Elliot Ritzema

Tag: Israel Pilgrimage

  • Arad and Contextualization

    June 22, PM

    This is the ninth post in a series of reflections on my recent trip to Israel (to read them all, click here).

    Our group’s last stop of the afternoon, before getting on the bus and heading north along the Jordan River Valley to Galilee, was at the top of a windy hill. To the south you could see the city of Arad. It turns out what used to be on top of that hill was a southern Judean border town also called Arad. It is not unusual for a city bearing the name of an ancient one to be built in the same vicinity, but not quite the same spot.

    Is4091The most interesting find at Arad is a temple that bore some similarity to the one in Jerusalem. There was an altar in a courtyard (with the same dimensions as the one in Exod 27:1), a holy place, and a holy of holies, where a tablet and two small incense altars were found. This temple, which seems to have been dedicated to the worship of Yahweh, was not destroyed or gradually dismantled. It was carefully buried. In the eighth century BC, King Hezekiah of Judah tried to centralize Yahweh worship in Jerusalem and put a stop to syncretism—worshiping Yahweh along with other gods. The burial may have been part of this reform, which is referenced in 2 Chronicles 32:11–12 (see also 2 Kgs 18:22; Isa 36:7; 2 Chr 31:1):

    When Hezekiah says, “The Lord our God will save us from the hand of the king of Assyria,” he is misleading you, to let you die of hunger and thirst. Did not Hezekiah himself remove this god’s high places and altars, saying to Judah and Jerusalem, “You must worship before one altar and burn sacrifices on it”?

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    The altar, in case you can’t tell from the interpretive sign on the right, is in the foreground

    As we sat in what used to be the courtyard of this temple, our tour leader, Tim, talked to us about the ancient practice of sacrifice. Why did the Israelites sacrifice animals? I’ve never been entirely satisfied with the typical Christian answer to this question: “It foreshadowed Jesus’ perfect sacrifice.” Well, sure. The New Testament, especially the book of Hebrews, tells us that. But even though we now know these sacrifices ultimately found their fulfillment in Jesus, it’s still worthwhile to ask why the Israelites thought they were doing it. How did it make sense to them?

    Tim’s answer was that sacrifices were signs and reminders of the covenant God made with Abraham in Genesis 15. Sacrifice was an aspect of covenants that was already part of ancient Near Eastern cultures. All the surrounding cultures made sacrifices to appease the gods. God included it in his covenant with Israel so they could understand what he was doing with them. He used something they knew from their culture. But as we see God doing in various other places in the Old Testament, he took up something people were familiar with and made subtle changes to it to make a point about how he differed from other gods.

    One example of this is in Genesis 1:21, where God creates “great creatures of the sea.” In other cultures, these were sea monsters that represented chaos, and the same Hebrew word is translated “monster” elsewhere in the Old Testament (Job 7:12; Isa 27:1). In the Genesis creation story, though, great frightening monsters are no threat to God; he makes them cavort in the sea.

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    The holy of holies is in the foreground, with the holy place and the courtyard beyond

    There were likely other things going on with regard to the significance of sacrifices in the Old Testament, and there are many scholarly rabbit holes to go down. I went down some of them while I was thinking about this blog post, which is why there is a gap of several days between this post and the previous one. In the end, I decided that I just couldn’t do a good job of addressing that question here.

    What I’ll say instead is that Arad reminded me that God loves to contextualize. He loves to condescend, to speak to us in terms we can understand, in ways that both use and challenge our cultural patterns of thought.When it comes to sacrifice, while other cultures saw it as a way to feed their gods, it does not appear to have been the case in Israel. The one God does not need people to feed him or sustain him. He used ancient ways of seeing the world to reveal himself, but staying within those cultural thought forms was not the goal. Showing himself to people, having a relationship with them, was the goal.

    This is part of the reason why Jesus had such trouble with religious authorities who were so focused on following rules that they missed the heart of God behind those rules. It wasn’t that rules were bad. Jesus himself appears to have been a good first-century Jewish man who followed the rules. The conflict lay in the fact that Jesus’ religious opponents used the rules as a means of self-justification. But even though Jesus followed the rules, people who were very different from him—people who were not good at following the rules—were attracted to him. They wanted to be with him because he was primarily focused on what the law was intended to do: reveal God’s loving heart to them. It makes me wonder: Am I adopting a cultural pattern of thought that God is challenging? How can I speak to people in a way they will understand?

  • Beth Shemesh and Desolation

    Beth Shemesh and Desolation

    I’ve been writing reflections on the pilgrimage to Israel I took in June of this year. To read all of them, click here.

