Petra

Yesterday (or today for most readers) was spent mostly getting to and from Petra, which is two and a half hours plus a border crossing away from Eilat. I still have no idea as to how Petra connects to the Bible other than it being very likely that the Hebrews wandered through the general area on their way to the promised land 700 or 800 hundred years before the city was founded and almost 1200 years before the famous parts of city were built.

One of the narrow parts of the canyon. During the Exodus, it would have been a riverbed.

Petra is an architectural masterpiece, but to be honest, I was a bit disappointed. Most of the cool buildings are temple-tombs, and they don't allow you inside the famous Treasury (despite the name, it is one of the temple-tombs). Petra has an impressive theater carved into a hillside, but since we've seen freestanding Roman theaters of similar size and design, we were not as impressed as our guide thought we would be.  The structures are also sprawled out over a couple of miles of canyon walls with little rhythm or reason except the allowance of space.  Compare this to the tels and Roman cities which had to maximize space, and it just seems piece-meal in design because it was.

The treasury. Sadly not the resting place of the Holy Grail

The royal tombs from the first century AD, about a mile from the treasury

Despite this griping, we still had fun.  A lot of the class got kippahs (or shemaghs) in Jordan, and I must confess we had some less than charitable jokes about our Jordanian guide, who must either get a cut from all the busking Bedouins or was really devoted to improving the Jordanian economy, because we always seemed to stop near one to extol whatever product was available (camel rides, group photos, fresh juice, the list goes on).  Either way, it made us appreciate our Israeli (really Palestinian Christian) guide more.

Tomorrow we are off to more sites that don't really relate to the Bible but provide historical/regional texture, and then we get to go up to Jerusalem (fun fact: Jews always speak of going up to Jerusalem regardless of the actual direction).