THE WHERE OF THE OLD TESTAMENT

Transcription

1 THE WHERE OF THE OLD TESTAMENT APRIL 23, 2018 We are in our Old Testament series, and I hope that you are enjoying it as much as I am. I cannot wait until we get to the tabernacle because it is going to really blow you away. It s one of my favorites; in fact, I m really hoping that I can do the tabernacle study as my next project, my next book. In that case I believe I m going to try to make it more of a fill-in-the-blanks kind of study with DVDs. I think it is that kind of format. There is so much information! I m just going to give it all to you, and I just know that it is going to change the way you worship. That is my prayer for you. It definitely did for me. It was the probably #1 thing that brought me into the Church besides my relationship with my dad and my father wound and my issues with authority. I am really looking forward to that part, and we are just about there. We ve talked about the Who of the Old Testament. We know now that that is both God I AM who I AM and the people of Israel, who are God s people, and by extension because they are our elder brothers in the faith we also are the who of the New Testament. The Who of the Bible, then, is God, the Israelites, and us. We talked about the Who, we talked about the What that was the covenant discussion, and I actually included that in the survey because it s called the master key of understanding the whole Bible and the Scriptures and what it is all about. If that is true, then I would say that the tabernacle is a very, very close second to that. I would agree that covenants probably are the key to understanding the Bible, just because it is the What, and the What is the love of God for humanity, for people, and even the cosmos. Today we are going to talk about the Where. We are going to talk about the Holy Land. I actually really love this subject. I remember in one of my seminary classes we were doing an Old Testament survey and it included all this information on the Holy Land. I just was blown away because I grew up, in my mother s womb, hearing these Bible stories. She always made sure that I had these little picture books of Bible stories. Later as I got older I got Bible story books that had fewer pictures but they were more fleshed out. Then, when I got old enough I was able to read the stories for myself. We were constantly in Vacation Bible School. We had Bible drills. I actually loved those. I have probably mentioned those to you before. If I get repetitive, just pardon me. I have back-toback trips between now and Christmas so I m gone every weekend, I get back on Monday morning, I go straight to teach a class on the Mercy series, on Tuesday I teach an Old Testament class, and then I am preparing for the radio show. At this point I have absolutely no idea what I ve said where. In the meantime, I m writing a book also on how to study the Bible, and it includes some of this information. So, if I repeat myself, just roll your eyes and call me Old Lady Evangelista because half the time I don t know what I ve said. Anyway, I knew all of the stories. In learning this information and looking at these maps which I have included on the study notes for this show I was blown away. I don t know why I had this disconnect in my head but suddenly I understood that this was a real place. These stories were not just stories. I remember that this happened in a similar way as I was homeschooling and my oldest son was working on a timeline in history. We started at creation and so I began with evolution and dinosaurs and all that, but in the very beginning we started with Genesis. I remember that he was putting on that 1 P a g e

2 timeline creation, dinosaurs, cuneiform and the Sumerian civilization, the Egyptians and the Exodus this mixture of what was sacred or Christian history along with secular history, the stuff we learned in World Civilization and that sort of thing. Something clicked in my head and I realized, first of all, that these were real people. They are all on the same timeline that I inhabit, right? They are just way behind. I understood them to be real. They weren t just stories that I had read before and cherished and loved. These were real people that actually lived. In the same way when I learned about the Holy Land, and the geography and the agriculture and the rainfall and the climate and all that stuff, those stories in the Bible suddenly took on this glorious three-dimensional nature. They just came alive. They were suddenly real in a way that they had not been before. I hope that is the case for you. I have included a couple of crude maps. If I am not mistaken they are the actual maps that I got way back then. They are not necessarily accurate as far as the exact places now. It is not a current contemporary map. One of them is topography. One of the others shows you the Fertile Crescent, so you can see where Abraham was called out of Urr and I circled that on the smaller horizontal map and you can see how far his trip took him. I also included the natural regions of Palestine. I also included that it in an infographic for this particular show so that you could sort of have that to hand. I hope you share that. I