Israel Trip Overview - Part 1
Vern Peterman · Mar 15, 2015
Specials, No. 01
Holly Hills Bible Church
https://hollyhillsbiblechurch.org/teaching/messages/4926458393538

Transcribed from the recording by SermonAudio, so expect the occasional misheard word.

Good morning. A month ago today, Nancy and I and Courtney and Ingrid left on a trip to Israel. And so we're going to spend today and next Sunday sharing about that. We went from Denver to Frankfurt and then ended up at Tel Aviv. We spent the night there, which is the same thing we did the last night, and then visited Joppa. Now, we had a rental car, and Courtney did all of the driving. Not actually quite like that. It was more like this, right? And he drove with a Hebrew accent. It was great. Yeah. It is really focused on five areas.

One is Joppa near Tel Aviv for one day, actually not quite a whole day. Next, in and around the old city of Jerusalem for six days. And the Ela Valley, and I'm not sure why it cut off, but it should be the Sorek Valley for one day. And then what we'll begin covering next week, Old Testament Jericho for a day, and then the Sea of Galilee region for four days. And we travel to Israel and back for days and days. OK? All right. Now, so we're going to start here. We began at Tel Aviv.

And there, right nearby, was Joppa. Joppa shows up first mentioned in the book of Joshua where the Israelites are taking over the promised land and it continues to be mentioned all the way into the book of Acts where Peter spends a significant amount of time there. Much of what is seen in Joppa now is actually from recent centuries and a lot of it even from the last century because Joppa has been attacked and been in various hands over time. And so a lot of it's been reconstructed. Joppa was a port city that was in existence before the time of Joshua, actually by thousands of years. And then the times when the timbers for both the first and second temple came through the port of Joppa, the time when Jonah went there, and then Peter and others in the book of Acts were there. So it has a long biblical history. all the way from quite early into the time of the Book of Acts.

Here is Joppa in the foreground and Tel Aviv in the background. Tel Aviv was all developed later and in modern times. It used to be that there was just Joppa and there was not too much else that was close by. Here's an aerial view of the old city of Joppa and You can see a kind of a lawn area in the middle there. The city of Joppa has had some excavations. A lot of what's built there now that's more recent, it's a little difficult to go underneath without tearing things up.

But there have been excavations there in that area. Here is the harbor. And it's obviously not exactly the way it was back in biblical times. But this was a major harbor, the major harbor for Israel. even though it was under the power of various entities over time. The Egyptians and even the Philistines had possession of it. Here's the way a lot of the city streets look. Not the sort of thing you'd drive a car up at all. You're going to walk where you're going to walk. That's about it.

Now here's a place that claims with a rather amateurish looking sign to be the house of Simon the Tanner. It's one of those things, the floor is possibly the real place, but I think keep in mind that things have been destroyed and rebuilt and destroyed and rebuilt quite a bit. The Roman Catholic tradition places it at St. Peter's Church nearby, and the Muslims have yet another tradition, which is pretty traditional for the Muslims to have another tradition. Here is, you know, Nancy and Ingrid are there in one of the streets of Joppa. You can just walk along these streets and they're all very unique and different and nothing to drive a car into. This was also something very interesting we saw, a suspended plant with a tree. There, from Tel Aviv, we went kind of like this, with a Hebrew accent, right? It went from Tel Aviv up to Jerusalem.

And Jerusalem spans the time from Melchizedek. Melchizedek, as you may recall, are studied through Hebrews and Genesis some time back. The King of Salem later on changed to Yerushalom. So then until King David through the Assyrian, Babylonian, Persian, Greek, and Roman empires and into the Muslim and Crusader times, roughly 1100 through 1300. Then back into Muslim rule until British occupation about a century back.

I think that's 98 years ago. Israel became a nation in 1948, but in 1967 fought for control of Jerusalem and other areas in Israel again. The Jordanians had actually taken over Jerusalem and farther to the north, Syria had taken over the northern area. So the Six Day War of 67, they went and pushed them out. About 40 times Jerusalem has been attacked, damaged, in some cases completely destroyed, and then rebuilt. So a lot of building, rebuilding, lots of change over the centuries.

Now you have something like this actually on your handout, only it's got some labels on it. I'm going to do that. You have the outline of Old Jerusalem and the outline of the Temple Mount. Here are the Gates as their name now. Now this configuration of Jerusalem, not at all the way it was originally configured. We'll take a look at that.

