Last Day in Jerusalem

This morning I had no tour, and no one I had to meet, so I actually got to sleep in till a decent hour. Once I got up, I tried to head over to the Dome of the Rock, but it was closed once again when I got there. That thing has the strangest, most spurattic hours I've ever seen. They'll close it for a weeked, and then open it one day for like 3 hours in the morning, and then another day like an hour and a half somewhere in the middle of the day. It's ridiculous! So unfortunately, I won't be able to go inside the Dome of the Rock this trip, but I won't lose sleep over it. It wasn't really my top priority thing to see while I was here, and I did get to see the outside of it, and the wall of Solomon's Temple and all that.

I then decided to get some food, and try to catch a bus to the Jerusalem Museum. So I walked over to Damascus Gate, ordered one last Falafel from my coveted falafel stand, and journied on through Damascus Gate to the nearest bus stop. I waited there like 20 minutes just to find out that that bus doesn't go anywhere near Jerusalem Museum. The bus driver actually told me the only way to get to Jerusalem Museum from Damascus Gate was to take a taxi. Like that was going to happen! It'd cost me something like 50 sheckels to get there by taxi. Screw that, walking's free. So I began to walk, in my usual way, vastly underestimating the distance between areas that look so close on a map. On my way down the otherside of a big hill near city center jerusalem, I got to walk through these beautiful botanical gardens, and the weather was also equally beautiful. It was sunny out, and warm but with a cool wind that whips through every minute or so. Eventually, I made it to where I was trying to get, and payed my ticket to go inside. There was one main reason I wanted so badly to go to the Jerusalem Museum, and that was because The Dead Sea Scrolls were on display there. So I located the area where they were being kept, and headed that direction. The scrolls are kept in a white building, that's quite a work of art in itself, which has a cieling shaped like the tops of the jars that the Dead Sea scrolls were found in. There's a continuous fountain shooting up water all over the white structure that, I read, is supposed to symbolize purity and clensing. Adjacent to the white building is a huge black wall which is supposed to symbolize the enemies of the people who wrote in these scrolls. The people who wrote the Dead Sea scrolls referred to themselves as "Sons of Light", and adversely all their enemies were called "Sons of Darkness" and Satan was known as "The Prince of Darkness" which is where we get that term.

I walked into the room where the scrolls were kept and made sure I read every inscription and information plaque that I could, which was so much information, I'm having trouble remembering most of it. The main hallway of the room had exibitions of artifacts found inside the intricate caves that they lived and wrote in. Things consisting mainly of pottery, old sandals, gardening tools, and all the usual remnants of a lost civilization. When I got to the main room which held the scrolls, I was amazed at how well preserved most of them were. I expected to find them ripped, and delapidated and barely readable (which some of them were), but most of them were almost entirely intact like they had been written 10 years ago. Most of the scrolls they recovered were written on parchment, not papyrus like I'd originally thought, and they had recovered almost every book in the bible (I think it had listed like 4 books they hadn't found, all old testament), including the books that make up the apocrypha. I couldn't read any of the ancient text, being that it was all in hebrew, but the wall plaques were saying that when first reading the scrolls, archiologists were absolutely stunned. The translation on these ancient scrolls dating as far back as 200BCE matched perfectly word for word the common translation of the bible you can pick up in any book store, and every scroll found to date is absolutely consistent.

