side, where the Ketef Hinnom juts out below the western hill of the Old City. (Translation: we went to the west side of town where a shoulder of the ridges pokes out toward the bottom of the valley south of Temple Mount) There were lots of Iron Age (Joshua's time) tombs carved into the rock and it was in one of those tombs that the oldest piece of Scripture was found. On an thin silver amulet words from Numbers 6:24 provide us with words of the Bible from about 600 B.C. cool stuff. Just think how long the Bible has been passed down!

To the West Bank.

Stop #1: Bethlehem, now an Arab village (duh, it's the west bank), is not exactly what one would imagine to be where God was born unto man. But nonetheless, it's the place. The countryside is pretty amazing, tough life for those shepherds and farmkids. Bill likes to stop in random farmer's fields to show us what the terrain was for so-and-so in the Bible and give us an example of such-and-such a weed and things like that. So after lunch in nativity square and a filafel and a 1.125 liter bottle of coke for 10 shekels (about $2.50), we continued our harrowing adventure.

Stop #2 The Herodian. Two words: google it. Or wikipedia it if that is your preference. Either way there is a lot to say about it that I don't want to type. But it is impressive and it was a SWEET view of everywhere. You can see up to Jerusalem and out to the Dead Sea and everything in between and all around. Plus there were pillars that we could climb on. So we did. Lots of times. :)

Stop #3 Farmer's field near Tekoa. Random field again, but pretty and a good view of where Amos lived and the valley of Berachah (2 Chronicles 20 has some stuff about this area, read it, it's good. Especially verse 13, I like that one.)

Stop #4 Valley of Refaim (or Rephaim, or however you want to spell it.)
-- Pause for two days while Eli is really busy --
It's where David toasted the Philistines a couple of times. It's also a place where three springs all pop out of the ground ("like daisies!"), a unique thing for this dry land. It's a beautiful area, sometime when I blog and have fast internet at the same time I will upload some pictures of all that I talk about.

Stops 5, 6, 7... The previous stop was our last, technically. But after going to checkpoint #1, we were turned back and sent to another one. Then at that one we were close to the road home (like less than a kilometer) and they turned us back again. Finally, we returned to the checkpoint that we went through that morning and an armed gal walked down the aisle looking at everyone. They're good at profiling, fortunately none of us looked too sketchy. But she did drop something on me and get her gun caught one seat behind me, so I'm guessing that even if we were a threat, if it was more than one of us she would have been on the receiving end of any hostilities. But she did look mean at us, I'll give her that.

So we went home. The end.

Then two days passed and here I sit, finishing a blog that seems so long ago. I am guessing that some of you faithful readers thought, "What? Eli did not blog today? Did pigs sprout wings? Did the Sahara freeze over? Did the Border Patrol get him after all? Or maybe he was shanghai'd into the IDF? (a dream of mine you know...) No to all of those, contrary to popular perception, blogging is not my number one priority, I think that this new habit of not doing it every day is good for me. Good for my study habits I would venture to say, though we all know that it's never really an issue for me.

That being said, life here is good, I am tired today, but in a good way. We went for a hike, I got to be leader by default because topo maps are like a foreign language to these people. Oh wait... they are in a foreign language... But seriously, there are few among us who understand the series of lines and colored lines and little clay pot symbols that combine to form the beauty that is a topo map. A product of my raising, what can I say. So after 10 or 12 miles (we're not really sure) I am going to relax, learn some vocab so that I can actually use verbs instead of barely scraping through, "Shalom, my name is Eli, I am a student from America, I live ..." etc. So hopefully I will be on my way to fluent after today. Doubtful, but hey, optimism springs eternal when the sun is shining and you just had some chocolate.