hope you share all of the shows because it helps get this information into other people. I m a Bible geek so I like all this stuff, but I really do think it is going to amaze you at the things that you are going to connect in this show today. You can see on that natural regions map that there are 4 strips: The coastal plains, the central highlands, the Jordan valley, and the eastern highlands. I hope that as you will go to the radio notes over at scroll down on that home page, and click on today s show The Where of the Old Testament. That is where those maps will be. There are pictures but also there is a PDF there that you can download and print off. Follow along, is what I m saying. That way you can sort of see what I m talking about as we go along. We are going to talk today about each of those strips of land, each of those natural regions. Look at the geographical regions map. I actually drew lines from north to south to show you about where these geographical regions would be separated or delineated. You can see that the whole Holy Land is only at its widest part is only about 60 or 70 miles wide down at the southern end, and at the top it is barely 40. If you look at the length it s just a little over 100 miles. This area is very small. That is important. If you look at the other picture of the Fertile Crescent you can see even better that you have all of this area this Arabian desert is now what we call Iraq and Iran, and Lebanon is in there. You can see the Tigris and the Euphrates rivers, the Persian Gulf right there where Kuwait is. All of this is desert except for this area right here that is shaded in dark. Those are where the rivers are. Because the rivers flood, that causes that land to be so fertile. You can see that Palestine in that little crook on the right of the Mediterranean Sea is a very small area. It is a tiny little area, this Holy Land. An important distinction to make is that God did not choose the land because it was holy. That is true of everything that God choose that he has created. The thing is holy or the land is holy or the person is holy because God chose it. I don t know about you, but a lot of times for instance, Mary. She is full of grace. She is holy. We think that God chose Mary because she was so holy but it s the opposite. Mary was holy because God chose her, and he made her holy because he was going to choose her and the purpose for which he chose her. It s true of us as well. God always equips us to do the thing that he has called us to do. When he says Be holy, he will make us holy. We re not automatically holy and then he chooses us. 2 P a g e

3 The land is not holy in and of itself, it s holy because God chose it to reveal himself and to began incarnate. He began that revelation of himself to Adam and Eve in that same area. The Church teaches that all of us did indeed descend from one man and one woman a specific man and specific woman and science believes that one man and woman actually began and existed somewhere in Africa. We think we may have African roots. In any case, God began to reveal himself even there. That Garden of Eden, especially the Holy Land, was always considered by the ancients to be the belly button of the earth. The navel of the earth is what the theologians called it. I think that s funny because the entire area has that sort of nickname, but also Jerusalem, because Jerusalem is the capital of the Holy Land. Specifically, there is a Church I believe it is the Church of the Holy Sepulcher that is said to be the actual spot that is the belly button of the earth. The land of Palestine, the land that Jesus lived and worked, where his ministry took place, all of that is in this one little strip of earth. I think that s cool. Place is very important to understanding an issue or a place or a story. As we look at the Bible, it really is the love story of God for humanity and all that he has created. In order to understand him, we really need to understand something of the place in which he chose to reveal himself. Places are important. That is why when you study literature you always look at the setting, and the setting includes the place. In my early 20s my husband and I traveled to Poland. We went on a mission trip. We were non-catholic at the time. I loved that trip. First of all, it was an answer to a prayer because I really wanted to go overseas abroad to Europe, but I didn t want to go to do all the touristy stuff. I was snobby, I guess, because now I would just about love to just go any of those places. It was an answer to a prayer because I wanted to do what the locals do. I didn t want to do the whole tourist thing. It was such an odd place for us to get to go, but we went on a mission trip. It s funny looking back on it now because we were non-catholics going to evangelize and witness to this whole country of Catholics. I think that s hysterical now. It s very Pauline. In any case, we went to Poland and we stayed with this family in their flat. It was a teeny little apartment. I love small spaces. My house is not very big, and I love that. I love that my kitchen is small. I like that. It s cozier. I don t want it to be cramped. This family was a mother, father, and