My first few days in the Holy Land

Well, I can't believe I'm actually in the Holy Land. It has already been an awesome few days that I've been here. On the plane ride over from Austria, I sat next to a younger Israeli man named David who now lives in Australia. We ended up talking for quite awhile, and I learned a lot about this country before I even arrived on its soil.

The professors picked us up at the airport. We took a 45 minutes bus ride from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, marveling all along at the street signs (written in Hebrew, Arabic, and English) and the surprisingly lush countryside. The bus wound and climbed into the mountainous area Jerusalem is situated in, and we pulled around a corner and suddenly glimpsed the Dome of the Rock gleaming in the afternoon sun, and then the Jerusalem Center itself. The city is absolutely beautiful; the Jerusalem Center is unlike anything I'd ever pictured or dreamed of. I'll have to take some pictures or a video--nothing I say will do it any justice.

We've been booked with activities, orientations, classes, field trips, and tours since we got here, but it's been great. The food is great, the other students are friendly and so easy to get along with, and the sights are unbelievable. I'm just glad I have seven more weeks to take it all in. There is always something to be doing.

On the first night, just hours after we'd arrived, we were in class when we heard a strange, almost eerie singing noise in the background. We were told it was the Muslim's call to prayer. They have towers lit by green lights across jerusalem that play a recorded song five times a day to call Muslims to prayer. I've since become well acquainted with the sound (it woke me up at 4 a.m. the next morning!).

On our walking tour, which we took early in the morning just after our arrival, we were taken through East Jerusalem, where the Center is (it's the Palestinian part of the city) and the Old City (we ventured into the Christian and Muslim quarters) and tried this great bread that's covered in sesame seeds and you dip into freshly ground spices like oregano. So good. We left through one of the gates in the Old City (the Old City is still surrounded by walls), Jaffa Gate, and explored just a bit in the industrialized, Israeli part of the city--West Jerusalem. I've quickly learned that among shopkeepers and vendors, the Mormons stick out like a sore thumb. They recognize us from a mile away. We also have friends in the various shops throughout the city, and I'm certainly glad for once that we BYU students have a reputation that precedes us. It's also an incentive for all of us to uphold that reputation that BYU has worked so hard to establish and maintain.

We walked past the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, and learned that the Christian denominations fight over who gets to own it or have space in it so much that the keys belong to a Muslim family, who has to come and open it at 4 am every day. As the church has been damaged over the years and needed repair, different sects would adopt a section to repair, and would leave up scaffolding and building equipment for a long time so they could control different sections of the church. Since this became commonplace, the different sects began to argue when one denomination wanted to make a repair, claiming that they would just take over more of the church. Because of this, the church fell by the wayside for several years, with no one to fix or repair it. We spent a few minutes there, but didn't go in. We walked past the path to the Garden Tomb, and walked up to Jaffa Gate, which led us into the Israeli part of the city—West Jerusalem. It was as though we had passed from night to day, the contrast was so great. We left from an old, cobblestone covered city completely swarming with street vendors and little shops and left to an industrialized, busy city. It kind of reminded me of Puerta del Sol in Madrid--a busy, social street where people hang out and window shop and stroll.

On our geography field trip yesterday, our first stop was Augusta Victoria, a church built 100 years ago by Kaiser Wilhelm, named after his wife. The church looked really Romanesque. A young German woman gave us a brief history of the place, and then invited us to sing, which we did. The acoustics were amazing, and we sang "In Humility, Our Savior," "Rejoice, the Lord is King," "All Creatures of our God and King," "Nearer My God to Thee," and several others. So cool.

After Augusta Victoria, we got out at this seven arches hotel (well, just below that) at a lookout spot to see where the ancient City of David used to be, as well as get another view (this time from the South East) of Jerusalem. Then we went to Haas Promenade, a knoll that looks at Jerusalem from the South. We read from Psalms 122, and from Genesis 22, where Abraham is commanded to kill Isaac. He came from the South and saw the hill far away where he would have to take Isaac, and commanded the two servants to stay behind with the donkey. Isaac then had to carry the wood that would be used for the sacrifice, which is symbolic of what Christ had to do when he carried his own cross on the Via Dolorosa. The place where he was commanded to kill Isaac is probably in the same spot where the Dome of the Rock now sits.

We drove a bit farther than before, this time going south and getting out to overlook the shepherds' fields and see Bethlehem from a distance. We read from Samuel 16, which is about the prophet taking oil and a horn to anoint David as the king. It is no coincidence that the king was anointed in Bethlehem, where Christ, the King of Kings, would also be anointed. Some of the Bible persons that had been there were Abraham, Jacob and Rachel (Rachel died there giving birth to Benjamin), and Ruth.

