Israel Day 16: Sepphoris, Nazareth, En Harod, Beth Shean/Sycthopolis

After we all had breakfast and had loaded up the bus, we took off to Sepphoris. This is an antiquities site that I didn’t know anything about. But, we had been told that there were some great mosaics there, so I was looking forward to that. As we entered the antiquities site, we started walking down a Roman road that actually dates back to Roman times. The stones were basically all worn smooth, but the road was still pretty bumpy because it was still made of individual stones. You could see deep ruts worn into some of them. Some of us pondered what it would have been like to ride a chariot down that road. My only thought is that as much as I’d like to drive a chariot, riding it down that road would be murder on your knees.

The mosaics were indeed as beautiful as they had been described. I thought I had seen some good mosaics before coming to Israel, but they’re nothing compared to the ones I’ve seen all over this country. Some of the ones I’ve seen at Sepphoris are the most intricate I’ve seen anywhere. I tried to take pictures of them, but no photo did them justice. The best part is that two of them have building built of them that have AC to help preserve them. I was a big fan of these two locations!

Next we stopped at an overlook that is above Nazareth. Nazareth has a ring of hills around it forming a kind of bowl shaped valley in the middle. While the city is fairly large and is up and over the sides of some of the hills, Biblical Nazareth was quite a bit smaller. It’s thought that it probably rested towards the bottom of the bowl where it was more protected. The down side to this is that no cool breeze probably blew through there. Rather, the breeze would have blown above it. It was interesting to see what all was near Nazareth as well as the probable location for the ancient site, but it really wasn’t too impressive to me because of the big city around it. It just didn’t seem like the little village I’ve always imagined.

For lunch, we stopped at En Harod. This is the probable location of where Gideon and his army drank from the spring. This is also where God pared down Gideon’s army to just 300 men. In my mind, this spring was going to be pretty large. I imagined it to be like some of the big springs we have in Florida. I should have learned at this point that most sites here are smaller than I imagined. This spring was no exception. I had trouble picturing so many men drinking from the spring. Dr. Stone shared with us some about Gideon and his battle against the Middianites. Standing where Gideon stood and looking at where they would have had to march to brings a whole new appreciation for this event. Seeing it in its larger context really helped me to picture just how tough these men would have had to be, and just how much they would have needed to depend on God.

Beth Shean was our last stop of the Galilee Field Study. What was interesting to me about this site is that you have an Iron Age Israelite site at the top of the tel. Lower down is an Early Bronze age site that would go back to the fifth or fourth millennium BC, and below that a Greco Roman site. On top of all of this, there’s one place you can stand at the Iron Age site where you can see the other two sites below and a McDonalds in the distance. That’s a huge swath of human history right there!

By the time we left this antiquities site, I was actually ready to get back to JUC. It fealt like I had been away from home for a very long time. Our time in the Galilee region was a great deal of fun, but it was also extremely tiring.