Susannah and Randy are down at the swimming pool, cooling off as best as one can in a desert. Actually it has been cooler yesterday and today, and everyone has more energy than usual. Of course, this is still all relative. Randy and Susannah and I just came back from a brief visit to the nearby Timna Valley, an area mined for copper by the Egyptians as early as the third millennium BC. It is about ten minutes down the road from us. There is an active modern mine in the area, too. It is a pretty valley with interesting rock formations, somewhat like the American Southwest. I couldn’t wait to show Susannah a small temple dedicated to Hathor, the goddess of mining (among many other things), and a rock carving in a cliff above that shows Ramesses III making an offering to Hathor, complete with cartouches and hieroglyphs. She loved it!
It was while we were climbing the trail up to the cliff with the rock carvings that the cell phone rang. We were the only people on the trail, and the ring of the phone echoed off the cliff walls. It has one of those silly musical ringtones, and that sounded even more out of place in our surroundings. Susannah and I giggled, since it seemed so strange to get a phone call out in the middle of the desert, perched on a wall of sandstone underneath a carving of Ramesses III. What a place for a phone call!
We could hear Randy answer the phone behind us, and we giggled even more as he shouted (which he does when he thinks someone doesn’t understand English very well), “Yes, Mary Robinson-Mohr is here, but she’s up the trail! She’s not right here, I’ll have to get her, but she’s up the trail. She’s UP THE TRAIL! We’re in the middle of the desert! We’re on a trail IN THE DESERT! What? I’ll have to catch up to her! No, she doesn’t live in Israel! What?” Then the phone disconnected. Either that, or he freaked out the caller so badly that she hung up.
Randy caught up with us, just in time for the phone to ring again. He handed it over to me. What do you know! It was a woman with a thick Israeli accent calling from the American Embassy in Tel Aviv! “You had a passport stolen?” “Why yes.” Before I could thank her for sending the replacement passport, she floored me by stating, “Your stolen passport has been found.”
Land o’Goshen! Somehow “the police” (I don’t know which police) had found it, and turned it in to the embassy. I would love to hear the rest of the story…did they find it lying around in a dumpster? Was someone trying to use it under false pretenses, and got caught? I don’t know, and I probably never will know. Unfortunately, they still have not found Susannah’s. Maybe it will turn up yet. The stolen one will be mailed to me here at Kibbutz Lotan, but it is already on record as invalid. The replacement passport is the one I must use.
I loved the woman’s parting words to me. “Yes, the police have been doing their work!” I couldn’t think of a thing to say, as I guffawed to myself, remembering the Hadera police who didn’t know the name of the street on which their station was located. I thanked her, and decided that maybe all of our chasing down of police paid off after all.
The Galilee Boat
Now, I still need to catch you up on our adventures before coming down to the Yotvata dig. Thursday morning, May 25, we realized we had stayed at Kibbutz Ginnosar for five days, and had not visited the museum of “The Galilee Boat” right on the shore of the kibbutz. Well, of course we had to visit that! When Randy and I were here ten years ago, the boat was still submerged in a vat of chemicals, being preserved. It was not yet on public display, but we were with archaeologists who knew people, and we were able to see the boat in the lab where it was being studied and preserved.
It is beautifully displayed and interpreted now, and I would recommend a visit to see it to anyone who comes this way. The boat was discovered about 15 years ago, when a drought caused the shoreline of the Sea of Galilee to drop considerably. Two beachcombing brothers caught sight of it first, seeing an oval shape of waterlogged wood in the mud. They examined it enough to know that whatever it was, it had not been constructed by modern methods. They called in experts, and the excavation of the very fragile boat began. It has been dated to the first century A.D., and it is a typical working boat of that region. It would have been the style of boat used by the disciples that fished, and it would have been the type of boat that they transported Jesus in at times. It is a boat that uses thirteen different types of wood, some apparently salvaged from earlier boats, so it probably never was very fancy. A pottery cooking pot and lamp were found in the boat, among a few other items, and these helped determine the date of the boat. There is a possibility that it was sunk in a vicious “battle at sea” between Romans and Jewish rebels in the first century. Such a battle occurred just off the shore of Magdala, and many of the rebels’ boats were set fire or sunk. That would fit with the time period and the location. What a find!
Mount of the Beatitudes
After that, we headed up the hills to the north toward the site of the ancient city of Hazor. But, before we did that, we decided that we should stop at the shrine of the “Mount of the Beatitudes” and see what was there. Now, I’m not really into shrines, but I am growing to appreciate places that provide a place to ponder, pray, and meditate upon different events or teachings. The “Mount of the Beatitudes” is one such place. It is perched on a somewhat level spur jutting out from the steeply ascending hills above the site of Capernaum. There is a spectacular view directly south, down the entire length of the Sea of Galilee. If this is not the actual location where Jesus first preached the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5 through 7), then it must be very similar to that place. It is also a wonderful place to consider the Beatitudes (Matt. 5:1-12), a watershed of the ethics and teachings of Jesus.
We strolled through the neatly manicured gardens of eucalyptus trees, date palms, olive trees, bougainvillea, rose bushes, and jasmine vines. These surround an octagonal church built in 1938. It is octagonal to honor the eight beatitudes (although many scholars name nine beatitudes, others are not sure that verses 11 and 12 should be included with the table of beatitudes). A cadre of very attentive nuns ensure that there is no talking inside the church, and as a result, there is a calm and prayerful atmosphere. One can walk in a circle around the church, and on each side read a beatitude spelled out in tiles on the mosaic floor. One can also look up and out at the view of the entire Sea of Galilee, and down at the shore where Jesus lived, worked, preached, and healed.
After spending time in the octagonal church, we walked toward the parking lot and bought fresh squeezed orange juice from a vendor. We found a bench in the shade, and took our time drinking that wonderfully cold and thirst-quenching juice, watching the wind whip up the sea below us.
Finally, we decided to move on to our greater destination, the site of the great ancient city of Hazor. But I will tell you about that another time. It is getting late, and we need to be on the “dig” bus before 7 a.m. in the morning for a field trip to Qumran, EnGedi, and a swim in the Dead Sea.
Shabbat Shalom, and Lilit Tov,
Mary, Randy, and Susannah
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