by Lynn Austin
“Wow! I’ve never seen so many stars! There are too many city lights where I live.”
“God told Abraham to look up at the heavens and count the stars—that’s how numerous his offspring would be.”
The sky was already growing light when they arrived at the excavation site—a jumbled pile of stones and weeds on top of a mound forty feet high. While Dr. Voss issued orders for the equipment to be unloaded—picks, shovels, wheelbarrows, spades, and dozens of black plastic buckets—Hannah drew Abby aside.
“Ready for your second reward?” They walked to the eastern edge of the mound, overlooking a grove of fruit trees. “Have you ever heard the song of praise the birds sing as they greet the dawn? Listen . . .”
The sky above the distant hills resembled an Impressionist watercolor in muted shades of pink and blue. Then, as the hazy sun slowly rose above the horizon, it was greeted by a chorus of birdsong in the trees below. The sound slowly grew in a mighty crescendo of joy.
“You’re right,” Abby said softly. “It was worth getting up early for this.”
“Jesus told us to look at the birds; they don’t worry about the future because our heavenly Father feeds them. I think that’s why they praise Him, don’t you, Abby?”
They enjoyed the ever-changing sky in silence for a few minutes before Hannah sighed and said, “Well, now we must get to work.”
“She gathered all the volunteers around her to begin the day with a walking tour of the site, deftly maneuvering with her crutches over the rough terrain. “This tel, or archaeological mound we’re standing on, is like a layer cake of ancient history. Each time the village was destroyed, the survivors would rebuild on the remaining rubble, layer after layer, until the result was this flat-topped tel. The oldest civilizations are on the very bottom, the newest ones close to the surface. This is only our third year at this site, and as you can see”—she gestured toward the eleven-acre plateau that remained largely unexcavated—“we have a long way to go. If you look around among the weeds as we walk, you’ll probably find some stray pieces of pottery.”
“Can we keep what we find?” one of the college students asked.
Hannah smiled. “That depends. We already have plenty of ordinary potsherds, so you can keep those. But promise me you will show your area supervisor any pieces that have writing or designs on them, okay? All of the artifacts belong to the State of Israel . . . and we still live by the Ten Commandments here—‘Thou shalt not steal.’” Everyone laughed.
Hannah stopped at a work site near the village spring. “During our first season, we dug this shaft all the way down to the bedrock and learned that the village was occupied almost continually throughout the Old Testament period, probably because of this freshwater supply. Last year we did more probing, searching for promising sites, and stumbled on a few, including the synagogue that you’ll see in a minute. This season we want to concentrate on the top layer of occupation, which dates from the Roman period.”
Abby found herself walking beside Ari as they followed Hannah to the next work area. “This should be right up your alley,” she said.
“My what?”
Seeing his puzzled expression she added, “The Roman period, I mean. Didn’t you say it was your area of expertise?”
“Yes,” he said after a moment. “Yes, I’m looking forward to it.” But there was no enthusiasm in his voice.
“We are still unsure of the name of this tel,” Hannah continued. “No one thought to put up a welcome sign on the outskirts of town, announcing the name. But we have tentatively identified it as the village of Degania, which was last occupied in the first century The name comes from a little blue wild flower, the deganit, which grows all over this area in the springtime.”
Hannah guided the group across the rocky ground to an impressive pile of building stones and sections of fallen pillars. “Now, what we have over here are the remains of the village synagogue. It would have served Degania as a place of worship and also as the village school. Close to it, over here, we found a public mikveh, or ritual bath. Since the Pharisees were very concerned about all the ritual cleansings prescribed by Mosaic Law, we can probably conclude that the Pharisees played a major role in the life of this village. Tell me,” she said, addressing the students, “what comes to your mind when you hear the word Pharisee?”
“A hypocrite,” someone offered.
“The Pharisees hated Jesus.”
“They were the ones who crucified Him.”