We stayed at the National Hotel just a few blocks to the north of the Old City. It was actually a great place to stay. You could walk right into the Old City very quickly. Believe it or not, it's Muslim and in the Muslim Quarter, but it worked out very well for us. Here's Jerusalem, the old city, all within those walls. And when you say the old city, there are things there from all kinds of different times, ancient times on into modern.

Here's the Temple Mount slash Dome of the Rock. It was the Temple Mount during the time of Christ and before, but the Dome of the Rock since into about... I might have my battery low if it's going in now. I don't know. The Temple Mount was changed to the Dome of the Rock in the 7th century. Muhammad died in 632 and the Muslims came in shortly after that and built the Dome of the Rock over the rock. We'll talk about that rock in a minute. Here's the Mount of Olives off to the east. That is something we'll address later as well.

The city of David, and we're actually only noting here the northern part of the city of David. I'm getting some pretty erratic. Here we go. Then you have the Garden of Gethsemane, which is just to the east of the Temple Mount. And so that's located here. What we will do is go clockwise around the outside until we get over towards Zion's gate. And then we'll return to things on the inside there.

Here is the Garden of Gethsemane. I'm going to ask Courtney to step up here. It says, they came to a place called Gethsemane. And he said to his disciples, sit here until I have prayed. And he took with him Peter and James and John and began to be very distressed and troubled. This is from Mark 1432.

Yeah. Just so I don't go long because I'm so brief usually when I talk. Some of the things, actually two different things on the trip, which we'll talk about next week on one, water systems. Unbelievable on the water systems. You know, I feel woefully inadequate next to those guys that are 4,000 year old water systems when I guarantee a well for 50 years maybe. And so, but the other was, and Nancy and Vern and Ingrid probably got tired of me. A lot of times I just kept wondering about what was going on at that time when you, We only get a portion in the scripture of what Christ did.

He ministered for three years. He lived for 33 years. So we really don't get a picture. Well, we get the highlights, what God wanted us to know. But as we went to a lot of these different places, especially in the Garden of Gethsemane and up north in a lot of those areas where he ministered, I just find myself pondering, what was it like? Christ was there, and we don't get a lot of the days. A thousand days, we don't know what he did.

The Garden of Gethsemane, very powerful. When you're sitting there and you're standing, they're very good about that location because the olive trees are like a thousand years old. These weren't at the time of Christ, but we know that location. And just think about the time when he spoke, I am, and all the soldiers fell to the ground. Sorry.

The one that really hit me probably the hardest was up at Bethsaida. And in the scripture in Luke, it says, woe to you, Corazon and Bethsaida. And we were standing up there, and you could see down, we're at Bethsaida, and I got to look down at the upper Jordan. tree-lined, beautiful, the upper Jordan comes into Galilee right where Bethsaida is. And again, it's woe to you, Corazon and Bethsaida, for if I had done the works in Tyre and Sidon that I've done for you, they would have repented.

And he lived with them. And I kept thinking, day by day, he was with those people. I couldn't help but think, you know, just down by the river, he spent time day after day with those people, and yet they rejected him. And from a personal aspect, I kept thinking, you know, what about me? If I spent time with him, I have time with him. I have his word. And yet, do I believe it? And not woe to me, but I think the same view as what Peter's, when he denied him the third time, the Lord looked at him.

We're trying to find that location, actually, in the old city. You know, that's one of those moving ones. It's not a look of condemnation. It's a look of compassion and love. And I kept thinking up down by the river just minute in time, day after day with those people, and he rejected them. And I thought, we don't get a lot of those days. You know, a thousand days or so of his ministry, we don't even get And so every day, you know, we'd look at different places. Another one was at Capernaum and Magdala, especially Magdala.

There was the synagogue where Jesus actually taught. We sat, we were in the same spot where Jesus taught. That's incredible. The other is the Sermon on the Mount. You can see just where it's a perfect place for that, where he would be talking and ministering.

And, you know, just there's so many places where, in Nazareth, we came out of Nazareth, and Nancy will talk about something that was really special, I think next week, the last thing. At Nazareth, we dropped into the Valley of Megiddo and went over to the Megiddo ruins. And looking back, suddenly, you know, you can see Nazareth from there. And I kept thinking, this is my pondering all day long, what was he thinking? When he was in Nazareth, looking over the Valley of Megiddo, he knew what was going to be there. Someday it's going to end in the Valley of Megiddo, in the Armageddon. And he knew as a small child, he knew about that when he's sitting up in Nazareth, just looking over the valley, what were his thoughts?

