Day 2
Today was jam-packed. After an amazing breakfast (more food than at dinner the night before!), we were on the bus by 7:45. Our first stop was old Caesarea, which is an archeological site that has unearthed layer after later of cities built on top of each other. Now, I have a thing for old, dilapidated buildings. My brother always makes fun of me for it because every time I see an abandoned house, I say I want to live there. So I was having the time of my life bounding from stone pillars to old foundations. Our tour guide is absolutely brilliant, so he filled us in on pretty much everything. I don't think there is a detail of Israel history (and current issues) that he doesn't know. Needless to say, I drank in the info he gave at each spot. I should have been an archeologist.
Caesarea was built by Harod in the 1st century as a port town so he could basically make more money. There is a ton more detail than that, but I'm typing on my phone...
Harod constructed a lot of aspects of the city purely so the people (mainly sailors since it was a port town) would have entertainment. He built a theater, a race arena (which was later closed off into an amphitheater for gladiator games/a place to feed people--such as Christians--to wild animals), bath houses, and (likely) brothels.
Caesarea was the town that Peter went to in order to meet Cornelius, who was the first gentile convert to Christianity (Acts 10). It was also the place that Paul defended himself at in court before appealing to Rome, where he was eventually killed (Acts 24). I absolutely loved everything we saw there and the time we spent. I definitely could have stayed longer.
Next, we traveled to Mt. Carmel, the location on which Elijah challenged the Baal prophets (1 Kings 18:20-40). The top was a bit too touristy for my taste, but the view was beautiful. Trees covered the hills, the Mediterranean was off in the distance (although it was too cloudy to see), and the Jezreel Valley stretched off in the other direction. You could envision how Elijah was watching for clouds to form over the sea and blow over to the valley, where the majority of the agriculture takes place (1 Kings 18:41-46).
Another really cool archeological site we stopped at was the ancient city of Megiddo. It had been a major city for that region for centuries due to it's geological location. If you controlled Megiddo, you controlled a huge part of the trade route. As a result, people fought over that city for as long as it had been in existence. We saw plenty of ruins there (which I loved, of course), and we even got to go through a tunnel that the city's water source used to run through. It went from inside the city to outside the walled area. Really impressive!
Out last stop before heading to the hotel was Mt. Precipice, which overlooked Nazareth (where Jesus grew up). Nazareth is very large now, nothing like it was in Biblical times. The view was so pretty, though. Besides Nazareth, you could see Mt. Carmel, Tibor mountain (which is referenced a lot in the Bible, one example being the place that the prophetess Deborah sat), and the Jezreel Valley. Mt. Precipice was the mountain that people sought to throw Jesus off when they became upset with the things he was saying on a visit to Nazareth (Luke 4:16-30).
The rest of the evening consisted of the bus ride to our new hotel, dinner, and finally bed!
Cool fact: our guide He explained that when God referred to a "land flowing with milk and honey," the milk is goat's milk, and the honey is date honey.
AWESOME!!!
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