daughter, I think. The mother and father were gone the whole time we were there. They were on their own trip and so we stayed with their daughter who was in the youth group at this church which we were visiting. We stayed in her apartment, her family s flat. The rest of the group stayed in the church. It was a pretty big group. We had almost 10 people and we all went together. They stayed at the church. My husband and I were the only 2 people that stayed with this young girl in her flat. I absolutely loved it. We were there for 2 weeks. It was so untouristy. It was a little bitty village. We ate what they ate. One of the cool things about Poland is they eat the leftovers from their dinner the night before for breakfast. I love that. I am not a breakfast person. I can eat a couple of hours after I get up. Occasionally I like the bacon and eggs or omelet or pancakes or whatever, but really rarely unless it s several hours after I get up. Usually I just like fruit and cheese and nuts. In any case, we had the leftovers from the night before. Because we had cabbage with every meal, that meant some sort of slaw and maybe pork chops and some potatoes. One night we had tripe soup. I had no idea what that was. They said it in Polish and I had no idea what it was until they set it down in front of me and it was a bowl of soup. Listen, let me tell you, it smelled like a bowl of doo-doo. Tripe is the intestines from an animal, like chitlins here in the South. People eat chitlins here. Listen, I have the weakest stomach ever, and they set it down in front of me and my mouth started watering because I thought I was going to vomit. I had a hold of table the whole time. My knuckles were just white. I remember looking around at everyone around me. Nobody wanted to be rude and I didn t either, so I picked up my spoon and I was clutching the edge of the table with one hand and had my spoon with the 3 P a g e

4 other hand, and I m just moving it around in the bowl and pretending like I m taking a taste of it. I just pretended like I ate. I remember going to bed hungry that night because it was very difficult for me to even smell it. I have a very acute sense of smell, so I had a hard time. But the cool thing about the trip was that is what that usually ate, so they offered us what they usually ate. It was a family setting. We walked everywhere we went. We drank beverages with no ice. If we did drive, we rode with our hair on fire in this propane-propelled 2-door spec, or what my mom calls a pregnant roller skate through these cobblestone streets. They had no speed limits. We bathed once a week because it was so expensive. Well, we bathed every day because I didn t realize what was happening. The people who were staying in the church were complaining because there was no hot water. The 8 of them would get up to take a shower every morning and there was no hot water, so they were complaining about having no hot water. My husband and I just thought we were so lucky because we had hot water. The hot water container was on the wall and it was maybe 5 or 10 gallons, so it was really hot. You let the water out into the tub and then you run cold water in it and that is how you bathe. I didn t realize until we got home that it was probably because it was so expensive to heat the water that they had cut the heat off the water at the church and this poor girl didn t know that we were taking a bath every single day in her apartment. We probably spent them out of house and home doing that. In any case, it was the best trip, but it was really odd. I developed this sinus issue while we were there. It was in the fall. I took to the streets in the little village looking for something that resembled Sudafed. I walked and walked. I was so happy. I kept saying hi to everybody. I was smiling and just about dancing down the street. By the time I got to the apothecary shop, the chemist, which is what they called the pharmacy, I noticed that everybody seemed so morose. Nobody met my eyes. Nobody answered me when I said hello. Nobody smiled. Everybody was looking down at their feet when they walked. They didn t have anything that resembled Sudafed. Everyone kept trying to give me grapeflavored calcium tablets, but that s neither here nor there. I had no idea what was going on, and I got back to the church when everyone was meeting together for dinner and I asked what was going on. That is when I was enlightened to Polish history and the recent horrors that they had suffered at the hands of the communists, including extermination and exile from their homeland. I was just absolutely humbled by the resilience of this nation that had welcomed us into its bosom. We got to go to a couple of monuments and a museum, and we learned all about what had been happening. It made perfect sense that the people who had lived under this iron rule of communism for all this time were not skipping through the streets. They had a very serious outlook on life. It humbled me quite a bit. I told you that because a lot of people read the Bible like it s just some sort of spiritual book. I did this too, but I didn t mean to. They read it like it s almost like it s detached from history and the events and history and