So anyway, water systems will be next week. This was a tough one. Downhill from here. One of the things you can see from the Garden of Gethsemane, and Gethsemane, by the way, just means olive press or oil press. One of the things you can see that really struck me is right there from the Garden of Gethsemane, this gate right here that's shut is where Christ will return to Jerusalem. Through that gate.

And that's according to prophecy. Ezekiel 44, 1-3, and I won't take the time to read it, is a passage that tells about that. The gate will be shut, is what Ezekiel was told. Long, centuries before it was shut, and it was shut, shut under Muslim ruler Suleiman the so-called Magnificent, Sultan of the Ottoman Empire.

And so it was just marvelous to see that gate and see fulfillment of prophecy and how the Muslims, in trying to thwart the Messiah's return, actually fulfilled prophecy here. In Acts, right behind us was the Mount of Olives. It said on the Mount of Olives, Acts 1, 11, they also, being the angels speaking to the eleven disciples, men of Galilee, why do you stand looking into the sky? This Jesus who has been taken up from you into heaven will come in just the same way as you watched him go into heaven. And so Zechariah 14, 3 and 4 tells about how Christ will return on the Mount of Olives and He will battle for Israel and He will go from there then through those gates that you saw shut.

The pinnacle of the temple is something we saw back in Luke 4.9, and we pointed out then it could be either here or here, except that the word for temple is not that one in the middle, but the one over in the corner. So there's the pinnacle, excuse me, there's the pinnacle of the temple.

The tombs of the kings, I put quotes around those because the bones aren't there to check things out, they've long ago been taken out. There's also another place that claims to be the tombs of the kings, so some question about that, but nonetheless, likely some royalty was buried here.

Here's the City of David excavation. It was closed while we were there because they had an ongoing archeological excavation. This is the north end of where the City of David, that is the one in Jerusalem, not the one in Bethlehem, was constructed. And it's actually more in the time of Solomon and later. Some recent excavations right inside that area, they've discovered, for example, they believe where Jeremiah was thrown into the pit. when he was put in kind of the pit prison there. Here is kind of an angular aerial view, and you can see in the foreground is actually the part that was Jerusalem during the time of David.

The part that's circled with the dashed yellow lines is what was the part built during the time of Solomon, including the temple up on the top there. Now, we also went to the top of the Gihon Spring. This is the place where Solomon was anointed in about 970 BC. You'll find that in 1 Kings 1. From there, we stepped into a tunnel. This is Hezekiah's tunnel.

2 Chronicles 32.30 records it. It was he who stopped up the waters of Gihon and directed them to the west side of the city of David. So in 701 BC, in advance of the Assyrian attack, He had this tunnel built starting from two ends and then the circuitous route. And when they met in the middle, the account of their meeting was chiseled into the wall.

So, by the way, that is what it looks like if you don't have lights on. Okay, just so you know. Okay, so here's Courtney. What we ended up doing is using our cell phones to light our way through the tunnel. And so walk through this, 533 meters long, okay? A meter being a little more than a yard.

We got at the end and we came to the pool of Siloam. And this is called the waters of Shiloh in Isaiah and the pool of Shelah in Nehemiah. And then what you see down in the lower right part is the part that is now dry, but that was also a part of the pool of Siloam.

This is the probable, not certain, probable upper room where the Last Supper was held. The floor and part of the walls are original. The columns and what's built over the top, built around 1200, so obviously not original. So that was something to be there, and it fits the description, large upper room.

A man who was carrying water guided them to this room. Now, it was unusual because men didn't carry water. That was a woman's job in the culture of the day. So that's the signal that Jesus had for, this is the guy who's going to lead you to this room.

Now, going back to the overview here, we're going to switch from things on the outside of Jerusalem to things inside the Old City and up on the Temple Mount, which is now where the Dome of the Rock is. You have a drawing like this on your handout on the top of page two. This drawing is by Layen and Kathleen Rittmeyer. Layen Rittmeyer is a guy who believes the Bible is the word of God. He has a doctorate degree in archaeology. He's probably the foremost expert on the archaeology on and around the Temple Mount.

So anyway, he's made this drawing here, and you have marked out the Pool of Bethesda and the Ancient Quarry in Golgotha, and then up top the Antonia Fortress, the Temple as it was, and then Wilson's Arch and Robinson's Arch. We'll talk about that in a minute, and also you'll see some other things that we'll address shortly. We went to the pool of Bethesda, and we found it has some very complex archaeology. They've dug things at different times and added things to it. And it had things that the Romans added and the Greeks added, and so very complex. But nonetheless, an amazing place to be. And there are cisterns deep down that do hold water.

