While sitting in the theatre, we learned about how the Jews viewed Gentiles during the time of Christ, and how the view the early church (mostly Jews) had to change. Gentiles were viewed by the Jews as pagans - they avoided interaction with them and would never enter their homes or invite them into theirs ... they were unclean. While it isn't against the Torah for Jews to interact with Gentiles, there were other oral laws, made to prevent the Torah from being disobeyed, that prohibited it. In Acts, we are introduced to Cornelius, described as devote and God-fearing (but not a Jew) as he is praying at 3 in the afternoon. (As an aside, this was the time of the sacrifice at the temple, so it was seen as good time to pray). In verse 9, the story switches to Peter and his vision of unclean animals and a voice telling him to kill and eat them. We often don't understand his reaction and confusion (since we don't live with dietary laws), but as our prof told us, this would be "like an angel telling you to get a prostitute and go have fun tonight" - it just isn't something we would even think of doing! Peter's understanding comes when the Spirit tells him that three men are waiting for him and to not hesitate to go with them - before this, Peter would never have thought to associate with Gentiles, let alone invite the men into the house as guests! We often view this passage as telling us that we no longer have to obey dietary laws, but that isn't how Peter understood it. To him, God was now calling Gentiles clean and therefore, he was now allowed to interact with them without worrying about disobeying the Torah. One of the first church councils focused on this very matter - what to do about the Gentiles who have come to believe in Christ? Do they have to follow all the laws of the Torah? A letter is written to the Gentile believers to outline the laws that they must follow: to abstain from food polluted by idols, from sexual immorality, from the meat of strangled animals and from blood. At this time, most of these Gentiles probably attended the synagogue (which would be providing them with a moral law), so only these four instructions were required to be followed. This was a huge turning point in the history of the early Church - without this decision, Gentiles would first have to become Jewish before they could become Christians, and it probably enabled Christianity to spread faster.
Back to the present day and the ruins of Ceasarea ... After our lecture in the theatre, we explored the rest of the city ruins, including a hippodrome and the only temple built to honour Tiberius (he had decreed that no temples should be built in his name). After this, we had a quick stop at the aqueduct that supplied the city with water, and I was finally able to put my feet into the Mediterranean!
Our next stop was on top of Mt. Carmel, where Elijah challenged the prophets of Baal. Before the Israelites conquered the land, this area was Baal's country - people believed that the gods stayed with the land, not the people, so if you moved to a new land, you also switched gods. (This is why, after Naaman is cured of leprosy, he takes home soil so that he can continue to worship God.) Baal was the god of storms, so after three years without rain, the people must have been tempted, out of desperation, to worship Baal - thinking that they had offended him and that is why the rain had stopped. Also, when Elijah tells them that their god must answer their prayers with fire, it makes sense - fire from heaven is lightening, something the god of storms should have no problem creating! The prophets of Baal are not successful, no storms develop and no lightening shoots from the sky, so Elijah "repaired the altar of the LORD, which had been torn down" and proceeds to douse it with water - considering that this was after a three year drought, he wasted a lot of water doing this! When God lights Elijah's sacrifice, there is still no storm, no rain clouds, only fire from heaven. The rain finally comes after Ahab sets off for Jezreel, across the valley from Mt. Carmel. The heavy rain probably turned this valley into mud causing his chariot to get stuck, which explains whey Elijah was able to run ahead of Ahab - he probably stuck to the edge of the valley just where the ridge starts to rise, and avoided the muck!
We descended into the Jezreel valley and stopped at Tel Megiddo, then across the valley to Nazareth where we visited the Church of the Annunciation (a modern church built in the 1960s).
We then drove out to a lookout and talked about the story of Deborah. A Canaanite king was using his iron chariots (commanded by Sisera) to oppress the Israelites and they went to Deborah for help. She summoned Barak, whose name means "lightening", to fight them. Sisera and his troops were lured to the Kishon River at the mouth of the Jezreel valley to fight the Israelites. Considering Barak's name and the fact that Sisera "abandoned his chariot and fled on foot", it likely rained, causing the valley to become mud, rendering the chariots more of a hinderance than an advantage. Sisera flees to the tent of Jael, and is given milk and then covered up - while this may not sound like much to us, in that culture, those actions contained a sexual innuendo. Therefore, Jael now had to kill him or be killed for her indiscretions. All Bedouin women set up tents, so are skilled at driving tent pegs into the ground, so it's not surprising that that is the method she chooses to use to kill Sisera. It's also interesting that only Zebulun and Naphtali are mentioned as fighting with Barak, but in the Song of Deborah which follows this story, all the tribes except Judah are mentioned. Some scholars believe that the stories contained in the book of Judges may have occurred after Israel had it's first king, and in that case, the story of Deborah may have happened after the kingdom divided.
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