    June 20, AM

    On the morning of our second day in Israel, we left Azekah and went to Beth Shemesh, another site in the Shephelah (“lowlands”) of Israel. The name beth shemesh means “house of the sun,” and it’s possible that there was a temple (“house”) dedicated to the Canaanite sun god there at one time. It lies on the Valley of Sorek, an east-west valley that connects the coastal plain with the Judean mountains. In the Old Testament, after the Philistines captured the ark of the covenant in the time of Samuel, they put it on a cart pulled by two cows. The cows headed east up the Valley of Sorek and stopped at Beth Shemesh (1 Sam 6:1–14). Later, in the eighth century BC, Amaziah king of Judah and Jehoash king of Israel fought each other at Beth Shemesh (2 Kgs 14:8–11). About 50 years after this, the Philistines captured Beth Shemesh (2 Chr 28:18). There is a destruction layer at the site that likely dates to the campaign of the Assyrian king Sennacherib in 701 BC.

    As at Azekah, to get to Beth Shemesh we got out of the bus on the side of the road and walked. We went along the Valley of Sorek and climbed a small hill to the site, where there is an active archaeological dig. We were welcomed by Dr. Dale Manor of Harding University, the field director of the dig. According to his website, he “was wearing the fedora before Indiana Jones” (it doesn’t say how long he has been fighting Nazis).

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    Dr. Manor telling us about Beth Shemesh

    He told us a few things about the site: An Egyptian palace was here, owned by a woman who was mentioned in the 14th century BC Amarna Letters. A scarab found here names Amenhotep III. At a higher level, there is a temple from the time of the judges (ca. 1100 BC) that is still in the process of being excavated. Recently, two store jar handles were recovered that say lemelek (“belonging to the king”) on them. These probably date to the time of Hezekiah (eighth century BC).

    After hearing from Dr. Manor, our group went into an underground cistern. There our group leader, Tim, talked to us about Samson, who lived in the area. Zorah (his birthplace) was across the Valley of Sorek to the northeast (Judg 13:2; 16:31). Timnah was down the valley to the west, in Philistine territory (Judg 14:1–6). Farther down the valley was Ashkelon (Judg 14:9). Tim talked about Samson’s mighty exploits, but also his failure to remain faithful to God. As he had at Azekah, Tim talked about the Shephelah as a place of pressure and conflict, and encouraged us to think about how we should act in our own “shephelahs.” These are places in our lives where we face tensions and temptations, where it’s easy to become tired and worn down.

    My dad, who was also on the trip, wrote a blog post a few days ago about our visit to Beth Shemesh. He mentioned that in contemplating the idea of personal shephelahs he thought of Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor’s book A Secular Age. I thought of this as well. (It’s almost as if we are related. Also, we might have read some of the same books.)

    Part of Taylor’s argument is that we live in a time of cross-pressures. Both religious and atheist forms of fundamentalism get all the press, but most of us live in a middle area where we wrestle with faith, doubt, and longing. We have gone, Taylor says, “from a society where belief in God is unchallenged and indeed, unproblematic, to one in which it is understood to be one option among others, and frequently not the easiest to embrace.” But it doesn’t all work in one direction: believers are tempted to doubt, and doubters are tempted to believe. While the world may be disenchanted for many people—faith is regarded as something childish to leave behind, like belief in monsters and fairies—a lot of them still experience a sense of loss at this disenchantment, and a sense that what they are left with may not be enough to make meaning of life.

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    Beth Shemesh, overlooking the Valley of Sorek

    When Tim asked us on this day, “What will you do in your Shephelah?” I thought of the cross-pressures of faith, doubt, and longing in a secular age. I also thought of Gordon Smith, who taught a class on spiritual discernment when I was at Regent College. It was a popular class; lots of people at Regent were looking for guidance on what to do in the next chapter of their lives. In his teaching on discernment, Smith took two concepts from Ignatius of Loyola’s Spiritual Exercises: consolation and desolation.

    In his book The Voice of Jesus, Smith writes that consolation is “our emotional response to a set of circumstances that reflect the power and goodness of God” (139). In contrast, desolation is “an emotional response to the multiple ways in which we experience a broken world” (138–39). Desolation is a valid response, since the world is in fact broken in many ways. But the rule for discernment, Smith says, is this: Act on a decision only in consolation. When we are in desolation, we cannot trust ourselves to see clearly and act rightly. “We can trust ourselves and act in confidence only when we know that our hearts are in tune with the Spirit” (139).

    Samson, it seemed, acted often out of desolation. He was angry, vengeful, lustful, and continually reacted in destructive ways. As I go through my own shephelahs, I want to remember that they are a normal part of life. Everyone lives in them at times. But I also want to remember that they are not the place to make major decisions. When I am tired, worn down, or feeling tempted, I need to continue on the path I am on—the path I started to follow when I was seeing more clearly—and not change course in response to feelings of desolation.