The touring begins!

We began visiting various sites today, including King Herod’s palace in Caesarea; Mount Carmel, where Elijah had a “prophet-off” (I just made up that word) with 450 Baal prophets; Megiddo, a crucial place in the history of the battles that have raged in this area through the centuries; and Nazareth village, a farm where archaeologists have dug up a wine press and vineyard area and then added people in costumes to share what Nazareth might have been like in Jesus’ time.

Each of those places would be worthy of a blog post, but I will not do that to you. First, a few opening impressions.  Israel is not very wide, but is stacked up with villages and residential areas climbing the mountains.  It is easy to understand why security is a high priority for Israel, and also easy to see why through the generations other countries/groups believed they were close enough to invade Israel.  When looking at maps from many generations of the land that is now Israel, it is also easy to appreciate why this land has been a popular place for powers to want to control.  Its position near trade routes and water supply, for instance, was/is a tremendous asset.

To see the excavation site at Megiddo where archaeologists have discovered cities built on top of cities feels like taking an elevator down and each floor is another era in history. To have the sense that we can walk where others walked centuries ago, particularly if one of those was Jesus, is a powerful feeling.

I have not found a good solution to getting photos on my blog, so I will post this and try and fire that out later,