consequences and sequences of history, but it s our sacred history. If our process of revelation has been a self-disclosure of person to persons God to us and if God entered history as a person through a particular race of people at a special place in the world during a specific historical place in time, and if that same Jewish race of people also experienced and wrote most of what is in the Bible, in and from that particular geographical place, then what might the Where of the Bible tell us about God? That s an important question. It actually tells us a lot. Just like he did in the times in the people in the Bible, God wants to speak to us in our own time and our own work, our own relationships, and our geographical location. We are not here accidentally. We don t live in America accidentally, or for those of you who are my British or French or Polish or Australian or Canadian listeners, wherever we live we live there for a particular 4 P a g e

5 reason in a particular time of history, and we have particular family members for many reasons, reasons that God knows and God planned. It s important, if we are going to understand God s way with us, to understand his ways with the people that are in the Bible, the Old Testament especially since that s what we re talking about. It s important that we know something of the when and where and through whom everything happened, because we want to be able to visualize the places while we were reading. The people, the time, and the land constitute the arena in which God chose to speak, act, and intervene uniquely in history. I think it is so fascinating that almost every human author of every single book of the Bible was part of the area of Palestine. Almost all of them were Jewish. I don t know if I mentioned this during our survey, but the Bible is collected into one book for us but for them the scriptures were scrolls and there were many of them. For every single Old Testament book that you have in your Bible, that was a single scroll or a series of scrolls. Each book was a separate book. The word bible, or biblia, means books. It s a library of books. It s not just one volume, though we have it collected for us neatly and conveniently by the Church. It s a library of books. Almost every author of every book of the Bible was Jewish. They all lived in this area. It is so important to understand what this area is like because we want to know these people and what they were like and what kind of living they did. Every biblical prophet with the exception of Moses, who was buried outside the promised land the Holy Land with his obstinate flock all lived at least a little while in the Holy Land. They lived and wrote from that context. We cannot understand Jesus or even ourselves as a people of faith without that context. Sometimes it is only understanding the land that we get why certain stories have the meanings that they have. That is why I am sharing this. Romans 11:16 says, If the first fruit of Judaism is holy, then the lump of Christianity is holy. If the root is holy then so are the branches. St. Paul says there that we Christians are grafted onto the olive tree of faith. Even the olive tree had a very special significance in the Holy Land, and it still does. It s a very arid climate and olives grow well in that climate, in the Mediterranean. That s why our olive oil comes from Italy and Palestine and Spain and all of those areas there that are around that Mediterranean. You see that even the terminology that is used in the Bible is important, so knowing something about the land will tell you a little more and give you more meaning for each of the verses and the stories that you read. In knowing something about the land that this olive tree grows in is to know something about ourselves in Christ. There are all sorts of topographical, agricultural, climactic, and geographical information that contributes to our understanding of the Bible, especially in the Old Testament, but by extension also by Christ. That s why we are looking at it. As I said, the ancients called this area the navel of the earth, or the belly button of the earth. To this day the land of Israel is more than simply a place for Jews. They don t recognize Jesus as their Messiah. They still hold to this Old Testament law, the first 5 books, the Torah. That s their scriptures. They don t recognize Jesus as their Messiah. All of the Old Testament prophesies have not been fulfilled for them yet, they believe. They do not understand Jesus as the fulfilment of those prophesies. They continue to believe in the literal, physical fulfilment of those promises in the same way that the events of the Torah were literal and physical. We talked about the outward and the inward and that God used all of these literal things the need for water, food, leadership, protection, a law in a literal way to teach them to depend on him for all of their literal physical needs. Later Jesus came to show us that God is even more interested in the spiritual needs that go with that. He turned all of those literal examples into spiritual examples for us. He is the living water. He is the bread of life. He is the tabernacle or the temple that he will destroy. The temple of his body is the one that they will destroy and he will raise up in 3 days. He goes more 5 P a g e

