I would like to invite you to join me in an upcoming Bible study: Understanding the Land of the Bible.  This eight week exploration will delve into the geographical, historical and cultural backgrounds of the Bible.

The Bible's historians, prophets and poets were all intimately familiar with the world in which they lived.  They wrote about their world expecting their readers to also be familiar with it.  

Living thousands of years and miles away from those biblical writers in an extremely different culture we must take the time to learn about their world so that we might more fully understand their writings.  As we understand the Bible in its context, we can better understand our contemporary world and its current struggles.

The materials used in this course will be a Bible and the Introductory Study Package from Biblical Backgrounds.  The cost of materials is $29 plus shipping and handling.  Please order these as soon as possible to receive before the first class.

Space is limited to the first 25 people who respond to me either in person or via email.  The class will be taught at the offices of Christ-Life Ministries at 2980 99th Street, Urbandale, IA 50322, on Thursday from 7:30-9:00 PM, November 10th until January 12th (class will not meet November 25th or December 15).  If you are not able to attend these first 8 weeks, I will teach this class again in the Spring.

I hope to hear from you soon.

Grace and peace,

Peter Blankenship

It's been nearly 2 months since my last blog post. I'm sorry about that. Life has been very busy.

I graduated from JUC with my masters in biblical history and geography at the beginning of May! Yeah! Dr. Paul Wright, the president of the university, is standing with me, holding my diploma in the picture to the left. My time living and studying in Jerusalem and traveling throughout Israel, Jordan and Egypt was life-changing. While I was excited to come home I was sad to leave and will miss living in the Land of the Bible. Hopefully I will be back to visit before very long.

A couple days after my graduation I flew back to Rochester, NY and spent a couple weeks there before packing up everything I own and moving it all to Des Moines, Iowa where I will be living with my bride following our wedding on July 17. Life at the moment is focused on preparing for the wedding and finding a job in Des Moines. I would appreciate your prayers on both of those items.

I meant to post this a long time ago, but was sidetracked by all the events of life. A week and a half before I left Israel I went from Jerusalem to Hebron with Sam Salem, an Arab-Christian tour guide, and 3 other guys from school. Hebron shows up in the stories of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob as well as that of David. It is at Hebron that the three Patriarchs were buried, and it was also there that David was made king. David ruled from Hebron for 7 years before taking Jerusalem from the Jebusites and turning it into his capital city.

The Tomb of the Patriarchs was probably built by Herod the Great, a few years/decades prior to the birth of Jesus Christ. Today the structure contains a synagogue and a mosque. At one time the whole structure was open to the members of both of these religions. However, following the Goldstein Massacre, they have been separated by a wall within the structure.

It is believed that this structure was built by Herod because it has so many characteristics of Herodian architecture. Herod was the architect of the Temple Mount which is seen today. It is believed that around the upper level of the Temple Mount were massive pilasters like those of the Tomb of the Patriarchs. Check out the pictures below.

Below the Herodian monumental building is a cave, believed to be the Machpelah Cave, which Abraham bought to bury Sarah in. Isaac, Rebekah, Jacob and Leah are also believed to have been buried in this cave as well. Today, the building stands over the cave and no one is allowed to enter it. Six giant sarcophagii-like memorials draped in cloth stand within the mosque/synagogue, and are memorials to Abraham, Sarah, Isaac, Rebekah, Jacob and Leah, who are all supposed to have been buried here.

Following our visit to the tomb we drove through the center of town to the ancient tel of Hebron, where the city in the time of Abraham and David would have been. This central area of the modern city is a ghost town. No one lives here and all the shop doors are welded shut. The only people in this area were Israeli soldiers on patrol. You can see this area in the video at the bottom of this post.

The top of the tel of the ancient site has been built over by a military base and an apartment building. So, there is not a lot to see. Beneath the apartment building we were able to view the remains of a 4-room Israelite house from the biblical period. The 4-room style house is a classic Israelite structure.

          
    

In this video you can see the inside of the Tomb of the Patriarchs, the center of Hebron and the 4-room house on top of the ancient tel of Hebron. The guy doing a lot of the talking is Sam Salem, a Christian-Arab guide. I highly recommend employing him to take you on visits to sites in the West Bank/Palestine. You can contact him to set up a tour at guide.holy@gmail.com. Thank you for reading! Enjoy the video!

This week is Holy Week, not just for the Christians but also for the Jews. This week is not only the Christian observance of Palm Sunday, Passover, Good Friday and Easter. This is one of those years where the Jewish observation of Passover (in Hebrew it is Pesach) falls in the same week. As you would imagine that leads to a busy week here in Jerusalem.

