Today was the start of the course, so after breakfast we walked down to JUC for our 8 am class (no sleeping in on this trip!) After an introduction to the university and a tour around the campus, the prof gave us and introduction to the course. In it, he focused on Dt 8:7-9 and Dt. 11:8-12 . Dt 8 lists the 7 traditional agricultural products of Israel (wheat, barley, vines and fig trees, pomegranates, and olive oil), but there is one odd one added - honey! Honey isn't and agricultural product! So, there are 2 theories about why it's included. The first is that the honey could have been a syrup made from dates and therefore an agricultural product. The second is that it actually is bee honey, like it says. If so, we can assume that means that there must have been a lot of flowers (needed to make honey), and therefore, uncultivated land for pastures. That also works with what is written in Dt 11 (a land flowing with milk and honey). The milk being refered to here was goat milk, so a land with plenty of milk and honey must have been uncultivated pasture lands.
Dt 11 also goes on to talk about the difference between farming in Egypt and in Israel - in Egypt, the water comes from the Nile though irrigation, it's always available. But in Israel, the people would have to depend on the rain for their crops to flourish and therefore depend on God to provide the rain. So, rain begins to be associated with God's care for His people.
We then looked at a map showing the type of lands found in the Middle East. Israel is positioned within the fertile cresent between tow large superpowers, Babylon/Assyria and Egypt. Because the surrounding land is either desert or highlands and can't support crops, this fertile cresent became the trade routes between the two nations.
Our next topic was a brief history of Modern Israel - the formation and expansion of the country, and how the Israeli government has delt with the Arabs in various areas of the country (making them citizens, giving them ID cards, leaving them without a nation (and therefore, no passports), or leaving them in refugee camps in surrounding nations. We also talked a bit about the Jewish settlements in areas of the Gaza Strip and the West Bank.
We then switched our focus back to the history of Jerusalem. Jerusalem at the time of David (c. 1000 BCE) was south of the present Old City, located between the Kidron Valley and Tyropoeon Valley (also called "The Valley"), since that is the location of the Gihon Spring - they city's water source. King Solomon (c. 930 BCE) expanded the city, building the Temple to the north and his palace to the south. By the time of King Hezekiah (c. 701 BCE), the city had grown to include the area west of The Valley. The city shrunk with the exile, then grew again through the Hasmoneans and Romans.
After lunch at the school, we started out for a 4 hour walk through the Old City. Each of the quarters has a "magnet" drawing those people to it. The Armenians have the Church of St. James, the Christians have the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, the Jews have the Western Wall, and the Muslims have access to the Temple Mount. The Quarters don't have the obvious divisions that the maps show - the lines are blurred.
We started our walk at Jaffa Gate. The gate was opened up in over a hundred years ago to allow a visiting German Kaiser to enter the city in his carriage. The next stop was outside David’s Citadel, which despite the name, is not the location of King David’s palace (this area wasn’t part of the city during that time).
Down the road is St. James’ Cathedral (the Armenian “magnet”). Following around the outside of the Cathedral (paying attention to the fact that there is only one entrance!) we reached St. Mark’s Church. This Syrian Orthodox church contains one of the Upper Rooms (if there aren’t at least 2 different churches claiming that an event happened there, it probably didn’t happen) and also claims to be Mark’s home. I guess the important thing for us is to remember and commemorate the event rather than the location!
We continued into the Jewish Quarter, stopping at The Cardo (an excavated section of the main street of Byzantine-era Jerusalem), Hurva Square, and a place where we could look over the valley to the Temple Mount and part of the Western (Wailing) Wall. It was interesting to see the amount of activity taking place around the entrance and at the lookout, the number of Jewish school kids on field trips, each group accompanied by an armed guard. Then it was up onto the roof-tops for a different view of the city!
After going down off the roofs, an Arab boy showed us into the Muslim Quarter (not David Street like he was supposed to), so we stopped by Damascus Gate. It is supposedly the most beautiful of the city gates, but it's being restored right now, so all we got to see was scaffolding. What we could see is how the gate becomes the market, meeting place, court, etc. for a city.
Back in the Christian Quarter, we were introduced to two shopkeepers that have a good relationship with JUC - Shaaban (who was around when my sister came here!) and Zak. After getting some free drinks from Shaaban, we headed back up David St. and along the city wall to JUC to write some emails. We headed back to the hotel just before it got dark.
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