When the college coed was home for semester break at Christmas, we ate Tex Mex at least once a week since she can't get the "good stuff" up in South Carolina where she goes to school. The first couple weeks after she returned to start the spring semester, I didn't want to even contemplate a nacho or enchilada. But of course that passed and I'm back into the groove of enjoying queso and chalupas.
This year we've been studying the book of Genesis in Bible Study Fellowship (BSF). If you're not familiar with BSF, give it a google and check out their website. I absolutely adore my BSF leader, the ladies in my group and the in-depth study of God's word every week. With my love of all things history and archaeology, I've enjoyed rooting around in that lately through a variety of websites and book resources. Just in the month of January, we've delved into the destruction of Sodom when Lot fled to the mountains with his daughters, the miraculous birth of Isaac, and the deaths of Abraham and Sarah. Sure enough, I recalled seeing Lot's Cave as a teeny tiny speck on top of a mountain almost a year ago when the older daughter and I were in Jordan (and Egypt). Jordan is full of sites noted in the Bible, and yet our time there was on the back end of our big sixteen day tour. So I'll really need to return in order to enjoy Jordan at a more leisurely place.
Like everybody else on God's green earth, I'm impatiently waiting for this awful coronavirus pandemic to run its course so we can get back to something like normal. And I'm mainly talking about travel. The Holy Lands are at the top of my bucket list, and our study of Genesis has whetted my appetite to return to this region to really delve into sites related to the Old and New Testaments.
The Cave of the Patriarchs (and Matriarchs), aka Tomb at Machpelah in Hebron, seen above, is on my rader now thanks to this study in Genesis. When Abraham's wife Sarah died (Genesis 23), he purchased this land and cave in Canaan from Ephron the Hittite, the land God promised Abraham and his descendants as part of His covenant. In addition to Abraham and Sarah, family members also buried in this cave include Isaac, Rebekah, Jacob and Leah. As king of Judea from 37-4 BC, Herod ordered the construction of fortress like walls built around the land sitting atop the cave, designed in the same style which masons used on the temple mount in Jerusalem during this same period. In the 6th century AD, a Byzantine church was built on this site. A century later, it was converted to a mosque, but then rebuilt as a church by the crusaders in the 12th century. Alas, it was reconverted back to a mosque by Muslim leader Saladin when he conquered the holy lands later in the same century. For 700 years, from 1167 to 1967, the land atop/around it was controlled by muslims, and they didn't allow Jews or Christians past the 7th exterior step, let alone the inside. Since the reunification of Israel over fifty years ago, the Tomb of Machpelah functions as part mosque and synagogue, divided by bullet proof glass. Sign me up, y'all, I definitely have to take a tour of this historic biblical site that is the final resting place for ancestors integral to the Jewish and Christian faiths.
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