I know that a few of my former students check in on this blog from time to time, and I thought it might be helpful for them to see an addition I made last week in my lecture on the Conquest. I usually give three evidences from Scripture that Joshua led the Israelites into Canaan about 1400 B.C. (from 1 Kings 6:1, Judges 11:26, and 1 Chron 6:33-37). A recent article in the Journal of Evangelical Theological Society gives an additional evidence for this date, from passages in the Talmud. In the article (“When Did Solomon Die”, 46/4, Dec 2003), Rodger C. Young shows how the counting of the Years of Jubilees indicates an entrance into Israel in 1406 B.C. You’ll have to read this section of the article for all the details (pp. 599-603), but here’s my simplistic PowerPoint summary:

–The Talmud dates the 17th Jubilee to 574 B.C. (b. Arak 12a; cf. Ezek 40:1)
–The Talmud dates the 16th Jubilee to 623 B.C. (18th year of Josiah; b. Meg. 14b)

This establishes:
•Interval between Jubilees was 49 years (not 50)
•The counting for the first Jubilee year began in 1406 B.C. (17 cycles x 49 years = 833 years; 574 B.C. + 833 years = 1407 minus 1=1406 B.C.).

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The following programs are essential to my (nearly) everyday use. If seems often that I hear recommendations of other programs (e.g., Google toolbar) and I just think – you don’t need that if you have this other one, which is superior in all regards (e.g., Dave’s Quick Search Deskbar). So here is a short list of my favorite apps.

Free
1. Dave’s Quick Search Deskbar – I love this program. Yes, it’ll search Google (default). But type amaz before your search and it’ll pull up your book/product on Amazon.com. Or type fedex and the tracking number and you’ll know exactly where your package is. No need to find the fedex website, click the tracking button, etc. And it does that for hundreds of other functions. I love it and use it dozens of times daily.

2. IrfanView – picture viewer. There are millions of these kinds of programs, but none that I know of does it as fast and slick. I especially use the F6 (rename), F7 (move), and F8 (copy) functions – perfect for fast and easy sorting. I use several other graphics programs for other things, but nothing replaces this for basic viewing tasks.

3. CDex – rips mp3 files from CDs. Enables me to keep all of my music on my computer, without shuffling CDs.

4. Notetab Light – one of a number of replacements for Windows Notepad. There very well may be others equal or better than this one, but I’m happy with it and prefer it significantly over the MS default.

5. 1-4a Rename – for batch renaming of files. I do this frequently when working with my picture files.

Not Free (and probably not new to most)
MS Office
Paint Shop Pro – for graphics editing
WS_FTP Pro – for uploading files
Adobe Acrobat – for creation of pdf files
Nero – for burning CDs and DVDs

It seems to me that one sign of maturity is the realization that making fun of someone’s name isn’t really funny. Perhaps I am wrong, but it seems to me that probably any joke about a person’s name, that person has already heard before (if not a hundred times). Thus it’s not funny to them. One place I hear it more frequently is with our kids’ names: Luke is oldest and Mark is #2. So the “obvious” thing to say is – who’s next, Matthew? Because it’s so obvious, I suppose I shouldn’t be offended. And usually I’m not, even when the person saying it should be wise enough to know we’ve heard it a thousand times already. Perhaps the joker thinks we were playing a joke in naming our kids. We weren’t. In our case, the joke is even less funny because the third one is Timothy; the joker may not even know that, as he is now in heaven. I don’t say this because someone recently offended me (they didn’t), but because I think it’s a worthy observation. And because earlier this evening I was reading a new storybook to the boys and for each one it lists what the Bible sources are. That particularly story listed three books of the Bible. Luke and Mark each recognized their name correctly, and then I asked what the third name was. Mark’s guess: Bethany :-).

Our students arrived yesterday, which means I’ll probably slow down a bit on blogging. I had hoped to do a few more Egypt posts, but am not sure I will. This picture is of the boys doing a new 100-piece puzzle tonight. Bethany is on the couch.

The latest report on the sifting of Temple Mount debris is posted, including information about what has been recovered thus far:

a seal impression from the Second Temple period (five-pointed star with the word ‘ירשלם’ [Jerusalem] inscribed on it), a fragment of a monumental door jamb of a gate from the Second Temple Period, arch stones, and more architectural fragments. In addition, we have also found fragments of glass vessels (some are from the Second Temple Period), a cosmetic alabaster plate from the Persian period, a fragment of an ornamental stone table from the Second Temple period, fragments of glazed bricks, and a few coins, of which the first one discovered was from the first Jewish revolt against the Romans with the written phrase “For the Freedom of Zion.”

Some of our students spent a day helping last month. It’s quite possible that some more remarkable discoveries will turn up. The excavation director, Dr. Gabriel Barkay, is first-class in knowledge and expertise. I doubt there is anyone alive who knows more about Jerusalem than he does. The team is looking for contributions and volunteers.

