Maacah

Transcription

I can remember the flannelgraph stories, and in specific I remember one time the teacher was talking about how King Saul, this moody king, invites David to come and soothe him with a harp. And in a fit of anger, Saul takes a ceremonial sword and he hurls it at David. And I remember asking myself, how did they know what King Saul looked like? How did they know what kind of throne he sat on? How did they know the kind of clothes that David was wearing, or what the sword looked like that Saul threw at David? And so, already at that time, I was curious about this, and so I wanted to know, and this is really in, I have to say, my later years, is what drew me in to archaeology. My first dig was actually at a site called Tel Katzir in nearby Tel Aviv. And actually my colleague and I, we were digging in an area where we weren't finding anything. All the people around us, finding all kinds of building remains, pottery. Us? Nothing. Then all of a sudden, we come across a big, circular pillar base in the ground. So we call over the director Andi Mizar (sp), and he looked at it and he said, "You have just discovered the Philistine temple." I thought, this is so cool, these Philistines are not imaginary figures, these are real people who lived in a real place in time, and this got me so excited. This is an area photo, by the way, taken in 1945; it begins here, with, it's probably the city gate in ancient times... One of the things I love to do with my students is to try to try make them feel a part of the world of the Bible, through images, through pictures that I take, maps, in some cases I use film, to try to draw them into the past. What excites me most about the potential of Abel Beth Maacah is that we know from 2 Samuel 20 that there was a rebellion against King David that involved this site. So just from these two different verses in the Bible, you get the sense that this city is an important guardian for the Northern approaches into Israel... To be able to come across this destruction layer, and to capture some of the pottery and finds, I think would be an amazing discovery. My goal is to, every year, get together a group of students who would like to have an experience of working on an archaeological dig, and then come to a site like Abel Beth Maacah—a specific biblical city, a city that's called "a mother" in Israel; it was an important city—and to dig and to discover how people lived; the kinds of food they ate, the kind of clothes they wore, their jewelry, what were their burial practices. And through archaeology we're given a different perspective and we're able to fill in the gaps in so many new ways.