You may not know this, but the Eastern Orthodox Church runs on its own calendar, so the Orthodox Holy Week does not always line up with that observed by Western Christians. This is one of those years when it does line up. Thus, the city is packed with Protestants, Catholics and Orthodox Christians as well as Jews. All of them have made pilgrimage from somewhere far away and there are thousands and thousands of them.

It is the most interesting week of the entire year to go people-watching around the Old City. It's also a great opportunity to see how many languages you can identify.

As you probably know, this last Sunday was Palm Sunday, the day that remembers Jesus' final entrance into Jerusalem prior to his death. The Bible tells us that Jesus came up the road from Jericho to Jerusalem, stopped at Bethphage on the back of the Mt. of Olives and then came over it and into the city of Jerusalem (Matthew 21, Mark 11, Luke 19).

Today this event is remembered with a giant procession involving between 7,000 and 10,000 people ever year. I'm not sure how accurate those numbers are. I was given those numbers by a local and they could be accurate. I've never seen 7-10,000 people in a group before though so I don't know what that many people would look like.

These people line up starting at Bethphage and march up and over the Mt. of Olives. Once they reach the bottom they climb to the Lion's Gate (also called Stephen's Gate) and enter through it into the Old City of Jerusalem. Once inside they make their way into the courtyard of St. Anne's Church and have a party. Few among them know it, but they are actually having their party on top of the unexcavated lower Pool of Bethesda. In John 5 Jesus heals a man who had been crippled for 38 years at this spot.

While walking in the procession I made a video. Unfortunately, all the tourists in Jerusalem seem to be causing the internet to act up. This has so far prevented me from uploading my video of Sunday's procession. So, I discovered CNN's brief video of Palm Sunday here in Jerusalem and have embedded it below. CNN doesn't have the internet bandwidth issues I have.



Below is another video about Jerusalem during this week. It is from gloria.tv, which is a Catholic website. Their slogan is "The more Catholic the better." I don't know about that, but in any case, it's an interesting video. A lot of the video is done inside the Holy Sepulcher. Remember that the Catholics are only one of the six churches present within the Holy Sepulcher. Check out this previous blog post to learn more about the Holy Sepulcher.



If you have any questions about Holy Week in Jerusalem, please comment on this post.

Grace and peace!

There's a new website that you should know about, but before learning about it you need to know about The Ultimate Journey, also known as The Christ-Life Solution. God used this program to totally transform the life I had been living into something brand new. Through my experiences in the Christ-Life sessions I realized that God loved me in spite of myself and all the stuff that I had done and been involved in up to that point. I discovered that He had made me exactly as He wanted me to be from day 1of my conception. From the very beginning He had given me everything I would ever need to be exactly the man who He created me to be. I am His beloved child and He is with me every single day of this adventure of life.

Because of the amazing change that God brought me through via The Ultimate Journey. I strongly recommend you consider going through it as well. God didn't stop changing life for me after going through the initial process. This journey of growing in Him is an eternal one.

One other way God used The Ultimate Journey to change my life is through the daughter of the current directors of the program. She happens to currently be my fiance! In only 110 more days she'll be my wife!

After checking out The Ultimate Journey go to Follow Me Ministries. This is a site set up by the writer of the The Ultimate Journey materials, John Marquez. He has recently felt God leading him on to a new step in their journey together. You can follow along with John's journey via Follow Me Ministries.

On Friday of last week I went on an all-day hike with Dan and Paula Moore, the couple who is doing the cooking at JUC this year. We walked across Jerusalem, stopping by the market to get some pita for lunch. We walked beneath the big white train bridge and then went off the road onto a trail leading down to an old abandoned Arab town called Neftoah. This town is here because of a spring which still functions even though the town is now deserted. The waters coming from this spring appear in Joshua 15:9 and 18:15 as part of the border between the tribes of Judah and Benjamin.

Today, the spring runs out of a rock face into a pool. Unfortunately for us, we didn't get any pictures of the pool in the morning because it was full of 60-something year old men skinny (or perhaps not so skinny) dipping! We scurried on down the trail.

As you can see from the pictures it was a beautiful, though overcast, day. There were flowers and birds everywhere. We saw kingfishers and a golden eagle. Also, we saw two mountain gazelles. One had only one horn. They were too far away for me to get a picture.

After hiking for about four hours we turned around and walked back up the Sorek Wadi to Jerusalem. We were rained on pretty hard on the way back, but it was fun. And, the rain might have been why their were no naked men at the pool of Neftoah upon our return. Thus, I have a picture of the pool included in this post.

Enjoy the pictures. For those of you who have only been here in the summer, fall or winter, this is what the entire hill country from Dan to Beersheba looks like in the spring! It is an amazing transformation.