“Does everyone see them as villains?” Hannah asked, smiling. Most of the volunteers nodded their heads. “Well, maybe it will soften your opinion a bit if I tell you that when the movement began, the Pharisees were men of great courage-heroes who were willing to face death rather than deny their faith. The sect originated after the Greeks conquered the nation and began to forcibly impose Greek culture and religion on the Jews. One of the Greek rulers, Antiochus Epiphanes, began a systematic effort to wipe out every trace of the Jewish religion. He even sacrificed a pig on the holy altar in God’s Temple. Thousands of Jews were martyred as they defended their faith, and if the Pharisees hadn’t remained steadfast in the face of this terrible persecution, the Greeks might have succeeded in eliminating the Jewish faith.
“The name Pharisee means ‘the separated ones.’ That was their response to foreign conquest. They tried to remain strictly separate, having nothing to do with the Greeks or Romans or any other Gentiles—and condemning any Jew who did associate with them. But by Jesus’ day, the outward form of their religion had become more important than the state of a man’s heart or his relationship with God. They were carefully straining their food to avoid swallowing a gnat—the smallest of the unclean creatures—while at the same time, by neglecting mercy and grace, they were swallowing camels, so to speak—the largest unclean animal.”
Gazing at the synagogue’s fallen pillars and beautifully carved lintel stones, Abby tried to envision herself coming here to worship under the stern gaze of the Pharisees. It was their modern-day counterparts, with their emphasis on laws and rules, their lack of grace, that had finally driven Abby from the church of her childhood. Her daughter, Emily, insisted that the church she now attended would treat her differently, but Abby had her doubts—especially if she became a divorcee.
“Besides keeping the faith alive during times of persecution,” Hannah continued, “the Pharisees made another very important contribution. They helped develop an educational system, teaching the Torah in local synagogues. It was because of the Pharisees’ devotion to teaching God’s Law that the average person in Jesus’ time knew what the Bible prophecies said, even if he was a humble fisherman or a carpenter. And so the Pharisees prepared the people for Christ’s coming.”
Abby found it hard to imagine that this somber building had once served as a schoolhouse. She smiled to herself as she pictured the village children bursting through its doors into the freedom of the warm Galilee sunlight at the end of the school day. After answering a few questions, Hannah led the group to the next work area, which looked to Abby like a tumbled heap of ordinary fieldstones.
“At the close of last year’s season, we found the remains of this typical first-century home,” Hannah explained. “We’ve been eager to finish excavating it ever since. You can see the outline of the house—the main living quarters, an attached storage room, and an enclosed courtyard, where we might even find an outdoor oven.” She gestured, using one of her canes as a pointer.
Abby tried to envision the house Hannah was describing among the ruins, but it looked like a pile of rocks to her untrained eye.
“Most of the people who lived in this village were probably very poor,” Hannah added, “and lived in houses much like this one. Dr. Ari Bazak will oversee this section, which Dr. Voss and I call the residential area. We think there’s a good chance of recovering significant artifacts, since Degania was never burned.”
“Then what did happen to the village?” one of the college students asked.
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“The people abandoned it around A.D. 67 at the beginning of the Jewish Revolt against the Romans. Jerusalem and the Temple were later destroyed during that same war, in A.D.70. Since Degania wasn’t protected by walls, the inhabitants probably fled to take refuge in one of the fortress cities, like Jota-pata or Gamla . . . maybe even Jerusalem. As far as we can tell, the people never returned. Those who survived the war may have been carried into exile. Earthquakes eventually weakened and tumbled many of these structures, until the abandoned village simply crumbled into ruins, buried beneath the dust of the ages.”
As Hannah led them across the rubble once more, Abby felt a weight of sorrow settle over her. She could identify with these villagers and the turmoil that had disrupted their lives. She thought of the home she and Mark had worked so hard to restore, with its gabled roof and creaking floorboards, and realized that when her children both left this fall, it, too, would be little more than an empty shell.
