That Shower Came From Star Trek

The next morning started bright and early with the obnoxiously loud telephone in our room ringing for our wake-up call. Sam Bowman answered it and I got up to take a shower. After breakfast we loaded up in the bus and drove across the north of Israel to the seaside town of Capernaum. Our guide explained the remains of a Jewish synagogue we found there, which were made of a type of stone not found anywhere near the Sea of Galilee. This meant that the Jews (who were building a larger synagogue as a way of thumbing their noses at the budding Christian population in Capernaum) had to ship the stone from somewhere else, which would have been incredibly expensive. The upshot of this is that one of the stones used in the synagogue was carved by someone who inscribes his name as a son of Zebedee, which provides secondary confirmation that the family of Zebedee described in scripture actually existed in that area at the right time for two to become Jesus’ disciples.

From Capernaum we drove deeper into the disputed Golan Heights.Prior to the 1960’s the whole Golan area was part of Syria. In the mid-60’s, the Israeli military launched a surprise simultaneous assault on every major Arab air force and essentially obliterated them all. This meant that their subsequent land invasions of the Sinai peninsula in the south, and the Golan Heights in the north were easy victories as the Arabs had no way to contest the Israeli fighter jets dropping bombs on their heads. Since this assault (named the Six Days War) Israel has held the whole Golan region, though it exchanged the Sinai Peninsula for a peace treaty with Egypt.

We stopped for one final time before returning to Nazareth for the night at Hatzor (Hazor in the Bible). Hazor was the site of a major city and is the famed location of Jabim’s palace during the time his people oppressed Israel until Deborah the Judge’s uprising. The view was amazing, only slightly lessened by a haze which settled across the whole of Israel caused by dust storms blowing in from the southeast. We finished touring Hazor, and by now we were all completely exhausted. We returned to the hotel, ate dinner, and relaxed for a few hours while preparing for the drive to Bethlehem the next day.