6 deeply. For the Jews, today, the land is primary. It is said by them to be a body for the soul of the Jewish people. A Jew does not travel to Israel, they say, he returns there. It is a land with a soul of it s own, a divinely blessed land. That s true. It is blessed because God revealed himself there. He actually incarnated there in Christ. It is a specific, well-defined, very special peace of earth to which the Jewish destiny is tied, and it will be even in the end. We know that the prophesies of St. Paul, Apocalypse, and the Old Testament all say in the end the Jewish people will be called back to Christ and will understand him to be the Messiah and they will except him to be their messiah. That has not come yet. I m getting way ahead. The point is that this land, and everything that has to do with Judaism and the Jewish destiny, is tied to that land. It is central to their existence. In fact, Jewish tradition teaches, God created the world like an embryo. Just as the embryo begins at the navel and continues to grow from that point, so too the world. The Holy One, blessed be he, began the world from its navel. From there it was stretched hither and yon. Where is it s navel? Jerusalem, and Jerusalem s navel itself the altar. That s obviously the altar in the temple, not the cross as we know it now. Following our elder Jewish brothers in the faith, St. Jerome and Christian geographers of the Middle Ages also argued and used that term that Jerusalem was the center, or the belly button, of the world. There is a stone set in the floor in the Church of the Holy Sepulcher. That is the traditional site of the burial and resurrection of Christ. Tradition says that is thought to be the exact spot. I always thought it was odd that the Catholic Church was the one that had all the art and all the holy places. When you travel to the Holy Land it is the Catholic churches that are on those sites. Why is that? Because it is the church of history. It s the church that was the beginning in the beginning. The Church has guarded the relics and the places and the artwork from the history of the Church. Christians also can argue that Palestine or the Holy Land is the center of nations. It s also our Holy Land. That s not even purely in a geographical sense, it s just true because Christ came from there and so did our elder brothers and sisters in Judaism. It s a region that is distinct from all others. It s the center of world history and center of geography in the sense that it s the Promised Land. It s the land that God promised to Abraham 2,000 years before Christ was born, lived, and died there. It s in this holy land that Christianity itself was born and survived the Roman Empire and changed the course of human history. Like anything else, God didn t choose it because it was holy, it was holy because God chose it as the location for revealing himself. For those who believe in providence, that Palestinian setting for this love story of salvation can t be accidental. The word Palestine actually originated from the root philistine. They were the notorious Israelite enemies and the people of Goliath. If you look at your little map of the Palestinian natural regions, on the far left-hand side you see the plain of Philistia. That is where the Philistines were. That is where the word Palestine comes from. They are first mentioned in the Bible as from Noah in Genesis 10:14. They occupied this little western section. From a geographical point of view, this land of Palestine if you look at your Fertile Crescent map, you can see this bridges the European, African, and Asian continents, all of which converge at this eastern seaboard of the Mediterranean. The citizens have always mingled on these trade routes by sea and land. The sea trade routes would go in here because it was central to this whole entire area on this map, and also the camel caravans would travel from the neck of the northern part of Palestine all the way down to the left of the Jordan River, which you can see on the lower map. They would travel from the Jordan River from the north to the south all the way to Egypt. There were all kinds of trade routes there. 6 P a g e

7 It s been invaded from all three different directions, but the location ultimately was an advantage when the gospel feet began trekking in all those different directions to evangelize the world with the Gospel of Christ. In its widest sense, then, the Holy Land includes the whole Fertile Crescent. That is that semi-circle that sweeps from Mesopotamia and the Euphrates River. This was where God called Abraham to go to this land. He didn t even know where he was going, but he was going to Palestine, the promised land that God pledged to him. This is also the land of Egypt. Down on the left is the Nile, where baby Moses was drawn out of the river reeds to become the prince. You can see the shortness of the distance between Egypt and Mt. Sinai and the eastern side of the Jordan River. You can see Egypt at the top, but on the bottom map of Palestinian Natural Regions, the land itself is only about 100 miles long and 50 or 60 miles