Abby returned to the present again as Hannah stopped at the highest point on the flat-topped tel. “And finally, from our preliminary probing, we think we’ve found the remains of a large, opulent home built in the Roman style. Perhaps the owner was a wealthy Jewish merchant or a prosperous landowner. Dr. Voss will oversee this excavation, which we’re hoping will reveal Roman-style mosaics and frescoes.”
Abby glanced around, looking for Ari. Why hadn’t he been assigned to excavate the villa, since his specialty was the Roman era? But Ari stood with his back to the ruins, watching the flaming sunrise. She couldn’t see his face.
When the tour ended and Dr. Voss divided the volunteers among the various work sites, Abby was disappointed to learn that she had been assigned to Ari’s section, not Hannah’s. Nevertheless, she made her way across the tel to the residential area, joining the four college students who would also be working with Ari. They all listened as he explained what to do.
“We need to finish cxcavating this entire area—both the interior and exterior of the house.” Ari stood inside a large square crater, which was already two feet deep, gesturing broadly to the jumbled stones all around them. “We’ll probably have to dig down another three or four feet before we reach first-century ground level, so you can see that’s a lot of dirt to remove. We’re going to carefully loosen the hard-packed soil with one of these.” Ari showed them a small handheld pick. “It’s called a petesh. Then we’ll haul the dirt up by the bucketful until our wheelbarrow is full. We can take turns running it to the dump. Proceed carefully! While it’s unlikely that we’ll find any gold coins in a house this basic, I’d hate to toss one away from carelessness. You also don’t want to swing your petesh so hard you smash a two-thousand-year-old oil lamp into bits. And that’s what we’re much more likely to find—pottery, oil lamps, jugs, household utensils—the simple tools of everyday life.”
He assigned each of them a petesh, a shovel-like tool called a tirea, a couple of black plastic buckets, and a square patch of ground. Abby’s allotment was inside the house itself, following the course of an inner wall. She pulled on a pair of gloves and started to work, carefully swinging her petesh.
The excitement of imminent discovery made her feel like a child digging for buried treasure and conjured up all her favorite treasure-hunting stories. By the time the bell rang for their breakfast break at eight-thirty, she was soaked with sweat and grateful for her straw hat and water supply. As she walked with one of the college students over to the shade of a large canopy for their outdoor breakfast, she glanced at her watch.
“Only eight-thirty!” she exclaimed. “It feels like noon!”
The student agreed. “That’s because back home, by the time we’ve been awake for four and a half hours, it is noon!”
Abby rarely ate breakfast at home, and when she did it never included cucumbers, olives, cheese, and tomatoes. But she was so hungry from her hard labor that she loaded all of those things onto her paper plate, along with bread, hard-boiled eggs, and a container of yogurt. She even went back for seconds.
Shortly after returning to work, Abby’s new friend made the first “find”—a long rounded stone, shaped like an oversized rolling pin. “Anyone want to guess what this is?” Ari asked. He shook his head in reply to all their theories. “Not even close. It’s a roller used to pack down the flat clay roof of the house. There would have been a latticework of wood underneath, then a layer of earth, which had to be repaired from time to time with this roller. It probably had a wooden handle attached through these holes on each end.”
Abby returned to her labor with renewed fervor after the excitement of the first discovery, and she had dug herself into a good-sized hole by quitting time. But aside from a handful of potsherds, she hadn’t unearthed any treasures her first day. The morning had flown quickly. As she climbed into the air-conditioned van, she felt gritty with dust and wilted from the heat.
“I feel like an ancient artifact myself,” she joked with Hannah on the ride back to the hotel. “All I want from life right now is a hot shower and a long nap.”
“I know how you feel,” Hannah said, laughing. “After a long morning on a dig, my daughter, Rachel, used to call me her mummy.”
