Day 40

This morning we went on a field trip, really close by in the City of David. Picture Utah County, where all the different cities really connect so you wouldn't really know if you crossed into another city. That's how the City of David is compared to Jerusalem. The Old City is West of us at the JC, and just South of that is the City of David. Jerusalem grew around the original city that David conquered, and they built the temple on the hill to the North, and that's the part that's inside the walls of the Old City today.

For the field trip we were checking out some of the sites associated with David and when he first conquered the city here and the city of Jerusalem first became important as far as events in the Bible. There are some walls and structures that they've found that date back to David's time and that they think might have been part of his palace. We watched a 3d movie at the beginning about the history of the city and the archaeological work they've been doing on it. It was really neat to see what the whole area of Jerusalem would have looked like then and how it has evolved over the past few thousand years.

The funnest part of the trip was when we went down into Hezekiah's Tunnel, which is a tunnel they built to carry the water under the city so the water supply couldn't be taken over during wars. The water came up mid-calf most of the way, but there were parts where it came all the way up to our thighs. The tunnel is pretty narrow and goes all the way from the highest point of the City of David to the bottom of the hill into a pool. There were several different pools that held the water over time, but one of them is the pool where the Savior sent the blind man to wash his eyes after He put mud on them. It's so cool to be able to physically see where biblical events like that took place, it makes them even more real.

We were back at the JC for lunch, then homework, reading, resting, lots of laundry, FHE (Disney Scene-it), and some more of the Palestinian midterm from Hades. I have most of the sections done but the ones I have left are pretty long. The good news is that at the end of June we are done with most of our classes- Palestinian, Judaism, Hebrew and Old Testament will all be over and then we'll just have New Testament and ANE for July. So I guess it's worth all the work now to have more free time later in the semester, instead of the other way around.