Weekend in Jerusalem

  Jerusalem, Israel
Sunday, July 13, 2008

Yesterday morning, Friday, we were on the bus at 9:00 am. It was a luxury to sleep in until 7:30 or 8:00. To our surprise a full-size bus, with a driver named Aram showed up for us, all 12 of us. We really could have used the space on our previous touring, but only got 14-seaters. Now when we had no luggage to speak of, we were given a 50-seater.  We drove toward Jerusalem but took a detour fairly close to the city to drive through the valley of Elah which is where the combat between David and Goliath took place. We read the passage together on the bus on the way to the area. We stopped at a likely place, where the brook runs through the center of the valley and got out to take photos and to think about what had happened someplace nearby. It was certainly interesting to try to reconstruct mentally.
 
We re-boarded and drove the rest of the way into Jerusalem.  I asked Aram to drop us at the Zion gate, which he did. It was nearly noon by this time. I asked him to meet us at the Damascus gate at 5:00 pm. We walked along the outside of Suleiman the Magnificent's wall around the city from the Zion gate to the Jaffa gate. We did this so everyone could have an idea of what the walls look like and so that we could have better spatial recognition of where we would be in the city.

In the Christian Quarter of the Old City

We entered the Jaffa gate and walked down into the center of the city to the Fountain restaurant where we had eaten lunch the previous Saturday. We has schawarma this time and a soft-drink and then we split up into groups of two or more and set out to explore the city and shop for souvenirs and gifts.  We were to meet again at 4:45 or 5:00 at the latest at the Damascus Gate.
 
Everyone seems to have had an enjoyable afternoon, people watching, shopping and the like. My wife and I walked through the Muslim and Christians Quarters in particular, to the Lion's Gate among other places. We window shopped, truly shopped, took photos, and watched people. We came across a religious procession coming up the Via Dolorosa. Priests with loudspeakers were speaking prayers in Latin with their congregants replying in kind as they moved up the Way.

Priests praying at a "station of the cross"

We saw Muslim men in keffiyehs, Muslim women in veils, Jewish men in their distinctive hats  and garb and tourist in all sorts of dress going from conservative to revealingly skimpy.  In the covered, narrow streets of this ancient city it was quite a combination.
 
At 4:45 we were all present and accounted for at the Damascus Gate. Aram was there to meet us and we boarded, comparing our purchases and the prices we paid for each of them. It was a short distance to the hotel where checked in once again and got our rooms. We settled in and enjoyed the air conditioning as we rested. We enjoyed a buffet dinner at 7:00 pm, and listened whether we wanted to or not to a group of Jewish children that were being rather loudly instructed about the customs of Sabbath dinner. They didn't seem to know many of the usual traditions and they were very noisy as children are sometimes wont to be. But it was interesting eavesdropping on those who where instructing them.
 
We're all still tired, we carry some residual fatigue with us all the time, so we all went to bed early to rest and catch up.
 
This morning we slept in (certainly by dig standards). We luxuriated in sleeping in comfortable hotel beds (the kibbutz beds are more of the summer-camp variety), in quiet rooms.  After breakfast, we had a Bible Study during which we covered scriptures pertaining to the city of Jerusalem: past, present, and future.

Bible Study Saturday morning

It has added meaning to learn about this city that is the focal point of Bible prophecy, since we were staying there and had spent the previous day in the old city, where so many important events occurred. At 10:30 we boarded the bus and drove to the Israel Museum which is within view of the Israeli Knesset, their Congress or Parliament.

Our first visit was the famous shrine of the book, where replicas of the Dead Sea Scrolls are on display. The building that houses the shrine has a roof shaped to look like the clay cover of the jars that protected the scrolls for millennia.

The group at the Shrine of the Book

 
Only replicas are shown, because when the originals were first displayed many years ago, there was marked deterioration of the parchments after only 18 months. However we were in for a real treat. This year marks the 60th anniversary of the founding of the modern nation of Israel.  To celebrate that occasion, the original manuscript of the Isaiah scroll in its entirety is now on display. So we were all able to get an up-close view of the scroll of the entire book of Isaiah, dating from the second century BC, the oldest complete one known in the world. We had already visited Qumran where the scrolls were found, now we had the opportunity to see the actually scroll itself.
 