* * *
By the end of the first week, Abby had indeed moved a lot of dirt, clearing a section of the home’s flagstone floor along one wall. She found the work exhilarating—and exhausting. She had gotten to know the four students quite well after working with them all week, but Ari remained a mystery to everyone. He seldom joined in their labor and never joined in their conversation, spending his time drawing detailed sketches of the area, filling out daily field reports, and tagging the bits of pottery and jug handles they found. His large strong hands cradled each artifact reverently, giving the impression of a man who loved his work, even if his manner of relating to the volunteers was more restrained than Hannah’s.
Abby began to feel at home in the ancient house once its contours were more readily seen. There was a central living area where she worked, the attached storeroom behind it where the students had already found the remains of several large storage vessels, and the outdoor courtyard, where Hannah said most of a woman’s typical tasks would have taken place in good weather. Abby began to wonder about the first-century woman who cooked and slept and ate here with her family, sweeping the dirt from the same flagstone floor that Abby was clearing with her shovel and whisk broom. She didn’t believe in ghosts, yet if she tried to imagine this room two thousand years ago, she could almost sense the presence of the people who had lived here in the past—the “great cloud of witnesses,” as Hannah called them.
Abby longed to make a spectacular find and was daydreaming about that very thing when her petesh suddenly struck something hard. She slowed down, digging carefully around the obstacle, leaving it in place as Ari had instructed them to do. But it was soon disappointingly obvious that it was only a fist-sized rock. She was about to pry it out when she noticed an indentation in the middle that looked a bit too perfect to be natural. She carefully cleared all the dirt out of the hole and discovered that it went all the way through the stone. When a shadow hovered over her, blocking out the sun, she looked up.
“What did you find there?” Ari asked.
“I don’t know . . . a rock with a hole through the middle of it. And when I dug the dirt out of the hole, there were a few strands of this rusty-colored fur or wool mixed in. Do you think it could be something?”
“Let me see.” She showed him the tiny fibers she had saved, and he carefully tucked them into an envelope. “Good job,” he said. “You found a weight stone that was probably used on a loom. The weights were attached to the warp threads—the vertical threads—to hold them tight. Keep digging. You might find more of them.”
He retrieved his clipboard and began measuring and sketching the location of her find in relation to the house’s foundation wall. Within half an hour, Abby had found three more weights. Then her trowel hit something softer than a rock—a piece of wood. She uncovered i
t carefully, brushing the dirt away with her whisk and saving the almost infinitesimal white fibers she found beside it. The wood was smooth, about ten inches long, and notched on both ends.
“Ari, I’ve found something else,” she said when it was partially uncovered. “Is it a piece of the loom?”
He laid down his notes and crouched to examine it. “It looks like it might be the shuttle. Quite well preserved, too. Uncover it all the way.”
“You trust me to finish?”
“Most volunteers never would have seen those tiny fibers—much less saved them.”
When she had the shuttle exposed, Abby noticed some unusual notches carved into the smooth wood. She used a toothbrush to clean them, operating as painstakingly as a surgeon. The carving looked too neat, too evenly spaced and sized to be natural. Maybe it was her imagination, but it looked to her like Hebrew lettering. She called Ari again.
“Is this writing?” He got down on his hands and knees to look closely, then removed a pair of eyeglasses from his pocket and peered at it again.
“Yes,” he said, pulling himself to his feet.
“Is that good?”
Ari didn’t answer. Instead, he climbed out of the excavation. “Hannah,” he called. “Come here when you have a minute.”
Abby thought she detected excitement in his voice. When Hannah arrived, Ari helped her down into the pit. The four college students crowded around them, watching.
“Did you find this?” Hannah asked Abby. “Congratulations! Great beginner’s luck!”
Hannah also put on a pair of reading glasses to study it. When she lifted her head again, her excitement was obvious. “This is amazing! We’ve found other shuttles before, but I’ve never seen one with writing on it.”
Abby felt so elated, the wood might have had rubies embedded in it instead of writing. “What does it say? Can you read what it says?”
“I think it’s a name—Leah. Probably the name of the woman who used this loom. You agree, Ari?”