Tels and Tells

Today we saw Tel Hazor and Tel Dan.  As a reminder, tels are hills which have ruins of cities that have been buried on top (in the US, we have a site called Cahokia which fits the description, but these are much older).  Tel Hazor was a very heavily populated site about 800 years before the Israelites conquered/moved into Canaan and shows up in lots of places, but was slowly depopulated, so when the Israelites conquered it, all that was populated was the acropolis or upper city.  We finally to rained on there, so the deacons, who got constantly rained on last year, should have some schadenfreude, if they can be distracted from Rome.

Part of the upper city that dates to Solomon

The staircase from the lower to the upper city.

Despite a lot of the class being archaeologically-exhausted (bronze age sites are about when Abraham was active in Canaan and can seem tangential, but I love it because they  traded heavily with both Egypt and Minoan/Mycenaean Greece), after lunch we headed to Tel Dan.  Tel Dan is weird because it's in the middle of a nature park, which reminded me a lot of Great Smoky National Park back home.  The park has the headwaters of the river Dan, which is one of the main tributaries of the Jordan.

One of my many rapids photos from the park.

Tel Dan was the regional capital for the tribe of Dan, and was the most northern city of Ancient Israel.  After the kingdom divided, Dan was one of two places set up as shrines to El Adonai, so the people of the Northern Kingdom wouldn't go to Jerusalem.  These sites are the places of improper worship of Adonai condemned by the prophets (as we learned last semester in Prophets).

The high place at Dan. The metal thing is a reconstruction of the altar.

Tomorrow, we have more archaeological sites to see, but we're off to the Hellenistic cities of the Decapolis, which means Roman ruins, so I am excited.  Then we are going to Jerusalem!