On the Sea of Galilee

Hey Blog Readers, Josh here again!

We have had an amazing week on the Sea of Galilee.

But before we start- sorry that I haven't really updated the blog at all. Turns out I was only saving my blogs to the website and not publishing them for public view. So the previous blog and this blog are just a conglomeration of a few blogs that did not get fully published.

Like I said, the Sea of Galilee was great. Did you know that the Sea is only 21 miles long and 7 miles wide? So all of the Biblical cities are very close to one another. From our hotel beach in Ginasor we can look across the water and see the large city of Tiberias. Also, our dig site in Bethsaida is a quick 20 minute drive from our hotel.

In Bethsaida we are working closely with Orna Cohen. She is a rock star of the archeology world. She is world famous for the preservation and conservations she does, her most famous work being the 1st century fishing boat discovered on the sea of Galilee. She also is currently working on the Herodium (King Herod's tomb), for more information on it check out National Geographic! She was in it! She has also been published, interviewed, and been put in charge of countless other projects. But she is also an incredibly humble person and a lot of fun to work with. She is having us repair and conserve the four chambered gate/corridor at Bethsaida (the largest four chambered corridor in Israel). All the students get up around 6:00 and get ready for the day. We are on the bus by 6:30 and unloading the dig equipment by 7:00. Around 9:30 we take a break and have breakfast for a half hour. And we generally finish the day just after noon. This may not seem like an incredibly long day to you, but it is back breaking work at times. We have to end around noon because it gets unbearably hot in the afternoon. We return back to the hotel to shower and siesta and finish the evening in lecture, touring the Biblical sites, or swimming in the Sea.

We spent most of our first day weeding and collecting piles of rocks and buckets of dirt in the hot Israeli sun! It was fun at first but it heats up really fast. We thought we had all gotten a really good tan the first day... but it just turned out just to be a layer of 2,000 year old dirt.

The second day was a lot more fun. We spent the first half of the day weeding and what not, but after breakfast we started to mix up a mud mortar to start repairing the wall. It was very messy but VERY fun and most off all very important for preserving the ancient city of Bethsaida. And that is how we spent most of our days at the site. We learned a great deal about archeology and modern day preservation techniques.

Before I end the blog I just wanted to highlight one especially interesting thing we did this week (we did way more than this, but for brevity's sake I'll keep it short). We took a tour, lead by Orna, through the bowels of the Ginosar museum. We got to see the preservation and assembly rooms, storage rooms, and a lot of unbelievably fragile and ancient pieces. At one point we were in an office shuffling through boxes of artifacts. Orna would open a box tell us what we were looking at and pass that item around the group! We got to hold and examine ancient fishing hooks, stone oil lamps, ivory carvings, and many other priceless antiquities, some of which were over 3,000 years old! And the pièce de résistance- she let us hold a fragment of the preserved wood from the 1st century fishing boat discovered in the late 1980s. This boat is literally one of a kind and a legendary find and we got to hold it! We all felt extremely honored and privileged to do all these amazing things. I'm sure Amanda will upload pictures to the blog site shortly!

We finished our Ginosar adventure with a picnic and a swim in the river Jordan. We were all really sad to leave yesterday but we all had amazing experiences that will stay with us for the rest of our lives!


As always, a brief bio of some of our classmates.