This summer, I had the honor of being a Two Brothers Fellow in Israel. The Two Brothers Fellowship pays for Yale Divinity students to travel to Israel to study Hebrew language or archaeology during the summertime. I decided to dedicate my time to archaeology, because I felt like an understanding of archeological field work and data collection would be useful to me in understanding historical biblical research and explaining it to others in a parish context (plus it just sounded really fun).

  

From the air, Israel is a uniform, dusty beige color, but as the plane got closer and closer to the ground, the land began to color itself in with deep greens and reds. Beautiful. Israel was the kind of place you have to look closely at.

  

I spent four weeks total in Israel. I dedicated a week before my archeological dig to sightseeing. Israel is roughly the size of New Jersey, so it's not a long trip across the country. I spent time in Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, Nazareth, the Dead Sea (and the area around it), Tiberias, and the Sea of Galilee. It was all incredible and very different from what I was used to, but the things that struck me the most was my stay in old city Nazareth and my time at the Sea of Galilee.

  

Nazareth is a majority-Palestinian city. It had a major economic collapse at the beginning of the 21 ^st century when officials decided to renovate the old city and drove people out of their homes and businesses with the dust and machinery crowding the narrow streets. Since then, the old city (where I spent most of my time) has been slowly rebuilding. They say that there are seven Nazareths below the current one-it's been demolished and sieged and rebuilt that many times. More than anywhere else, Nazareth was the place that I encountered genuine and kind people who loved what they were doing and cared about their city. In Nazareth, the sound of stray cats mewing mixed with church bells as dusk settled on the narrow stone streets. Nazareth seized my senses. I would go back in a heartbeat.

  

The Sea of Galilee was one of those places where I felt confronted by the weight of my call to work as a member of the clergy. There was something about how huge and essential and undeniable the water was that struck me. Jesus had taught and walked on that water. The Galilee is the only freshwater source in Israel-the entire country takes its water from that same source. The Galilee was powerful and unassuming in a way that many other religious sites had failed to be for me. It was incredible.

  

I spent the following three weeks on an archaeological excavation in the northern part of Israel on a mountain called Tel Hazor. Hazor is referenced in the Bible as "the head of all these kingdoms" (Josha 11:10). Joshua is said to have burned it down. It was a major political and economic power in several major historical periods. We worked in the administrative palace, where people would have brought payments and offerings for the king. We found a number of storage jars, a piece of jewelry, some bone (animal, probably!), and a grand staircase, among other things.

  

Archaeological work was incredibly interesting. The physical task involves long days in the sun, hoeing and using a pickaxe for the most part. You remove dirt in 3-5in. layers, and record findings as you go. The work is hard and I spent three weeks completely covered in dust every day. After a semester sitting in a chair typing papers, it felt good to make some progress doing something with my hands.

  

But it was also incredibly mentally stimulating. It takes a lot of sociological and historical knowledge to properly analyze findings. Our site supervisors would come over, offer some hypotheses about the things we found, and then ask us to take some guesses too. We were, of course, very underqualified to do this kind of thing, so it became an incredible teaching tool.

  

We spent particular time considering pottery shards, since it is easy to grasp the basics of pottery reading, (but hard to master the intricacies). After uncovering pottery shards, we'd wash and catalogue them, and then spend time considering their shape and materials and sorting them into categories based on what they were likely used for. Pottery is a very common and very helpful archaeological find because pottery is usually made by individual households, but follows stylistic trends. Pottery can tell us a lot about cultural and trade trends of an area.

  

This barely scratches the surface of the things going on at Tel Hazor. There was dirt and bone analysis, archaeozoology, drone mapping, radar measuring and mapping of lower areas of the kingdom, and probably plenty of other things I wasn't aware of or didn't attend a lecture on. It's an incredible field and a bustling dig (and one open to volunteers of all ages and backgrounds!).

  

The best part of Hazor was (of course) the people. The work of archaeology seems to attract people who are tough, inquisitive, and self-reliant. The leader of the dig, a PhD student named Shlomit was an exemplar of a strong woman in a rugged field that had only recently started to make room for her. She was a strong woman: tough and undeniably feminine. I adored her.

  

Israel hit me in some unexpected ways. It had a sort of rugged beauty to me. It's an area with a lot of political, religious, and cultural upheaval, but it retains its beauty and a sense of misunderstood drama. It was a joy to spend a month looking closer, and experiencing a small portion of the wide richness of Israel.