Spelunking, Tells, and Underground Dove Coops

Today was field trip day. They always seem to pack so much into 10 hours. We visited 6 or 7 places today. 1st was Beth Shemash...which means house of the sun...or something like that...It's right by a valley...whose name I do not remember without my field trip manual. Anyways...after that we headed over to Elah Valley which is where David fought Goliath. We went to the "brook" and picked out stones and threw them into a farmer's field with relatively similar slingshots. I was horrible. I got my stones to go...no more than 5 or 6 feet. Supposedly in David's time one could throw a rock 100 yards with a slingshot. It was pretty neat...but also pretty dangerous since 40 or so of us were attempting to "sling" our rocks. Some when forward. Most backwards or sideways and actually hit a couple of people. I was very excited to finally realize what I should bring home as a present for one of my brothers. It's completely perfect.

Then we went to another tell...I think the largest...(tells are basically ancient cities built ontop of the rubble of the previous city. It eventually gets built up enough that it resembles a mountain or large hill with a flat top...and lots of rocks sticking out) Anyways...we went to Lachish. It mentions this city several times in the Bible I believe. You can see Hebron, and Palastinian cities in the West Bank. I believe they said that was the closest we would get to these cities that are "off limits"...they were about 25 miles away. There was a small ancient Israelite temple there which allowed us to see the layout...with an open courtyard..then a small room before entering the smallest room, the holy of holies. Lachish was captured several times over the centuries, by the Israelites, Assyrians, and Babylonians.

We also went into a national park...called Marisa I believe. It was believed that Herod the Great was from there...when his family was forced to convert to Judaism. There are series of underground buildings and cisterns and houses there. They would cut blocks of chalk out and use the underground rooms for things such as bird coops...where they would be in little notches...and use the fertilizer and birds for sacrifice. There were also olive presses and houses underground.

My favorite part of our exhausting day was the spelunking in Micah's Caves. It was the coolest experience ever. I had my little flashlight in my mouth half of the time...crawling on all fours..or on my stomach through littles holes underground..and through passage ways. I crawled through the tiny tunnels for 45 minutes until our teachers said we had to go. (tiny meaning it was the width of my shoulders and usually not higher than 2 or tops 3 feet) Everyone was completely filthy when we crawled out. Dust and chalk covered our faces, arms, backs, and obviously pants. Several people are thinking of taking taxis back on a free day to do some more exploring.

It was an awesome day.