Harry Potter Caves?

This week has been a busy, but a little lower key. Our field trip this week was to the Shphelah so we got to do the mirrors on top of Azekah and Lachish. We’re getting pretty good at doing this now. I should have gotten a photo of the the flashing light from Azekah, but I guess I just don’t think quickly enough once we get up there. One of the students got the flashing light on video, so maybe I can get it off him some time. I think that this is one of those great pedagogical moments. It’s so fun to see the students get so excited when they see the flashing lights. All of a sudden, what we were talking about from the Lachish Ostraca Letter #4 about the fires from Azekah going out during the Babylonian invasion becomes meaningful. I’ve done it three times now and I still get excited about it!

After Lachish we went to Maresha. Two fun things there are the Zidonian tombs

 and the Bell caves. 

I call the Zidonian caves, the Harry Potter caves! I started saying that to the students this semester and all of a sudden the light went on in their eyes and they were eager to go in and see why. See here I’ve taken my picture with “Fluffy”!!!! The burial cave has some great decorations inside. This is just one of the fun ones.

The caves were formed as the Israelites learned that if they broke through the hard naari rock they could get down to the limestone and harvest it to make plaster to cover their homes, and most importantly, their cisterns. Maresha is a water-poor site, with no natural spring. The only way that they can survive is to collect every drop of water during the rainy season and store it in cisterns. That water has to last them for about 8 months of the year. If the plaster crakes then the cisterns leak and they lose their water. One thing that I learned this week is that while the Philistines in the Iron Age had superiority over the Israelites in the making of iron, particularly iron weapons (which are stronger than Bronze weapons), the Israelites had superiority in making leak-free cisterns! Anyway, the Israelites would harvest the limestone in ever-increading widths, which gives the shape to these bell caves. The acoustics in here is amazing and I love to go in here with the students and to hear them sing! It’s like choirs of angels! The picture is me with Kim Chadwick. She’s married to the archaeology teacher, Jeff.

We had the formal talent show this week. Once again there were some GREAT talents. One of the girls, Julia, sang a song in Hebrew about a diaspora Jew and his longing for Jerusalem. It was absolutely beautiful!!!!! 

Well my stressor for this week is working on a paper—which was due last Monday. It’s a chapter for the new NES textbook that they want to use this Fall. My chapter is on Christian History, four hundred years in 25 pages—an impossibility. So my stress is what to include and what to leave out. There is so little time here, that decided not to go on the Yad VaShem field trip today so that I can have 2 full days to work on it. I’ve been hard at it every spare moment for a couple of weeks and I have about 8 good pages. Only 17 more to go.