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<\/a>(Wikimedia Commons public domain photograph)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
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Thursday was our first actual day of touring with our group. (We met them in the airport at Lod on Wednesday night, and brought them up to Jerusalem from there.)<\/p>\n
First, we took them to the City of David, to the area known as \u201cthe ophel<\/em>.\u201d<\/a>\u00a0 Excavations and tourist-friendly development have changed it very much since I first saw it, roughly back under the reign of Solomon.\u00a0 Then they went through Hezekiah\u2019s Tunnel, the so-called \u201cwet tunnel,\u201d while my wife and I chose instead to go through the relatively newly-discovered \u201cdry tunnel,\u201d which is both considerably shorter and considerably older.\u00a0 (It was created by the Canaanites who preceded the Israelite occupation of Jerusalem.). We both came out by the biblical Pool of Siloam, in the modern Arab village of Silwan.\u00a0 Thereafter, we took them up onto the Temple Mount, where I was in sheer bliss while talking about such things as the history of the Temple of Jerusalem, the Dome of the Rock, Al-Aqsa Mosque, Muhammad, his miraculous \u201cnight journey,\u201d and etc. and etc.\u00a0 Then we visited the \u201cWestern Wall\u201d \u2014 commonly but now unfashionably known in past years as the \u201cWailing Wall\u201d \u2014 and climbed up onto the \u201cteaching steps\u201d at the southern end of the Temple site.\u00a0 These are first-century steps that provided the main ancient entrance into the Temple precincts; Jesus and his apostles almost certainly walked on them.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n Because of a marathon on Friday morning, all of the streets around our hotel were closed off.\u00a0 So we had to walk over to Damascus Gate in order to catch our bus.\u00a0 And you really notice how hilly Jerusalem is \u2014 located as it is on a mountain ridge \u2014 when you walk.\u00a0 I always chuckle when we sing the Latter-day Saint Christmas carol \u201cFar, Far Away on Judea\u2019s Plains\u201d during the holiday season: I like the song a lot, but John Menzies Macfarlane had plainly never visited the Holy Land.<\/p>\n Once we had our bus, we took our little group down the highway past Bethany toward Jericho and the Dead Sea, turning left at \u201cGenesis Land\u201d for a camel ride.\u00a0 Then, switching plans not only because of the marathon but in view of multi-day weather forecasts, we traveled to Bethlehem.\u00a0 The first checkpoint at which we arrived was unexpectedly closed \u2014 such things happen under sometimes arbitrary military occupation \u2014 so we had to travel a fair distance around to an alternative passageway through the Israeli \u201csecurity wall\u201d in Bethlehem.\u00a0 Once we were in town, we took them to the Nissan Brothers olivewood factory and shop and then to the emperor Justinian\u2019s ancient Church of the Nativity.\u00a0 From there we headed off to lunch, but we didn\u2019t eat, as we always have before, in The Tent Restaurant overlooking the traditional Shepherds\u2019 Fields.\u00a0 Since our visit today was unexpected, we weren\u2019t expected there.\u00a0 Instead, we ate at another restaurant nearby, which had pretty much the same food but, alas, without quite the same flavor.\u00a0 Then we went to the Franciscans\u2019 Shepherds\u2019 Fields location, as we always do.\u00a0 Finally, we visited the Church of Saint Peter in Gallicantu, not far from Zion\u2019s Gate in the Old City Wall.\u00a0 This is the traditional site where Jesus appeared for his initial judgment before the high priest Caiaphas and where Peter is said to have denied Christ.\u00a0 If<\/em> it is the proper location, then the first-century steps that come up to it from the Kidron Valley become quite important:\u00a0 They would almost certainly have been the way by which Jesus, after his arrest in the Garden of Gethsemane, was brought up to stand before Caiaphas.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n We started off the morning today (Saturday) with a visit to the Church of All Nations and the adjacent Garden of Gethsemane and then to the Orson Hyde Gardens just above.\u00a0 It\u2019s a wonderful place, obviously, to talk about the atonement of Christ, which is what we did.\u00a0 The place was awash with Latter-day Saints \u2014 three busloads from Bountiful Travel alone \u2014 and it was fun to run into John Bytheway<\/a>, Kevin Hinckley<\/a>, and Dave Hadlock<\/a>.\u00a0 Then we attended sacrament services \u2014 branch conference, as it happened \u2014 at Brigham Young University\u2019s Jerusalem Center for Near Eastern Studies, where it was a pleasure to spend some time visiting with, among others, David Rolph Seely<\/a>.\u00a0 , the author of, among many other things, Solomon\u2019s Temple: Myth and History<\/em><\/a>, with our late mutual friend Bill Hamblin.\u00a0 As we commonly do, we reminisced about Bill, whom we both miss very badly.<\/span><\/p>\n Afterwards, we drove out to the Israel Museum, where we spent some helpful time with the huge outdoor model of Jerusalem in the late Second Temple Period.\u00a0 It\u2019s a wonderful teaching tool, and it helps to make sense of the topography and geography of what our group has been seeing for the past few days.\u00a0 I certainly wish that we had a model like this one back in Utah!\u00a0 We then had a look at the Shrine of the Book, where the large majority of the Dead Sea Scrolls are housed.\u00a0 From there, I led our little band up to the archaeological section of the museum and directly to three of my favorite objects in its collection:\u00a0 1) the Pilate inscription from Caesarea Maritima, 2) the ossuary or bone box of the high priest Caiaphas, and 3) a replica of the heel bone of Jehohanan, son of Hagkol, which illustrates the technique of first-century Roman crucifixion.<\/p>\n