This is where Jesus healed. John 5, Jesus healed a man who was lame and couldn't get into the pool when it stirred. And so Jesus healed him and said, take up your bed and walk. Well, he healed him on the Sabbath, which was a no-no, right? And then told him to pick up his bed, and that was work, too.

So anyway, fascinating. OK, looking at this construction, you have a roadway called Via Dolorosa. does this jog and zigzag and ends up at the place that is thought to be Golgotha. We'll talk about that in a minute. It starts at Antonia Fortress. Now this is the start of Via Dolorosa. Looking the other way is the Way of Sorrows. It's looking out Lion's Gate and then the Mount of Olives is in view looking out that gate. Here is, and this would be a part of the Antonia Fortress complex, Christ's prison. Of course, the metal railing and the lights are all modern.

And then this is the place, and of course, it's Greek Orthodox, so they got all these things that they put there. This is thought to be Christ's particular place of imprisonment. And what they would do is put the feet down through the holes, have you sit on the stone bench, and then they'd shackle the ankles so you're not getting out of there, right? He would only have been there for a few hours at most, because partway through the night the trials went on with the Jews, and then starting in the morning early, he had a trial before Pilate.

This is part of the floor of the Antonia Fortress. One reason why you'll typically see not an extensive floor area, but rather just a small area at a time, is they tend to have benches and things like that around. So with those in the way, you get a part at a time.

This is a part of the floor that shows the Roman soldiers playing games and that sort of thing. It is likely the place where Jesus was beaten and mocked. by the soldiers. Here's another evidence of their playing games and using the floor to scratch different things for their games there. They would play games to entertain themselves and they would beat the people that they had charge of as another part of the entertainment.

Now, while the Via Dolorosa is shown as going from the Antonia Fortress straight and then Christ goes over to Golgotha, the reality is there are buildings within this rectangle here off the southwest part of the city, several buildings where he was taken. And so the Via Dolorosa that they have, and they have it marked here, the different stations, is a little simplified from what actually happened, because he was shuffled around also into buildings that we see over in this quadrant. So here is the Via Dolorosa ending up at Golgotha.

Looking here is where the Church of the Holy Sepulcher is located. and examining things. It's likely the general location for Golgotha, and I think what happens is, of course, people want to touch the actual stone and all that, and there tends to be a lot of magical thinking about it. Likely the specific locations inside the church building are not exactly what they're claiming they are, but the general vicinity appears genuine. That's where Golgotha was.

If you look at that drawing that you have in the back of page two, this whole area has been leveled off and back in the time of Christ, it was an area in a quarry where the rock was of poor quality and So they didn't excavate it and get rock out of it and that's where they had Golgotha. It was also a place where there was a roadway going by and so passers-by heading north from Jerusalem would see those who are crucified. The one who was crucified was looked upon by Rome as a billboard for don't mess with Rome.

If you think about it, it was here that we were identified with Christ in His death. It was here that we were, nearby, identified with Him in His burial. And it was here, where from that tomb, we were identified with Him in His resurrection. And right nearby, we saw it out Lion's Gate, Mount of Olives, was where we were identified with Him his ascension.

So four out of the five things happen right in this area here. Now taking a look again at this drawing that shows Antonia Fortress and the back side of Jerusalem, we come across an area along the western wall, and I'm going to ask Ingrid to step up here.

They come along an area in the Western Wall, and there are these three things, the Western Wall tunnels, which go along underneath. And why underneath? Because when the Muslims came in and took control, what they did was to go and build a bunch of buildings and houses and things like that all along the Western Wall. And so then the Jews, starting back in the 80s, began building tunnels so they could get access to this Western Wall underneath where all the Muslim buildings were. Next we have the Western Wall, sometimes called the Wailing Wall, though I never heard any of the Jews call it that. And then thirdly, the Temple Rubble.

First of all, thank you for praying for us. We really appreciated that and had such a good time, so thank you. Romans 10, 1 and 2 says, Brethren, my heart's desire and my prayer to God for them, Israel, is for their salvation. For I bear them witness that they have a zeal for God, but not in accordance with knowledge. So as we drove into Jerusalem, we couldn't help but notice all these men in black. I'm not sure if you have any pictures of those guys, but you've probably seen pictures with the hats and the long coats and the long sideburns. It was a lot to take in and wonder what that was all about. But what I was really interested in was the Western Wall and learning about the significance to the Jews.

