Walking with Jesus

I promised you folks another Israel story from my first trip there in 1996, and here it is. We were undergrads working in a consortium and getting Bible credits. Each morning we’d wake up early and head out from Kibbutz Snir (near the recently bombed Kiriyat Shimona) towards the border to Banias, the heart of the New Testament villages of Caesarea Philippi. We’d dig all morning, take a brunch break, and then dig until about 2PM. By that time the sun was too hot to work, but it was usually too hot for bugs as well, so the walk home was usually relaxing. This excludes, of course, the walk home I wrote about in my last “A Day in the Life” blog. If you haven’t read that, be sure to do so after this. Anyway, our evenings were spent in the classroom, learning the history of the region, discussing our reading, and getting the latest update on our team’s preliminary conclusions from what we were unearthing every day. On the weekends and on a few occasions during the week, we toured. Of cours

I’d like to tell you a story about one of my most memorable experiences in Israel. It happened when I was there as an undergraduate doing archaeology. The year was 1996… We lived up in the Golan Heights, in a kibbutz (communal village) named Snir. It was on the road that ran through the boundary of the occupied territory along the borders of Lebanon and Syria, an area which has been contested and fought over more than once in Israel’s modern history. The site we were excavating is called Banias, which is a derivative of Panias, and is the location of the Cave of Pan, where the Satyr-like god of the pagans ate his victims alive. In the New Testament it is called Caesarea Philippi. Actually, the Dan River (the tributary to the Jordan named after the nearby tribal city) once issued forth from a cave at the base of Mount Hermon. This cave was built up into a Temple for the festive and violent Pan, and people were thrown in alive, never to be seen again, though they were often heard bein