The Israel Museum/West Jerusalem

Today's journeys took us into West Jerusalem, basically a modern-day city very different frm East Jerusalem where St. George's is located and the old city where yesterday's photos were taken. You could be anywhere in the world, really, as you drive but a short distance to the west. This is a shot taken from The Israel Museum, our destination, but I include it because it is the Kennesett. We didn't go there but I thought it worth noting.

Here you get a sense of where we were and what this day was about. You can see the Kenneset to the left, behind us and some of the buildings of more modern West Jerusalem as well between our heads. To the right of Chris is The Shrine of the Book (more below). It is made to look like the clay jars in which the Dead Sea Scrolls had been stored. You kind of lose perspective here but the Shine of the Book is part of The Israel Museum and just about a hundred yard behind us, as opposed to the Kennesett which is across the street and maybe a quarter to half mile away. In any event, the photo was taken to give a sense of perspective of the model of Second Temple Jerusalem, i.e. Jerusalem in the first century, at the time of Jesus. More photos below but it's essentially a three dimensional replica of what the city may have looked like before the Romans destroyed the Temple in 70 A.D. (What is left of that temple is just the Western/Wailing Wall and some steps; and as previously mentioned the Dome of the Rock is now built on top of the Temple Mount.

So here you get a sense of what the Temple itself looked like, a huge space. The"holy of holies" is located in the middle and raised up.

You get a sense here of the whole of the walled city in this model and how dominant The Temple was on the landscape of the city. Although a little hard to see in this photo, the palace of Herod the Great and the home of Caiphus, the high priest, are the larger buildings to the left of the Temple.

Here you get a better view of the palace and "rich part" of town looking toward the Temple. This was really cool and I'm not sure the photos can convey that. I've seen architectural renderings of the Temple many times but my brain at least works much better in three-dimensions. Having now walked within the walls of the old city it is pretty easy to imagine what it was like, with the help of this model, 2000 years ago. I hope that comes through in the photos and previous reflections in this blog.

The second stop at the museum was the Shrine of the Book which is about the discovery of the scrolls at Qumran. When I teach undergrads the hardest part is trying to help them to begin to grasp that books are a relatively new thing in human history and a bound Bible is really a library of books or more accurately scrolls. I wish I could do this field trip to this museum at the start of every semester rather than having them read an essay in the Oxford Annotated Bible!

Qumran for anyone who doesn't know was the site where a Jewish sect known as the Essenes withdrew from Jerusalem to set up an intentional desert community. What is important about them for Christians is that they were essentially contemporaries of the Jesus' movement so they give us a glimpse at a movement both like and not like the movements of John the Baptist and Jesus. For example as I was reminded today in the museum that the Essenes practiced ritual immersion and also gathered for spiritual communal meals of bread, wine, dates, honey and cheese as they looked for the eschaton--the end of the world. Sound familiar? They went to the desert in order to build a spiritual community to substitute for the Temple in Jerusalem. Sound familiar? In any event, in the 1940s, the Dead Sea Scrolls were found in clay jars by a school boy in Qumran--everything was there from the Hebrew Bible except Nehemiah and Esther. The scrolls were in amazingly good shape.

Back to the point above: in the essay I have students read for my course at Assumption it tells them we have no "original" of any Biblical book. What we have are scrolls in better and worse shape, painstakingly written out by scribes. They made errors sometimes, and corrections too. And over many centuries parts of the scrolls also deteriorated. So it is painstaking work, before you ever begin to translate an ancient text into English, to first agree upon a "text" based on the scrolls we possess. What was cool here was to literally see the scroll of Isaiah (actually it is a replica here and not the original, but still!) unrolled and wrapped around a kind of kiosk in the center of the room. So you walk around the kiosk to read the entire scroll. Just a very cool visual. You can see where the text is clean, where there is some deterioration, where there are corrections made, etc. You couldn't take pictures in there unfortunately and I'm not sure I'm describing it well, but basically it's 734 centimeters long (you can convert that!) and unrolled and wrapped around something that sort of kiosk, and then encased in glass.

Finally, as Monty Python would say, "now for something completely different." Below is a picture taken from the window of my bedroom: some boys at soccer practice. It seems to me if there is ever going to be peace in Jerusalem and peace on earth it is sports and music that will lead us there.