shufflin' down the shephelah

phew! It has been crazy these last two weeks...who would have known a test in each class along with a field trip could be so busy-fying...

Well, it has now been 39 days in Israel- WOOOOO!!! It's official- I am no longer a tourist- I feel so much more native now....well...sort of...I'm still learning so much, like how to say "How are you?" in Hebrew and eating cheese and veggies for breakfast.

Today was awesome cause after our Land and Bible test it started snowinggggg!!! So, of course, we had a snowball fight and got good and wet. Looking outside you wouldn't know that the ground was coated in slush just a few hours ago- I guess it all melted away. But it sure was fun while it lasted.

This week has been amazingly wet and rainy- I'm so thankful Benj decided to move our Shephelah trip a day earlier- MAN! It was be-a-oo-tiful. I got a sunburn and wore short sleeves outside! Amazing!

The first place we went was Beth-Shemesh, which  over-looks the Sorek Valley. (Basically, the whole day was in three or even four valleys) This is where Samson was born, raised, and buried. It's sort of amazing how when you actually go to a place you start to say, "Oh yeah, I could see how that would happen that way" or you start to think about a place in the Bible as an actual touchable place. It's actually a little weird, but in a totally non-weird way. If that makes any sense.

flowers and the sorek valley- this is looking to the north, towards Zorah and Eshtaol

more sorek :)

 From the Sorek we went to another site called Tell Sfit which is also the most likely location of Gath, Goliath's hometown and city extraordinaire. In its heyday, Gath was a huge and thriving city, full of blacksmiths and giants. It would have been quite impressive. oh, by the way, they sort of built this hill to put their city on it...

Gath

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{kelly}

austin and kate demonstrating david and goliath, sort of

So the above was what I was working on a few weeks ago. And then it struck- sickness plus busy -out- of- my- mind. So here's what I'm going to do. I'm going to post a few pictures and through them tell the rest of the story of my day in the Shephelah.


























These pictures were all taken in the Elah Valley which is where David smote Goliath.

the israelite camp :]

sam as david, kate as goliath