Adventures and Encounters: Reflections on a Summer in Israel & Palestine

Adventures and Encounters: Reflections on a Summer in Israel & Palestine
By: Kristin E. Riegel
  
On July 6, 2012, I exited the Ben Gurion airport on a hot, summer morning and stepped into the sun and onto the streets of Israel. I was jetlagged, carrying far more luggage than I needed, and clueless on how I was going to get from the airport to Jerusalem, where I was meeting a friend who was living there for the summer. It didn’t matter though, I was in Israel and about to begin a journey, an adventure, and what I would soon realize, was to be a series of challenging, but inspiring encounters with people from Israel, Palestine, and around world. 

There were three main parts to my travels in Israel and Palestine: participating in the Leon Levy Expedition to Ashkelon, attending Sabeel’s 7^th Annual International Young Adult Conference, and visiting sacred and historic sites in Israel and Palestine. Each component of my trip offered unique opportunities to not only encounter different peoples and cultures, but also to reflect on my own community, sense of identity, and vocation. Over the next few weeks, I’ll be sharing brief reflections on my experiences here on The Herald.  Send me at email or come and talk to me if you have questions, comments, or if you want to learn about the opportunities McCormick offers for students to travel to the Middle East!

Dr. Tracy Hoffman & Dr. Ryan Boehm
excavate an archway.

The Leon Levy Expedition to Ashkelon

From June 9 to 28, 2012, my days began at 4:30am. After a quick “first breakfast,” I would join the other volunteers working on Grid 47, one of three grids currently being excavated in Ashkelon. Tel Ashkelon has a long history, dating back to 2700 BCE, because of its unique and advantageous position on the Mediterranean Sea. In 1750 BCE, during the end of the late Bronze Age, ramparts were built to protect the city, which had become a large trade center and strong economic force in the region. From this time onward, Ashkelon continued to be populated, albeit by a variety of different peoples and kingdoms.  In Grid 47, we were primarily excavating artifacts and building structures from the Roman, Byzantine, and Islamic periods. At the heart of our site was a Roman Odeon, a small theater, which the city of Ashkelon was hoping to partially restore so that the local community could visit and learn more about their history.

Dr. Tracy Hoffman, our grid supervisor, gave us a tour on our first day and explained that what we were seeing was the “bowels of the Odeon,” as after the theater went out of use, its marble and stone was robbed and repurposed as building materials. Dr. Hoffman’s enthusiasm for the Odeon was contagious, but tried as I could to envision this once magnificent theater, all I could see was a random arrangement of stones walls that had somehow managed to survive 1,000-plus years of wear and tear. It would take almost two weeks before I was able to begin to see what she saw and to understand that archaeology was not about finding individual artifacts, but rather about digging to discover, learn about, and reconstruct the story of how people lived, worshipped, and engaged with one another and the world. 

A cistern in Grid 47 and the many guffas that were used
to haul dirt from the site.

Some days, excavating involved using a paintbrush as we carefully removed monochrome Islamic pottery and glassware from 7^th century. Other days, excavating involved a sludge hammer as we tore down walls built during the Byzantine and Islamic periods so that we could search for the ever-elusive “third wall” of the Odeon. Every afternoon, we spent time at the pottery compound washing and reading the material culture that we had found that day. In the evenings, we attended lectures where we learned more about the rich history of Tel Ashkelon. Throughout this experience, I was struck most by the ordinariness of what we found—cooking pots, wine vats, and small iron crosses and coins.

The diverse material culture that we were uncovered brought history and the Bible to life for me in a whole new way. As we visited other grids, especially Grid 38, which was excavating from the Philistine period, I found myself in awe as I slowly began to make the transition from seeing these groups as abstract concepts or pseudo-mystical people to seeing them as communities of human beings who cooked food, shared in religious rituals, and engaged in housework and warfare, much like we do today. Although I had utilized historical criticism in my exegesis papers at McCormick, working with the material cultures of these peoples helped them come alive for me in a meaningful and significant way. As I read the Bible each night, especially the passages that mentioned Ashkelon, my understanding of these passages became much more “grounded” as what we had discovered in the ground painted a different picture for me of the characters and communities mentioned in the Bible.

Archaeology helped me to realize that I was not only connected to the people and communities mentioned in the Bible because of tradition and faith, but also because I was human. Through literally touching the cultures of the communities that existed at the same time of the Israelites and early “Christian” communities lived, I began to read and relate to the people in the biblical text as peoples and concrete communities who have things to say, stories to share, and important wisdom and lessons to impart about what it means to be a community and to be in relationship with God and one another.

Grid 47 Crew, The Leon Levy Expedition to Ashkelon. Summer 2012.