Joshua fought the battle of Jericho!

A history lesson: Although Jericho has always appeared on the maps it has been in slightly different places throughout time. Through my field trip I was able to visit 3 of the 4 “different” Jericho’s.

We started out with Tel Jericho. (Do you remember what a Tel is?) This is the Jericho that is found in the Old Testament. Basically it looked like a mound of dry dirt. Thrilling.

One of my favorite parts about this field trip was that we looked up scriptures at every place we went. It gave us a feeling of what happened where we were.

At Tel Jericho we looked at the story of Rahab, the harlot, in Joshua 2 and 6. I am sure that I had heard the story before but I didn’t remember it. I encourage you to read it. What we learned from it is that it doesn’t matter who you are or whether or not you were born in the covenant—those that put their trust and faith in God are blessed. Rahab is even mentioned in the genealogy of Christ found in Matthew. Crazy huh?

On Tel Jericho overlooking the city with some awesome girls!

Also, while we were at Tel Jericho there was a shop nearby that was selling Dead Sea Salt Scrubs AND giving free samples to us. My hands felt delicately soft!

Next we headed to Modern Jericho. Here we stopped by a beautiful sycamore tree and read from Luke 18:35 to 19:11. It is an amazing story.

The story of healing the blind man would have occurred in the New Testament Jericho but it was a beautiful spot.

Our third stop was Herod’s Winter Palace—which is in New Testament Jericho. We learned a lot about Herod. He really was a terrible man who killed basically everyone in sight. Caesar once said “I would rather be one of Herod’s pigs than his son” because Herod was a very jealous man and killed his sons when he thought they were more popular. When he knew he was dying he wanted the people to morn for him, but he knew that they wouldn’t. So he sent out a decree that when he died they would execute a list of people. That way, everyone would be sad that he had died and everyone would morn him. Seriously, he is terrible!

However, he did build some amazing buildings (usually he built them to gain favor with the Jews). It was pretty cool because we were able to hike down to his palace and walk through it. Obviously it is in ruins now—but we walked through them. We could touch the walls and everything. I am pretty sure that if a place like that was in America we wouldn’t be able to get within feet of the outer wall of the palace. It was amazing that we could be IN the palace.

In Herod's palace with Robin and Elyse.

We ended in Wadi-Kilt dry river bed. From it we could see a Greek Orthodox Monastery built into the mountain. Other than that we were surrounded by the Judean wilderness. It was SOOO hot. Just wandering around for a half hour was good enough for me. Here we read 1 Kings 17:1-7. 

This was around where Jesus wandered in the Wilderness to be with God and was tempted by the devil. I learned something interesting here. We learn from the scriptures that we was there for 40 days and 40 nights. However, when people were gone for a long time that was the generalization made to explain how long they were gone. This means that we don’t actually know how long Jesus fasted and wandered in the wilderness. All we know was that it was for quite some time—but not exactly 40 days.

What a great desert wanderer!

Doesn't that look legit?

Well, as we went to the sites naturally we had the song "Joshua fought the battle of Jericho!" stuck in our head. We didn't know any more verses so Elyse and I made some up. I think this part sums up the day pretty well. (Please sing this out loud!)

Joshua fought the Battle of Jericho, Jericho, Jericho!
Joshua fought the Battle of Jericho and the walls came tumbling down.

Rahab and her harlots were saved, saved, saved!
Rahab and her harlots were saved when the walls came tumbling down

Bartimaeus the blind man got his sight, sight, sight!
Bartimaeus the blind man got his sight when Jesus walked on by.

A student dropped a scarf in the water, water, water!
A student dropped a scarf in the water and the vender got real mad!

Herod killed everyone he saw, saw, saw!
Herod killed everyone he saw and then he died.

Jesus wandered in the dessert for a really long time, really long time, really long time!
Jesus wandered in the dessert for a really long time and it was very hot!