wide. It s a very small area. All of the people there were related to each other. They were basically cousins. I hope at this point you are realizing that we are not only a people of a book, the Bible, but that we are also the people of a land. In a narrow sense the land of Palestine is the Promised Land in a literal sense. It is a rich land. It is fertile. It is naturally separated into 4 geographical strips that run north to south. It was called a land flowing with milk and honey in Exodus 3:8, and the most glorious of all lands in Ezekiel 26. The land was so fruitful that the spies who were sent in to look at it brought back this single cluster of grapes that was so heavy it had to be carried by 2 men (Numbers 13:23-24). Palestinian farmers have to work hard to produce yield but good grief. If the fruitfulness of the land was a metaphor of the spiritual fruitfulness of the Promised Land in Christ, then think about that a little bit. What might that mean for you? That s a literal land and it is so fruitful that it takes 2 men to carry one cluster of grapes, then what is the spiritual Promised Land supposed to be for us? Jesus said that the kingdom is in us. It s here. The spiritual fertility and the richness that is available to us right now in Christ, even here on earth, is that kind of fruitful. Literally, though, as far as the actual land, the country is pretty small. If you take a look at these natural regions, the Lebanon Mountain range extends from to the north (Lebanon means white, it snows). The Mediterranean Sea is to the west, and the deserts are down to the east and the south. This map doesn t actually show you all the territories where this land was divided up into the 12 tribes. Each of the tribes got a section of land. At the top in the north was the tribe of Dans Land. You don t see that on this map. That s actually scriptural. I ll stick it in the radio notes if you want to go look at how those were divided and look up a map for that. Dan was at its northern-most part, and there was actually a city called Dan. If you look right above Central Highland where you can see that little dot, that s where the city of Beersheba was. In the scriptures you see this expression denoting the land from north to south. The whole expanse of it was called from Dan to Beersheba. You see that in Judges 21 and 1 Samuel 3:20 and a couple other places. I ll add those to the radio notes. You can see the total area in square miles is not very big. The Jordan River is called the backbone of the land, and it begins up in the Mountains of Lebanon at the very top. You can see that I drew a little triangle up there. Those waters run off from the snow melt and the snow melt trickles down to Lake Hula and then down further to the Sea of Galilee, which is also called the Lake of Tiberius, and then down from there through the Jordan River. It descends. Jordan actually means descender. At the top there where the mountains are, it descends in elevation all the way down to the lowest elevation on the face of the earth, the Dead Sea. That is why it is called the descender. The hills from the coastal plains roll up to the mountains on the left side of the river then down into the river valley, then back up to the right side of the mountains and then back down off the plains into the desert. It s sort of this big hill. It s really flat at the coast and it rolls down and then flat and then back up and then 7 P a g e

8 down again, down into the desert. You can see that really well if you look at the topographical map. You can see the elevations a little better, but you can also see that the Sea of Galilee at the top is really small. It is funny that they would call that a sea because it s really just a little lake. It empties down into the river. The land itself continues down to the Gulf of Aqaba. That was a seaport for the kings, especially. The topography of the land naturally separates it into these 4 long strip-like divisions: The Coastal Plains, the Central Highlands, the Jordan Valley, and the Eastern Highlands. From west to east, the Coastal plains ascend from the Mediterranean where the marshes and the pasturelands supported David s flocks. There were also swaths of wildflowers like the Rose of Sharon. They bloomed in profusion there because it was such a beautiful area. It s kind of beachy. The plains roll gently upward from the coastal seaports to the Central Highland mountain range. Those mountains from the central and eastern highlands tower over the plains and can be seen clearly from the coast. If you look at the topography map you can see that the elevation is really high, and that the land rolls up to the mountains and then back down to the valley of the river and then back up and plateaus off again. The Central Highlands, that second strip, is where Jesus s childhood and public ministry took place, in these hills of Galilee. That is where Nazareth is, where he lived. On a clear day the Mediterranean Sea is visible. It s only about 17 miles to the west. At the foot of the Carmel Mountain range rests the fortress town of Megiddo. For centuries it guarded the entrance to the main mountain pass to the south that leads to the hill country of Judea and