The Western Wall of the Temple Mount is actually part of the perimeter retaining wall for the Temple Courtyard, like Vern was just saying, since every stone of the Temple was overturned when the Romans overturned and destroyed the Temple in AD 70. So the wall is the closest place to where anybody can get to the Holy of Holies, the former temple. So they were just obsessed with this wall because that was the presence of God. This little pamphlet that we got when we were there reads, the divine presence has never departed from the Western Wall. So I just thought how blessed we are to have the Holy Spirit indwelling us. We are the temple of the Holy Spirit and we don't need to be worshipping a wall in order to get close to God because Christ is in us and we can't get much closer than that.

We took a tour through some of these underground tunnels that Vern was just talking about. and that went along the wall, since only about one-eighth of the wall was accessible in the plaza area to the Jews to be able to pray at above ground. So there were some women praying at the wall in these tunnels. We walked past them through the tours. And as we walked past them, we noticed that they were allowed to pray, apparently, 24 hours a day. They always have access to be able to go down there. So our tour guide told us that, according to Jewish tradition, The two ways that they could get closest to God was through this wall itself and also through prayer.

And he mentions Psalm 22.3 which says that God actually inhabits the praises and prayers of his people.

So we notice up in the plaza area up above that the men would pray off to the left side of this wall. right there, and then the women on the right side, and Nancy and I went over, well, we all tried to go over to the right side, not knowing what this whole division thing was about, but Courtney and Vern got booted out because they weren't women. They recognized we were not. So Nancy and I went over there just for a little bit and noticed that even the women that went right up to the wall, when they were leaving the wall, they all backed up because they never wanted to turn their backs to the wall. So there was something really important about that wall.

So apparently they had prayer books. We saw them praying prayers to the wall and they also wrote little prayers on pieces of paper and they stuck them in the cracks of the wall. They were bowing to the wall as they were praying. So apparently twice a year these little pieces of paper are gathered up, all these prayers of the people, and they're collected and buried in the Jewish cemetery. So, I just came away with a burden to pray for these people.

They're so religious, they have this zeal for God, but they have totally missed out on His Son, our Lord Jesus Christ. John 1, 11 and 12 say, He came to His own, and those who were His own did not receive Him, but as many as received Him, to them He gave the right to become children of God, even to those who believe in His name. And that's us. Thank you.

Well, not only do you have Jews gathering with intensity and passion in this spot, and the men and the women separately, but this little ramp that you see off to the side is the access to the Dome of the Rock, so you'll have Jews gathering there while the Muslims and other interested persons go up this ramp up to the Dome of the Rock platform, the Temple Mount as we would call it.

The stones along this western wall were placed under the direction of Herod the Not-So-Great. A really large place without mortar, up to 500 tons. I think I've heard a figure of even 600 tons. The stones were all founded on bedrock. and then built up from there. They had the same edging pattern that you see all around on all of the stones. The stones, some of them, are so large that there's only one crane in all of Israel that could pick it up and it couldn't move it anywhere, couldn't place it, but you could just barely pick it up. Massive. It is a mystery as to how those stones got placed.

Now, some of the remaining rubble from when the Romans dumped everything off are found here. The archaeologists went through and cleaned up a portion of it, but left some of it so you could see this is what had happened and that sort of thing. They have found some with certain engravings and markings on it, including one and a half of the signs that warn Gentiles not to come in here. So, what Randy read for us is really fitting here. Jesus told them, see these phenomenal, fantastic stones. I mean, these are marvelous, huge, massive stones. Up on top, not this retaining wall, up on top, all those stones, every single one was dumped off. Nothing left.

Here is what is left of Robinson's Arch. You'll see Robinson's Arch marked as the part of the stairway that went into the corner of the temple at the southwest corner. And so that's what's left that Courtney and Ingrid are standing near there. So that's another part of the destruction that took place.

The Dome of the Rock, which covers the rock, which according to Muslim writings was where Abraham offered up Ishmael. and where Mohammed ascended. Non-Muslims, like ourselves, we found out, are not allowed inside the Dome of the Rock now. But before that rule was put in place, Len Rittmeyer, the one who did that drawing on page 2, got in, and they let him take measurements, and they let him take pictures, like this one. Again, Len Rittmeyer, he's a Bible believer, and so he knows what's very interesting. There's a rectangular indentation on that rock that curiously has the exact same dimensions as the Ark of the Covenant.

