Still Diggin

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Hello again from Kibbutz Hoquq in Israel!



It’s another gorgeous day here, so I thought I’d take some time to sit out under a palm tree and let you know some more about the actual dig that we’ve been working on.



We’ve just finished day 6 digging at Bethsaida and we’ve already found a lot more than we originally planned. DJ talked a little about the pit that we were in last week where we uncovered a 3000 year old floor and found possible remnants from an ancient sacrificial site. We’ve since moved to the other side of the wall to a room they assume was a storage area. When I first imagined digging, I thought we would be using toothbrushes and finding one or two artifacts per day. In reality, we’ve been using wheelbarrows and pulleys to move around 1/2 ton boulders. Not everyone at the site has such an honor, but they decided the college kids from Nebraska would be better suited than the retired couples or the Harvard students.



Today we dug down deep enough to find either a threshold to another room or the base layer of a wall. While digging through several feet of dirt, it’s amazingly common to find broken pottery shards and bone fragments. In fact, we find so much of both of these that nearly all pieces get discarded at the end of the day. More rare pieces would include beads, coins, jewelry, or glass shards.



Typical days here have a pretty standard schedule. We wake up at 5 and throw on our combat boots and safari hats and head to the bus. The drive to the site takes about 20 minutes, so we get a little time to wake up and enjoy the breathtaking scenery around the Sea of Galilee. Once at the site, the 40 or so volunteers and archaeologists grab the tools they’ll need for the day and get all the tents around our four active sites set up. The actual digging can be fairly tedious if you have a long ways to go. Break away chunks with a pick, scoop with a trowel, dump into buckets, sift the buckets, put your finds in the “find bucket” and repeat. At 9:00 we break for breakfast, which is usually far more delicious than normal granola cereal, fruit, and bread would be. By 10:00 we’re back in “ze pitz” as one of the Nazi influenced archaeologists refers to them as and digging for treasure. Around 11:00 is my personal highlight of the day, popsicle break. Then it’s just another short hour of digging before we have to take all the tools back and head for the bus. Throughout the day there are also certain volunteers washing the previous day’s finds for our daily pottery reading.



We get back to the Kibbutz for lunch and either take a nap or do something less fun. Today we hiked with a small group up behind the Kibbutz to a deep ravine with a pass called “1900 step trail.” Since my mom’s probably reading this, I won’t spend much time talking about the two gates we hopped to get there or the staircase so steep you needed a rope to climb down. But mom, we had a pastor with us so it was fine. Four people, including DJ, started the descent while I waited at the top and peed my pants. A couple minutes later, after about a dozen “Blake........come ons” I joined in. We made it to the bottom by the grace of God and then realized we only had one bottle of water between the five of us and a long way back up. We made it back to the top and back over the gates at the EXACT moment the park guards drove up. And that is exactly why, if you’re going to break the law, you do so with a pastor.



At 5:00 p.m. every day is pottery reading. This is probably the most tedious part of the process as we mainly just sort and catalog pottery while Dr. Arav, the founder of Bethsaida, tells us what we found. At 7:00 we eat dinner which is followed by lecture at 8:00. These lectures have been on a variety of topics ranging from interesting to not so much, but they’re all from experts in their respective fields, so it’s a great way to get great insights into many fields. The lectures are over around 9:00 and we take the next few minutes to snapchat our girlfriends and tell them how nice they are for dating us and time for bed and pillow talk!





Hopefully that gives you a decent idea what’s goin on over here in the Holy Land. We’re trying our best to soak in all everything in our last few days before heading to Jerusalem. It won’t be long before we’ll be back in Omaha and reading verses like Psalm 130:7-8 that says, “O Israel, hope in the Lord! For with the Lord there is steadfast love, and with him is plentiful redemption. And he will redeem Israel from all his iniquities” with an entirely new image. Again, thanks for all your thoughts and prayers! We’ll check back soon

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