Ramat Rachel, Jerusalem (CNSNews.com) – Imagine spending your summer vacation covered with dust, swinging a pickaxe into stones that are thousands of years old.
Dozens of Christian volunteers and students from around the world are spending a month this summer doing just that -- digging for artifacts from biblical times at an archeological excavation on the outskirts of Jerusalem.
A joint project of Tel Aviv University and Heidelberg University in Germany, the excavations at Ramat Rachel are in their fourth season.
Professor Oded Lipschits from Tel Aviv University told CNSNews.com there are about 75 students – 20 from TAU, 40 from Germany and the rest from North America -- among the 100 volunteers working at the site. Some of the volunteers return year after year, he said.
Situated between Jerusalem and Bethlehem, the excavation at Ramat Rachel is popular with volunteers because of its location and because participants are digging up artifacts from the biblical period, said Gila Yudkin, who calls herself the “Big Mama” of the volunteer team members.
This year the volunteers and students came from at least 11 countries including the U.S., Canada, Australia, England, Spain, Mexico, Czech Republic, Hong Kong, Israel and Germany, said Yudkin, who is a tour guide by profession.
“Some of them are studying so they have different ideas, backgrounds,” Yudkin said. Some of them come with biblical knowledge, for example, or they come with biblical faith or they come with theology,” she said. But most have no knowledge about archeology.
The volunteers start work at 5:30 in the morning to avoid the worst heat of the day. They work in six areas covered by a huge tarp with equipment that ranges from pick axes and shovels to broom heads and dustpans.
About an hour before they finish work at 2:00 they gather all the finds of the day and scrub them with fingernail brushes in buckets of water. At 5:00 in the afternoon they regroup for a “rap session” where they hear about staff members’ passion for archeology and the “find of the day” is announced.
Standing next to a stone-lined pit, Kelly Murphy, 29, said the area she’s working in “started out really boring.” Murphy is a PhD student at Emory University in Atlanta. She was digging in what experts believe to be an ancient trash pit, filled with pieces of broken pottery.
“What I’ve enjoyed is when I actually find things,” Murphy said, adding it takes a lot of digging to find anything. She’s found a few ancient coins. “The thing I’ve done the most are shovel and pick axe.”
Murphy told CNSNews.com that she came to the excavation to get “hands-on, in-the-dirt experience” with biblical times. She said it’s been “pretty cool” to see the pottery and other items used in the past. It gives context for what she’s studying, she said.
She said she’d like to return with her own students when she is a professor.
The site was first excavated in 1954 and then again from 1959-1962. Since then, there have been a couple of small projects but a major excavation was re-opened at the site only in the summer of 2004 and 2005, Lipschits said.
According to Lipschits, the site was probably used as an administrative center from about 700 to 200 B.C. where the Jewish residents of Judea (the Jerusalem area and south) paid taxes to the foreign conquerers of the land. It then became a Jewish village until about the time that the Jewish Temple in Jerusalem was destroyed in 70 A.D.
From about the 5th to the 6th century A.D. it hosted a Byzantine church and later a large Muslim agricultural settlement, said Lipschits.
One of the excavated areas is a Columbarium – a huge cave with niches in the walls used for raising pigeons.
This year, one of the most important finds was a hoard of 15 silver coins, which would have been used to buy temple sacrifices. The coins were stashed in a pot at the bottom of the Columbarium.
Someone had taken the silver shekels and hidden them there in the bottom of the Columbarium and didn’t come back to take them, said Lipschits.
Rick Berendt, a medical doctor at a cancer hospital in Alberta, Canada, came to dig here for the full four weeks with his two teenage children.
“I’ve spent about three weeks swinging a pick axe, which is very uncharacteristic of my daytime work the rest of the year. It’s very therapeutic,” Berendt said.
As a young man, Berendt said, he worked on the City of David archeological dig in Jerusalem and he wanted his children to have that same experience. “I was looking for an opportunity to bring them over in a relatively exciting environment and sort of share with them the reality of the Bible Lands and historical sites (that are) so well-explained here,” he said.
“It gives you a concrete grasp of that whole story [of the Bible] that you can’t otherwise carry with you. It lasts a lifetime, so I think that my kids will benefit from this experience for many, many years,” he said. And his plan seems to be working.
His daughter Stephanie Berendt, 17, said she’s always been interested in history but admitted that initially the excavation was her dad’s idea. Now, though, she said it had definitely become “my thing.”
“I love [having] different people around,” she said, adding that at any given time, “you’ll hear Hebrew, German, French, English all mixed together. Another thing is, you’re really digging up the heritage of a land -- and from Canada there’s not so much of a deep history.”
Stephanie said she found two artifacts: an arrowhead and piece of an oil lamp with a “very distinguishable menorah” (candelabra) on it.
Her brother Karl Berendt, almost 15, said the most important find he was involved with was the discovery of a section of a biblical-era citadel wall under a Byzantine church. He said he was “excited to be digging the dirt that Jesus dug 2,000 years ago.”
Joyce Stark, a student of Ancient Studies and Art History at the University of Maryland in Baltimore, said she thought the years she spent combing the beaches of Florida for ancient sharks’ teeth had helped her in detecting important items on the dig.
Without the help of a metal detector. she found an ancient coin within her first hour on the dig, she said.
“There’s so many thousands of years of history here,” Stark said. “I felt like I’d be guaranteed to find something.”
“On every level it’s a learning experience…from archeology to religion to seeing the actual Biblical sites,” she said. “You read about it in the Bible but to be there and see it, words can’t even express.”