Hmm. So he said, okay, if I lay out the dimensions of the temple as it's described, in the law, and I put the Holy of Holies in that spot, then that gives me the configuration for where the temple was located, and that also matches up with certain cut lines on the top of the rock.

Amazing. Now, something else. This is also the rock. It would have been the same place that Abraham began to offer up Isaac, as recorded in Genesis 22. So an amazing place. We were able to get close, but not see it. But fortunately, we have the pictures and descriptions from Ley and Rittmeyer.

Now, we also had another trip that we took, a side trip for one day. And that was from Jerusalem over to the West. And we kind of went north and south a little bit too. And so we visited several Old Testament era cities and fortresses. And begin with what the northernmost one we saw that day was at Geysir. Geysir was actually, it's far enough north that it is in the Northern Kingdom.

That is, it was taken away, the people there were taken away. And we'll look at some of the stories here. Now, Gazer is one of eight tells that we went to see. A tell is a place that looks like a hill, and it's not because it is a natural hill, but because when people would have a city destroyed, they'd just build right on top of it. And if that got destroyed, they'd build on top of that. So some of the tells that we went to were actually fairly tall, and it was just because of one layer after another after another building on what was destroyed of the old city.

And so this is Tel Gezer, one of the eight Tels that we went to during our visit. There are over 200 Tels like this in Israel. So we picked eight instead of trying to see all 200. OK. Gezer is found in Joshua as a part of the Israelites capturing the land of Israel. And so there's some description there. It goes on into 1 Chronicles and several other accounts there.

Here is the water shaft at Geyser. What they would do in order to avoid the situation where here we are, we're under siege by whoever's attacking us, and we're running out of water. Now if you could get a water supply in the middle of your city, and of course that would be digging down through the layers because you have a tell, right? So here is the water shaft at Geyser. Now it turns out that that water shaft had gotten fairly clogged And New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary actually spent several years pulling out hundreds of tons of debris that had fallen into this tunnel.

So you can look down at some distance here. So here's kind of going down to the depths of this thing. Perhaps later on they may have it so you can actually go back in and have people do that. But it was something they were initially concerned about because of possible collapse.

Here's the water system. Basically, they would go down. They would have not steps, nice ones like we had with railings, but they would just have some carved steps so you could go down and then get into the groundwater level and get water and carry it back up.

But at least you'd have water in the middle of the siege. And so Gezer was one of those places. Courtney will talk about some other ones when we talk next week, because some of the other tells that we visited also had a water system like that. Something else, and that's Gezer was one place where when the Israelites went in, they did not drive off the inhabitants and they didn't kill them. They let them remain.

And so the inhabitants, in great part, Up until the time of Solomon, the inhabitants were Canaanites. And so with Canaanites, they had various Canaanite pagan rituals. And one of those was to have pillars in the high places. And so these are some of the Canaanite ritual pillars that they would have. They were called sacred pillars. And if you look up sacred pillars in the Bible, you'll find a number of places where that's mentioned.

In Joshua 6.10, it says, they did not drive out the Canaanites who lived in Gaza. So the Canaanites live in the midst of Ephraim to this day, whenever that writing was.

1 Kings 9, the pharaoh king of Egypt, who I think was Sihamun, had gone up and captured Gaza and burned it with fire. He killed the Canaanites who lived in the city and gave it as a dowry to his daughter, Solomon's wife. So Solomon rebuilt Gaza then as an Israelite city. The siege of Geysir that terminated the occupation was conducted by the Assyrian king Tiglath-Pileser III between 734 and 732. 732 he captured it, did it in, and hauled them off after that to another land.

Then another one we went to here is Timna. and Zorah and Eshto and we stood at Beth Shemesh. So, in the Sorek Valley, as a matter of fact, that's not Sorek, it's Sorek. The Sorek Valley is where Jacob used to take his sheep to be sheared at Timnah, where Samson lived most of his life. Most of what you see described in the life of Samson is in this valley. And where the Philistines went is they returned the Ark of the Covenant back to Israel because they were having lots of trouble with it, right?

So those things happened right in this valley. So we stood at Beth Shemesh. We got off the highway in the park where you see the dirt road there. And then there's this area of excavation, partial excavation, towards the front of the Tell. And that's where we stood. There was a shepherd on the cell phone there while we were there, right? I'm sure that didn't happen too often in old times, right?