We also saw the Codex Aleppo which is the most complete and accurate copy of the Jewish Bible, what we call the Old Testament. It was damaged and pages were lost in the 20th century during the upheavals associated with the founding of Israel, but most of it was smuggled into the country and is now protected and preserved here.
 
The main building of the museum, the archeology wing, is closed for refurbishing until 2010. So instead of going there, we went on to the scale model of "Second Temple Jerusalem" as it is called. We think of it as the Jerusalem of Jesus' earthly ministry.

The model of 1st century Jerusalem

The model was moved here from the Holy Land Hotel two years ago and has been improved and further completed. It shows to scale the location of the buildings (based on foundations) archeologists have discovered, or buildings that are known to have existed from other sources, during the first century AD.
 
I pointed out to the volunteers some of the places we had visited, and the relationships between different areas, such as the city of David (remarkably small in comparison to the later city), the Temple Mount, and where the Western Wall section is visible today, the palace of the Jewish High Priests of the time, the Roman Fortress Antonia where Jesus would have appeared before Pilate and have been judged and scourged, and the traditional location of Golgotha.

Studying the model

It is always a fascinating visit, and we walked all the way around, taking photos and listening to the audio-guides we carried.
 
It had been my plan to have lunch at the coffee shop and continue with the visit, but although the Museum was open (and we had to pay for tickets), the coffee shop was closed for the Sabbath. So we shifted our plan a bit. We decided to take another hour and look briefly at some of the orphaned art in the museum, then go someplace else for lunch.
 
The orphaned art was a small but moving exhibition. It includes works of art that were plundered from Jewish families in Europe, by the Nazis and stashed in various places. The originally owners were then murdered in the death camps, so the art was "orphaned." The US army gathered such art and tried to find the next of kin. That job is still being carried on by a commission in Israel. What was ironic to me as we looked at the paintings and gold work was that many of the people portrayed were Jewish, and the artists often were as well; there were several of the English Rothschilds portrayed on canvas. Other things stolen included golden crowns for Torah covers, taken from synagogues. Ironic that Nazis would steal such things while denigrating all things Jewish.
 
After that interesting visit we boarded the bus again and I asked Aram to take us to the Jaffa Gate of Old Jerusalem. We walked in to the edge of the Armenian section to an interesting little underground restaurant called the Armenian Tavern for a late lunch. It is ornately decorated in an Armenian theme.

Lunch at the Armenian Tavern

The food is delicious and not expensive (again by Israeli standards). It was also pleasantly quiet, a suitable place for a Saturday lunch. We had eaten here with the Youth Corps volunteers in 2000, and the restaurant hadn't changed much if at all.
 
By the time we reached the bus it was nearly 3:30 pm. We made the two-hour drive back to Megiddo, arriving with more time to rest before dinner which was scheduled for 8:00 pm to accommodate all the diggers arriving back from their various weekend travels.
 
When we arrived back we heard some thought-provoking news. Friday night about midnight, two Israeli police officers at the checkpoint at the Lion's Gate (or St Stephen's Gate) were shot by a Palestinian hiding in the Muslim cemetery just below the city wall. The Lion's Gate is the one nearest the start of the Via Dolorosa and us used by thousands of Christians, Jews and Muslims every day. The officers were shot in the head and chest, one is in critical condition. This event struck my wife and me in particular because we had walked through that gate and seen the police on duty there on Friday afternoon six or seven hours before the attack.
 
A little over a week ago (on July 2nd) a Palestinian working on road construction with a bulldozer suddenly started attacking vehicles with his machine on Jaffa Street.

Aftermath of the July 2 terrorist attack

He rammed busses and other vehicles, knocking some of them over and then running over them, killing 3 and wounding many others before he was shot and killed. Jaffa Street was the same street on which our Jerusalem hotel (where we didn't arrive until July 4th) was located, just a few miles away. Of course violence can happen anywhere, and in any city in the world. But these events underscored the constant vigilance Israelis must maintain, and the tension under which everyone lives in this region.