For a week in May, the rocky ruins of Bethsaida in Galilee was home to a group of seventeen volunteer archaeologists. Or maybe we were just movers of sand and rock. But now and then a little treasure would emerge from the sand or from the sifters and we felt like so much more than labourers.
We tried to picture the town in its various stages of history,
- a vibrant city at the time of David with walls between 20 and 30 feet thick.
- a smoky ruin 260 years later when the empire of the day, the Assyrians, tore it down. We handled the grain that was burned in that conflagration.
- a little fishing village in the time of Jesus when he came here to find several of his disciples.
- Here according to the Talmud, 300 different kinds of fish were served in the same dish. Must have been a bigger dish than we found.
This is a place where one little shard from a 3000 year old pot or a silver earring from the first century invites the imagination to run wild. Who wore this? How was it lost? How long did she search for it?
We touched broken and lost artifacts that were once part of the daily life of people like us. Their stories are lost to us but we were here because one set of stories was told and retold until they reached us, stories of a man strong in spirit and in love who changed our world and changed us.
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