So here's Timnah off to the left, upper left, and Genesis 38 describes Jacob going there to get his sheep taken care of. The capture of Timnah for the Israelites is described in the book of Joshua. And then Judges 14 is the account that includes Samson. That's where Samson got his first wife from Timnah, off on the left hand side here. Due north is shown there with the black end there over the arrow. Samson himself was born in Zorah. And so you see that just towards the middle of the photograph.

It continues to be an important Israelite city on into the time of Nehemiah. Eshtoel was also mentioned in Joshua and in Judges, but not afterwards. So here's this view taken from the Tel Beth Shemesh, which is mentioned in numerous places from Joshua to 2 Chronicles. So this is a very important Old Testament site.

So it was amazing to kind of look at this and just think of all that had gone on in this one place here. Now, it turns out A part of this tell had been excavated by archaeologists, and this was a shot taken by a drone. They put a camera on the drone and can fly over and get an arrow shot. So after they'd excavated, this is the picture they got. In this excavation, they found a seal from the 11th century, within decades of the life of Samson.

And the archaeologists who found the seal at Beth Shemesh believe it depicts Samson with long hair fighting a lion at its mouth. Isn't that amazing? Right there at that valley and depicting the biblical event. So this was something that at least somebody living at Beth Shemesh was very impressed by what had happened with Samson, perhaps only decades before.

Now, I'm going to talk briefly about Gath. We did not go to Gath, which is known as Tellus Safi. So it's another tell. We just didn't have time. But, let's see here. I'll go through this. Okay. Samson, at the end of his life, was taken down to Gaza. Gaza, the temple there is not accessible. Everything is covered up with buildings and pavement and all that. We do have, however, excavations of the temple at Gath, which is not too far from where we were located there on this visit. So here's the Philistine Temple of Dagon at Gath to give you an idea of what does the Philistine Temple of Dagon look like.

And what you find is there are then the bases of the two pillars. that Samson would have put his hands on. And so it would look like this with the two pillars, and the two pillars would support structural members that would be broken between the pillars. So as Samson put his hands on those pillars and pressed them apart, the whole place would come down. There would be people on the roof, people underneath, people next to the walls, people around the outside, and it's said that Samson took out more at that event than all the rest of his life. More Philistines. So this would have been an artist's depiction of what that would have looked like with those pillars. At Gath, also, the oldest known Philistine inscription was found dating from the 10th century. It reads Goliath. Goliath. The name Goliath. Goliath of Gath.

Now we're going to move into the Elah Valley. The Elah Valley, we visited Azekah and Qirbet Qeiyafa. And so the Elah Valley is where David flew Goliath, where several Old Testament era fortresses and tells are located. And so we went to Qirbet Qeiyafa fortress overlooking the Elah Valley here. And so we went there first, we went to walk around and look at things and whatnot.

Now what we did, this was the only day we really hired anybody to give us a tour because finding some of these places is a bit tricky. They're not, well anyway, the road is something else to get into here. Yeah, I'm glad. Courtney was driving. Anyway, our tour guide was Ido Garfinkel.

Now, he's not a believer, even though he has a degree in Bible from Hebrew University. And by the way, Bible means Old Testament, not, you know. So he has a degree in Bible from Hebrew University. He is working on his master's. His father, the reason I picked him, his father, Yosef Garfinkel, is the archaeology professor at Hebrew University that excavated Khirbet Qeiyafa.

So that's why I wanted to get that guy, OK? His father, on the first year of the dig, 2008, there are two gates at Kirbet Qeiyafa, and next to one of those gates, the one on the side, next to one of those gates, his father found what is the oldest Hebrew script ever found.

And so that's shown here. It's a little faint, and so that's what's reproduced here, a little bit more easy to read. So he wanted to get his insight. His father also had kind of taken some heat, even though he's not a believer, taken some heat for saying there was a guy named King David and he stayed here. So Yosef Garfinkel discovered this oldest known Hebrew script here at Kirbit Qeiyafa.

Now let's take a look. Here's an aerial view. Kibbutz Qaddafi, you see, is off to the left there. You see where the Israelites were stationed at the time when David went out to take things to his brothers, right? So here's the Israelite army position on one side of the Elah Valley. The Philistines are positioned on the other side.

