Galilee and Beyond

Hello everyone! I apologize that it has been so long since I have posted. The end of the semester has brought many multi day field studies and lots of papers and assignments to keep up with. As an added bonus my computer locked up and I was afraid I had lost all of my data but a computer company here in Israel was able to recover my files and reformatted the hard drive. Crisis averted but I still am out a bit of cash for the whole ordeal and now am the proud owner of an external hard drive which is busily copying all of my files and pictures as I am typing to you. The semester is drawing to a close and I think that I will be ready to come home when the day arrives. I have had a great experience and look forward to sharing more of it with all of you when I get back. In the above photo I am standing on an extinct volcano called the Horns of Hittin. You can't see the mountain from this picture but the crater of the volcano has eroded to the point where there are now two peaks giving it the appearance of having "horns." In the background you can see the sea of Galilee at dusk.

This is the waterfall at a place called Banias. It is just downstream a bit from the site of Biblical Dan. Dan is in the very north of the land and is used by the biblical writers as the northern most point of the kingdom in the phrase "From Dan to Beer-Sheba" with Beer-Sheba being the southern most point of the idyllic kingdom in the Negev. The spring at Dan is the source of the water for the waterfall. It is an impressive spring, the largest in the Middle East; it is surrounded by a beautiful park with the headwaters area nicknamed the Garden of Eden. These are Eucalyptus trees at the site of Biblical Dan. They are not native to the area and were not present in biblical times but are very common throughout the north today.
In the north Israel has land East of the Jordan and it was laced with landmines by its various enemies I think prior to the 1967 war. Obviously from the sign they are still in place and most of the open land in transjordan in fenced and marked for mines.
This is a typical look at class in action. On the left is Dr. Wright teaching and from left to right is Dan, Jeff and Christina hard at work. The stones on the maps represent Joshua's attack against the northern kings upon Isreal's entrance into the promised land. The northern kings were unified under the king of Hazor which is the city we were sitting on top of. (See Joshua Chapter 11)
The Jordan River north of the Sea of Galilee at its spring high.
This is a look into the Jezreel Valley from Nazareth Ridge, the site of Biblical Nazareth, the home of Jesus.


One of the Herodian Aqueducts at Caeserea by the Mediterranean Sea.
A flower that was in bloom when I was hiking on Mount Carmel over reading week. The southern part of the Dead Sea. This is also over reading week. We climbed to this ridge from the road below. The mountain is completely made of salt from the base up to about one third of the way from the top. Today the southern half of the Dead Sea is used for recovering salt by letting it into shallow pools and then harvesting the salt and minerals once the water evaporated. The pools are visible in the distance.