Jerusalem, which is further down south. The region between the two was the focus of Israel s history during the divided monarchy. I drew the delineations between Samaria and Judah. There were 10 tribes that were to the north. They occupied all that area. The two down to the south occupied the southern parts of Judea there. The capital of the northern kingdom Israel was Samaria, and the capital of the Southern kingdom of Judea was Jerusalem. Jerusalem itself is actually built on a mountain surrounded by mountains. It is sometimes called the Seven Hills of Jerusalem. It is perched on the crest of a Central Highland mountain chain that spreads through Palestine from north to south. We see that in the Psalms. It is believed that the temple was built and destroyed and rebuilt on the temple mount in Jerusalem on the very site on Mt. Moriah where Abraham almost sacrificed his son Isaac. (Genesis 22:2 and 2 Chronicles 3:1). Pilgrims passed this way all the time to Jerusalem by donkey and camel and by foot thousands of years ago. They were making their way to the holy sites for prayer and offerings and visits. Across the Kidron Valley, below Jerusalem, the Mount of Olives offers this really panoramic view of the temple site. You can t see that on this map, but if you look up a topographical map or a map of the temple area you can see this. That is the place where Jesus wept over Jerusalem, the Mount of Olives. It has actually been a Jewish cemetery from ancient times based on the Jewish tradition that when the messiah comes the resurrection of the dead will begin there. It really did. That prophesy is in Zechariah 14:4. The Mount of Olives is where Jesus ascended into heaven (Acts 1:11-12). From the summit of Mount of Olives, the land runs about a 2-day foot journey through this desert land called the Wilderness of Judea where Jesus was tempted by the devil for 40 days. You can see down south where that was. Then you have the Jordan Valley. That means descender. It also rests on a fault line in the valley, and so that river serves as a spine between the 2 mountain ranges and the 2 smaller bodies of water in the area, that being the Sea of Galilee and the Dead Sea. Up in the northern parts that is where the 8 P a g e

9 snow-capped peaks and the carpets of wildflowers and the waters of the Galilean hill country and the Sea of Galilee flow all the way down to the lowest point of the Dead Sea. Then you have the Araba, meaning dry. If you look at the top of the Dead Sea, you see Kamran and Jericho. Kamran is where they found the Dead Sea Scrolls. This area is honeycombed with caves. John the Baptist lived in that area as a hermit, and also that whole community of Essenes supposedly lived there. Another little tidbit of cool information is there at the Dead Sea there were pitch fires that burned all the time because of the salt land, and there were earthquakes and stuff a lot. That s where the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah were located. It is thought scientifically that what happened was there was an earthquake and those pitch fires just burned them to death. Isn t that interesting? In the Gulf of Aqaba, Israel s kings kept fleets of ships there to trade to with Africa and Asia. That means the Red Sea at the tip of the Sinai peninsula and flows on down to the Indian Ocean. We see in 1 Kings 10 there were gold, silver, ivory, apes, and peacocks traded there. Then you have the Eastern Tabor land. The Jordan Valley ascends on the eastern side of the riverbank back up to this eastern highland where Jacob wrestled the angel at the Jabbok River where Jacob wrestled with God. It s a fertile plateau because it gets lots of rainfall. Bashan is famous for its flocks of sheep. Gilead is famous for the balm of Gilead. The caravan of Ishmaelites that bought Joseph from his brothers was traveling on this king s highway. If you look to the very top of the right-hand side in Damascus, that caravan would have gone down to about the Sea of Galilee and taken a left, gone toward the coastline there, and then gone all the way down south on into Egypt. There were actually several caravans that crisscrossed that area. That caravan that they sold Joseph to was headed to Egypt on camels loaded with spices and balms and myrrh. (Genesis 37:25). Further south in this Eastern Highlands strip is Mt. Nebo and Moab, and that is where Moses glimpsed the Promised Land for the first time and wasn t allowed to go in. The southern-most point is Edom. The inhabitants of Edom prevented the children of Israel from going into the Promised Land through their territory, so they became lifelong enemies. As far as the jobs that the people did, they were shepherds. They were shepherds and then later, after they settled the land of Palestine and outed the enemies, then they became agricultural and grew all kinds of wonderful things. I hope that this has helped you. We kind of just hit the high spots. There is lots more that I could share but I don t have the time. I hope it has helped you, though, to see on these maps where some of these stories take place. Next week we ll talk about the When of the Old Testament. 9 P a g e

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