As I said before, most of the trip was to places that few tourists visit. Much of our time centered on the Delta (north of Cairo) and so-called Middle Egypt (between Cairo and Luxor). We drove through many villages, and they are not all the same. But the following observation is true for some of the villages we passed through. I felt as if the year could have been 1000 A.D. and nothing would have been different. The streets, the houses, the people and their dress, the fields and the manual labor – it seems like the 20th century has had no impact (save for a few bicycles and the vehicle we drove through in). We have drawings of Egypt in the 19th century from Picturesque Palestine, vol 4 (see here for a few) and things look the same. I suspect that this traditional way of life is not very different from the way that it was several thousand years ago. Without the minarets of course.

Nearly all of our traveling was done during daylight hours, and nearly all of it was through inhabited areas. In other words, I feel like I saw half of the population of Egypt. Maybe I’ll write more on that later. But the reality that I was impressed with was the hard-working nature of the Egyptian people. Most people I saw were working. There were a few standing on the streets (or riding in the buses with us), but most were on the move, whether it was 6:30 in the morning or 5 as the sun was setting. Women were out front cooking the meal in the early morning cold (yes it was cold!). We saw some kids in school or on their way, but in other places the kids were laboring. One scene that struck me was an adult supervising about half a dozen children hoeing in a large field. Women never seem to travel without carrying something, always on their head. The loads they can balance are amazing. The men too always seem to be hard at work. They don’t make much money (maybe more on that later), but it doesn’t seem to me to be due to a lack of effort. Perhaps one reason I was struck by this was because I haven’t observed the same work ethic among the Palestinian population in Israel. I can think of several factors that could contribute to this, but I make the observation nonetheless.

There are always things I’m learning that I think I should have known a long time ago. One example is the way that the Hasidic Jews (ultra-orthodox) treat Christmas. Here’s a quote from a recent article on it in Haaretz.

On Christmas Eve, known in Jewish circles as Nitel Night, the klipot (shells) are in total control. The klipot are parasitical evil forces that attach themselves to the forces of good. According to kabbala (Jewish mysticism), on the night on which “that man” – a Jewish euphemism for Jesus – was born, not even a trace of holiness is present and the klipot exploit every act of holiness for their own purposes. For this reason, Nitel Night, from nightfall to midnight, is one of the few occasions when Hasidim refrain from Torah study. On this horrific night, they neither conduct weddings nor do they go to the mikveh (ritual bath).

The article goes on at more length and is an interesting read. I was alerted to this by the Caspari Center Media Review (current issue), which looks at the articles related to Christians and messianic Jews in the Israeli news media. This bi-monthly review is highly recommended. To subscribe to the Media Review, send a blank email to media@caspari.com. Be aware that the term “missionary” is used for anyone of the Christian faith, regardless of whether they are evangelizing, doing humanitarian work, or simply running a business.

So, if you were a parent and had two sons, one living in Israel and the other in a comfortable southern California suburb, for whose safety would you be most concerned? If you listened to the U.S. State Department and the TV news, you’d be terrified for your son and his family living in Israel. You might not realize that TV news is horribly selective in what it portrays. And you might not realize that the State Dept.’s “travel advisories” are as much political statements as reliable indicators of safety (“The Department of State continues to warn U.S. citizens…to defer travel to Israel”). Now my experience is not necessarily representative of all, but it is my experience. In my years in Israel, I have never had a gun shot at me, or near me. In fact, in 10 years of living in Israel, not once have I heard a gun fired (except one that I was shooting in a sports range). My brother, on the other hand, had a bullet go through his house (where I grew up) last night. Less than two feet from his wife’s head. (There are reasons I won’t go into that indicate it was a random shooting.) In 10 years in Israel, I’ve never been assaulted; during our 2 years in southern California, I was. In 10 years in Israel, our car has not been broken into; during our 2 years in southern California, our car was broken into and vandalized. In 10 years in Israel, I’ve never seen a dead body; in our time in So. Cal, my wife saw one (in the alley behind our apartment). The point is not that these things couldn’t happen to us in Israel, but that they haven’t. But you wouldn’t guess it from the news or the travel advisory.

We spent more than a full day in the Nile Delta, more time than I had in my previous 6 trips to Egypt. I was struck by a number of things. 1) The land is green and productive everywhere. And in use. No empty space that goes unused here. 2) The use of the land for agriculture purposes, in contrast to shepherding (which was what Jacob’s descendants initially did when settling down in Goshen in the eastern Delta area). 3) The very poor preservation of the remains. The once-glorious cities of Pithom and Ramses are pathetic tells that remind one of the poor sites in Israel. (This is true whether you locate Pithom at Tell el-Maskuta or Tell er-Retabeh – both are piles of dirt.) The most impressive site is Tanis (Zoan), the capital of later pharaohs in the 21st and 22nd Dynasties (including the biblical pharaoh Shishak). But even this site is less impressive than any that we saw south of Cairo. We also saw the potential area for the crossing of the Red Sea. The best conservative scholars locate this crossing at or near the modern Timsah Lake or the Bitter Lakes. It is likely that these were connected to the Gulf of Suez in antiquity. In any case, I was impressed with how large these bodies of waters are, and how it would have been no less a miracle to part the water of a mere “lake” should they have been no more than they are today. Today’s photo shows some of the productive farmland in the area of the ancient city of Ramses (today Tell el-Daba).