Saturday, July 01, 2006
Tell Dan what?
Things I did today:

-climbed the Roman siege ramp at Masada
-floated in the Dead Sea
-saw the oldest temple to Yahweh found in Israel at Tel Arad

I'm in Israel all this month. Left last Saturday. Our flight was bumped up 3 hours, and so I wasn't able to leave any post here.

I'm with a group of 14 from the seminary. We're digging at Tel-Dan in the far north. I can see the Syrian and Lebanese border from the tel. This past week we dug up remains from the 16-17th century Mamluke period. We're on our way to looking for residential remains from the Iron Age, which would be the biblical period.

Tel Dan is important for a couple of finds. Excavations have gone on since 1966, and since then they've found a city gate dating to the Bronze Age (roughly the time of Abraham and the patriarchs), the high place of Jeroboam (who established Dan as a cult site in the divided monarchy), and an inscription that gives the first extrabiblical evidence of the "House of David."

Internet access is not as easy as I had hoped. I'll post when I can, but the pictures will have to wait until I get home.

Tomorrow we complete our tour of the Judean wilderness by seeing Ein Gedi and Qumran. I expect to find J, E, D and P all together there.

More later...

posted by Peter at 2:36 PM
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