Day 6

We thought yesterday was long. Today started at leaving the hotel at 8:00am and getting back a little past 8:00pm. We are consistently walking about 4 to 6 miles a day. We saw a TON of sites today, starting in the desert area. This is a localized desert only 8 miles wide, and you can hardly believe you are in the same country. This is the area that David would have tended his sheep, and there are still shepherds there today, though I saw more goats than sheep.

We went to the New Testament Jericho, where we saw the remains of Herod the Great’s palace which had pools and other water features which was quite extravagant considering that is basically on the edge of the desert. We then went north a little bit to the Old Testament Jericho, which was uninhabited in the time of Jesus. There is archeological evidence that support destruction as described in the Bible through Joshua. The walls appear to be collapsed on themselves, covered by a layer of soot, and containers full of grain were burned also. This supports that the walls falling down by God instead of some mechanical force; that Joshua burned the city; and they didn’t take any of the spoils of battle that soldiers normally would in a conquest, but God had told them not to in Jericho. We saw the geography that is the background to the Saul/David story, including the cliff that Jonathan would have climbed to attack the Philistines in 1 Samuel 14:1-14. We headed west towards the Mediterranean Sea, which we saw from a great distance away, at the location of Gezer. At Gezer, there are remains from city gates from the days of Solomon. This city is mentioned in 1 Kings 9: 15-19 where it says the Gezer (formally a Canaanite city) was destroyed by Egypt as a gift to Solomon, and Solomon was rebuilding it. I think what struck me the most today was a video we watched before we went to the Old Testament Jericho. It was from a non-Biblical perspective, and it explained why Jericho could NOT be the Jericho from the Bible, and the Biblical Jericho story was a myth. Our guide explained a lot of why we think it really is Jericho and why this other archeologists concluded it wasn’t, partly because that archeology is not an exact science and that there are presuppositions that people start with that cloud people’s reasoning. It convicted me of the fact, that all of us, need to find out the facts for ourselves, and not blindly believing what people tell us. To be more like the Jews of Berea, talked about in Acts 17: 11 “Now these Jews were more noble than those in Thessalonica; they received the word with all eagerness, examining the Scriptures daily to see if these things were so.”