In the middle on a display case artistically shaped like a rolled up scroll, they displayed the whole book of Isaiah. I wish I could of been able to read ancient hebrew, but I've been told that you can actually follow along in your bible as you read along the text on this scroll which is more than 2,100 years old. One thing that really interested me, was just to sit and look at the penmenship of the writers of the scrolls and see how each one varies from the other. The writing isn't absolutely perfect, which is cool. You can still get a little bit of a human feel, and see a particular person's writing style, and the way he shapes different letters differently from another person. It's like a signature, but better, and it comes from someone who lived in the days of the bible. there were also little shards of pottery that they found with random writings on it where the scribes would practice their penmenship, and make sure the ink wasn't going to drip all over the parchment. I guess I just really liked the idea of the history I'd read about, and heard about which happened so long ago, to become real by seeing a scribes random jottings, and very human practicing to begin writing something so monumentally importaint that they devoted every minute of their lives to it. One of my greatest fears as a christian, was that at some point what if the books of the bible had been changed somehow. Not on purpose even, but just translated slightly differently, or given a little something by a person telling it his own way. It was a question I was never really able to answer when asked by a non-christian. The chances of that happening were almost definate. I mean, look what happens in a game of telephone over the course of like 10 minutes. Now imagine that over a period of 2,200 years. However, somehow the Bible managed to survive through all that without being changed even the slightest bit. It's AWESOME, in the true sense of the word.

After seeing the Dead Sea Scrolls, I walked around the art garden for a bit, and enjoyed the scenery. The Jerusalem Museum, it seems, is not so much of a Museum in the way I thought it would be, but really more of a historical art gallery. But then again, a lot of the Museum was closed for renovations, so maybe the traditional museum artifacts were in those buildings. The Art garden was beautiful, but none of the sculptures really spoke to me all that much. I have yet to find a piece of art in all these galleries I've seen so far that I've been truly amazed by. Some of them I thought were pretty cool, but nothing yet has stopped me in my tracks. That may be something to look for in the future.

When I left the museum, I began walking back. I knew that bus number 38 would take me right back to my hostel, so I looked for a bus station with a 38 on it as I walked. I was stopped at a stoplight, when I was joined by a couple people wearing the same T-shirt. They were quickly joined by several more, and then even more after that. I looked behind me to see a giant mass of people, all waiting for the same stoplight. The stoplight changed and I was immediately sucked into the crowd of people. I thought at first this must be a tour group of some sort, many of them looked like tourists and backpackers. I noticed a young girl who had on a small backpack, cap, t-shirt and jeans, but then something else caught my eye. Around her chest she carried with her a loaded M16. In fact, as I looked around me, I noticed just about every other person had some sort of automatic weapon strapped to their chest. Banners were being carried, and flags baring the Star of David. Some were soldiers dressed in uniform, but others were just men women and children, all of which carried automatic weapons. I wiped the look of "What the hell is this" from my face because I figured that might be a good way to start a bad situation, and tried to figure out what was going on. I could now rule out that these were tourists, unless they were on some kind of war tour. Revolutionaries maybe? And here I was marching along side them. This is terrific, I'm about to become a martyr in some crazy revolution, and all I was trying to do was catch my bus. Viva Israel, and I marched on. I finally got up the courage to talk to a very non-threatening girl next me, and asked her what this was about. She said they were a group of people who came from the south of Israel walking to the north to talk about (or in protest of) the problems of Israel. I asked her what the guns were for, and she told me that they're just for their protection. Some of the people walking are soldiers, and others are just people, and so they felt they needed to arm themselves incase their cause was not looked favorably upon in some parts of Israel.

Eventually I found a bus stop for bus 38, and branched off away from my Israeli revolutionary friends. I caught the bus back to my hostel where I arranged for a taxi to come pick me up for the airport at 3:45am so that I could get to the airport in Tel Aviv, and be sure to catch my flight to Cyprus at 7:05am. I decided since I'm not going to be getting a lot of sleep tonight, that I should take the rest of the day and sleep and rest up, so that I'll have some energy to get through my flight tomorrow.

This is my last night in Israel. It's been quite an experience. Tomorrow I'll be in Cyprus for the weekend, and then on Monday or Tuesday I'll leave to Athens, Greece. I have some friends whom I'll be staying with this weekend in Cyprus, Alana and Andrea. They've prepared a place for me at Andrea's apartment I believe, and say they'd love to show me around Cyprus. I'll be getting into Cyprus at 8:00am tomorrow. Please pray for my safe journey, and I'll talk to you all tomorrow from Nicosia, Cyprus.