Today we had church and choir practice (Saturday is the sabbath day in Israel. Crazy). For ward choir, we practiced a piece that we would sing in sacrament meeting later this morning, "There is a Green Hill Far Away." However, Brother Thomas changed the words to "there is a green hill near at hand." Really, that was just a couple of miles from here (if that) where the Lord was crucified. Sacrament meeting was excellent—there were actually quite a few people there outside of the Jerusalem Center—a couple of consulates, a girl getting her master's degree who lives in the Old City, a couple visiting from Egypt, where the husband had lived for two years as he completed his Master's in Near Eastern studies. Lots of really neat people, and a few visitors from out of the country. Because of the no proselytizing rule, no non-member visitors are allowed.

After church, I walked to the Garden Tomb with a bunch of others. Our guide there (a British fellow) was pretty cool; he told us about the significance of the places we were seeing, as well as the historical evidence and facts that we have. While the places we saw may/may not be the actual sites, the evidence is pretty strong that they may be.

The guide told us about the process of crucifixion. The Roman soldiers tied ropes around the person's wrists in order to pull them back all the way, which makes it nearly impossible to breathe. They put the nails just below the wrist, which were hammered between the two arm bones, making it so that the weight of your body was upon your wrists. They then bent your knees, and put one leg in front of the other, hammering a nail through both of your feet at the ankle. Those who were crucified were usually nailed to trees rather than crosses, and at times when the emperor came to town, thousands would be erected on crosses as he rode in, making a pathway of crucified bodies as he entered the city. People were not crucified on hills; rather, they were crucified on flat surfaces, so that passersby could look them in the eye as they went by.

Being crucified was a long, painful death. Because you couldn't breathe with your arms pinned back so far, you would try to fight to stay alive by raising your chest up so that you could gasp for air. In order to lift yourself up enough to get air, you would have to prop yourself up on your ankles, which were nailed down. However, there is a nerve that runs right through where the nail penetrated, making it so that when you pushed up enough to catch a breath, the pain was excruciating. In that way, you would support yourself on your ankles long enough to gasp a breath of air, but would hang down again because of the horrendous pain that throbbed through your ankles. You would do it again when you ran out of breath. This long, torturous process lasted six hours for Christ, who could have given up and let himself die long before he had to experience this awful process. Not only that, but he knew as he walked with his apostles the night before he died that he would be crucified, and he could've escaped the process. He was no weak man—he was a man of immense courage and strength.

We continued on to the Garden Tomb itself with the large group of fellow BYU students and tourists. The guide explained how the British bought the piece of land for 6,000 pounds back in the late 1800s, and how they weren't looking for a tomb when they excavated--they just found it. He told us that while the British were the ones to plant the garden there once they thought it could be the site, there are two major clues that would suggest there was a garden there in the time of Christ: first, because there was a Roman irrigation system still intact from before the time of Christ, which is still used in the dry season to water the garden. For such an immense irrigation system, there had to have been something that needed watering. Next, the guide told us that gardens back then weren't simply gardens for beautiful flowers and plants. They had a purpose. The Garden of Gethsemane, for example, is a garden of olive trees, as many gardens of that time were. The British also found an immense oil press on the excavation site (the largest the guide said he's seen in the area), so it may have been a huge garden of olive trees.

Another thing he told us was about the tomb itself. While he has seen 40-45 tombs in the surrounding area, he has never seen one that so closely matched the description of the one described in the Bible. For instance, wealthy people were the only ones who could afford tombs. Because they were wealthy, they had a room before the room with the body called the weeping chamber, where the wealthy paid professional mourners to come cry for them after they'd died. If you were really wealthy, you'd have like 13-15 people come mourn for you, so you'd have a larger chamber. However, this tomb where we were didn't fit the typical mold of tombs—normally you'd have to walk through the weeping room to get to the room where the body was lain. In this tomb, there was no such room, just a place to lay the body immediately to the right, just as the Bible says (it says that Mary came in and went to the right). Also, this tomb was just barely completed, which fits in to the historical facts of Christ's tomb, because no body had been laid there before. In fact, this garden tomb that we were looking at was so unfinished that they had to quickly cut away a chunk of rock for there to be enough room for the person's feet. This, coupled with the fact that the tomb was so very close to the place where Christ is thought to have been crucified, lead to the conclusion that this may have actually been Christ's tomb.

Ultimately, though, I thought our British guide summed it up perfectly—he closed with the statement that he really believes it was there that Christ was buried. In the end, though, what does it matter? We didn't all travel thousands of miles to see a body in a tomb. No, Christ is not dead—He lives. I serve a living Christ, one that suffered the unspeakable in the Garden of Gethsemane for my sins, and one who died upon the cross to fulfill the Atonement. I serve Christ, the Son of the Living God, whose love is matchless and whose Atonement is infinite.