Well, it's been yet another fabulous day! I woke up in Arad at, what I'm told, will be the poshest hostel I will ever experience. It was great! After a few too many days without a warm shower, that was just what I needed!

We've been all over the land of Judah these last 3 days. None of the ancient sites are inhabited today, but the locations of the sites are still well known today. Everyone seemed to have the same idea for centuries! One civilization would build a city at a strategic location and then eventaully it would be destroyed. When the next people come along, the location was still strategic so they build right on top of the destroyed city using what remains they could. Now all that's left is a tell, an artificial hill filled with ruins from the past millenia! Those are the sites we visited.

Not many of them were fully excavated, in fact some seem to have been barely touched. There's not much money to be made in archeology here anymore. Any thing of value was kept with the most current surface generation and enough digging has been done to know pretty much exactly what is under every tell. Why spend the man power to discover nothing new? The ones that were excavated looked a lot alike with small differences. Gezer has a 6 chamber gate that Solomon would have built when the city, as well as a daughter, was given by Pharoah. Lachish has a seige ramp built up by Sanacarib when he attacked Judah during Hezekiah's reign. Azekah had a group of Israelis acting out the story of David and Goliath. That was pretty funny! Beth Shemesh had a cistern we could climb down into. Arad had a mysterious temple with 2 deities, Yahweh and his Ashorah.

Beersheva was a bit different. This site had been completely excavated so that the entire ancient city could easily be seen. Sure the walls had fallen down, but the overall layout of the town was easy to see from the nearby tower. Some walls had been built up a bit higher to give even more of a feel for the ancient homes. Here they also found a horned alter, while there was only supposed to be one in Jerusalem. That's odd and archeologist still don't really have an answer.

We explored the land of the tribe of Benjamin on Thursday. Mt Scopus; Nabi Samwil, from here we could see Gibeah, Gibeon, Ramah, and a few other Biblical cities; Gezer; Beth Shemesh, where we could see Zorah; and, Azekah, here we could see Gath. At Beth Shemesh we heard the story of Samson and could see exactly where it happened. Azekah was where the Isreali group so kindly acted out the story for us, but we could see the Sorek valley where David and Goliath would have faced off. Also at Azekah we had the chance to climb in some caves. Unfortunately it was too muddy, well, too muddy for most of us. I explored the dry caves and I can only hope that the pictures of the 2 bravest souls gets on the EMU website.

On Friday our trip headed south. Lachish was the "toaster" for Israel as it needed one more thing to stand on to reach the cookie jar on the top shelf. From there the coastal plains, Egypt and Jordan were accesible. Beersheva I already mentioned. Arad was the strangest with its polytheistic (bitheistic?) temple and wall well larger than the population center. Then we saw an erosion crater called the "Big Crater." It was quite impressive and quite expansive! We were able to climb around there a little bit. Then we headed to the modern day Arad for the night.

4 stops today before getting back to JUC. First, Masada, Herod the Great's rediculous palace. Second, En Gedi, the coast of the Dead Sea. Third, Wadi David, a gorgeous nature preserve! And last, Qumran, the site of the Dead Sea Scrolls. At Masada, Aaron and I set an EMU record for accending the 400 foot high cliff path at 4 minutes 8 seconds! To us it doesn't matter that there was no previous record to break. We get to hold the record for at least 2 years anyway! Wadi David had a whole lot of waterfalls and ibexes and conies to watch. Ibexes with massive horns scampering up cliff faces is quite the sight to see! We had fun climbing to a nonimportant cave at Qumran where Paul Wright, the director of JUC gave us a lecture. Oh yeah, I should have mentioned that. Cindy, our normal professor, had lost her voice on Tuesday, was back with us for Wednesday and Thursday, but then couldn't speak again on Friday so Paul came with us on our 2 day trip.

Now we are back on Mt Zion! Tonight I studied for our exam tomorrow and filled up my journal from Rachel! Thanks, Rachel! On to journal number 2! Alright, it's 1:09am here. Time for bed.