Now, right here is where David goes down to pick five smooth stones. And he picks those stones, so here's that creek. So there's the place. He walked down off that hillside, came down to this creek, picked up five stones, and then went out to meet Goliath. So he hits Goliath with this sling stone. Nothing like that had ever entered his mind before. So here, once David slays Goliath, Here is the path that the Philistines ran. They went down that valley, crossing the creek where David had picked up the stones, went down that valley and ran, ran, like a little piggy running home. Right? Okay. So this is in 1 Samuel 17, if you want to read that account. But this is the place.

Nearby city, we didn't go to it, but we could see it from Kibbutz Qeiyafa, was Soko. And the Bible talks about Soko in a number of places as well. Something else here this place This place is I believe the place that is identified here in the passage in 2nd Samuel, and I'll take you through it Here is one gate. This is the gate where? Yosef Garfinkel found that Hebrew script. That's the oldest Hebrew script ever found Over here is the other gate and so we started off at this gate and went over to the second gate, okay? the palace was between the two gates.

So let's read the account and see if it makes sense. Now David was sitting between the two gates, and the watchman went up to the roof of the gate by the wall, and that's this one over in the center, okay, in the center, because that's where you get a view of the Ella Valley, okay. Yes, there we go. So the watchman went up to the roof by the gate of the wall and raised his eyes and looked and behold a man running by himself. And then there's this interaction that's described. I'm not going to take the time to read it. But the man who comes with the news breaks it in the most gentle way possible. He breaks the news.

So David, when he gets the news, the king was deeply moved and went up to the chamber over the gate and wept over that gate in the middle. That gate and wept. Thus he said as he walked, O my son Absalom, my son, my son Absalom, would I had died instead of you, O Absalom, my son, my son.

Right there. This place. We went nearby to Tel Azikah. We didn't stay there long. It was really raining hard. But nonetheless, we did go there. It is also a tell, not because it's a hill, but again, you got layers of things mentioned numerous times in the Old Testament, but not in the New. Now we'll go to Lachish. Lachish is the southernmost place that we visited.

And here is Tell Lakish. The Assyrian siege ramp is still visible on the forward side of the Tell. And by the way, this is the only Tell that still has the Assyrian siege ramp visible. So out of over 200 Tells in Israel, I wanted to see this one. And there's another reason I wanted to see Lakish also.

There we were taken to the entrance gates and could see some things there. Just so you get an idea of what Lachish was like, well right now we'd see a bunch of green grass growing on top, but before it was attacked by first the Assyrians and then the Babylonians, it had a double wall around the outside and it had a palace area in the middle that was substantial. In Judah, This was the second largest city in terms of the number of people in it and the dwellings and that kind of thing, right behind Jerusalem. So here was Lakish.

One of the reasons I wanted to see it was to connect up something. When I was at the British Museum in 2009, and Bruce and I were there, here was the Assyrian account of the attack on Tel Lakish in 701 AD, and it was taken to the British Museum. This was taken off the palace walls in Assyria. The Assyrian capital and the palace walls, and it tells the story pictorially, I'm not aware of any writing, pictorially of the attack on Lachish. So the Assyrians were very proud of their attack on Lachish, and it just confirms what the Bible describes, and that is that the attack on Lachish was intense and severe, and they ultimately defeated Lachish soundly.

So then we had gone to all these different places. There were other places we could have gone, but just ran out of time and we only had one day with Ido. Now, we're going to tell you next week, warning signs that we read as we went into Jericho. the road this road leads to area a under the palestinian authority the entrance for israeli citizens is forbidden dangers to your lives and is against israeli law we went in anyway tell you how crazy we were and also We're going to be telling you about all the places we visited in the northern area of Israel surrounding the Sea of Galilee and particularly off to the west side. So we'll be going through that. Alright, so just this morning we've taken you through the place where Abraham offered up Isaac. to the place where Joshua had come into many of these cities and overtaken them, to the place where King David reigned, and even to the very place where David was when he got the news about his son Absalom. We've taken you to places that Solomon reigned and we've taken you through places where the Jews lived and were attacked by the Assyrians and were attacked by the Babylonians and then on into Roman times and we've taken you to the place where Christ walked and where Christ was crucified and taken you there.

And next week, we'll move on to more exciting things. So join us then. Let's pray. Lord, we thank you for the opportunities here. We see in this just the reality of what you have done for us. We see even in this small area where we've been identified with Christ and his death, burial, and resurrection, and even his ascension. And we just give you thanks for the opportunities you've laid before us. We pray in Jesus' name. Amen.