Find out what others experienced on the dig

Digging in Jerusalem:  A Student’s Perspective
By
Jonathan Hartzell
    In the Fall 2006 semester, I signed up for Dr. James Tabor’s class on the historical Jesus.  As a Religious Studies major with full intentions to study ancient Judaism in graduate school, I thought this course would offer a unique perspective.  I could not have been more right.  Not only did his theories regarding the historical Jesus help me broaden my vision of the methods and potential of Religious Studies in general, but his lessons regarding the Jewish world in which Jesus lived were some of the most informative lectures I had yet attended.  Imagine my excitement when, one day in class, he mentioned the possibility of a few undergraduate students accompanying him on an archaeological expedition within the city limits of Jerusalem itself.  After months of harassing Dr. Tabor via email and after-class ambushes, I was finally accepted as a member of the dig team.  I was so thrilled that I could hardly contain myself.
    The all-too-short week that I spent in Israel was filled with days of back-breaking manual labor in the hot desert sun.  Never in my life did I imagine myself as the type of person who would enjoy waking up before sunrise to toil in the sun and dirt, but after one day of the dig, I felt more alive than I had in years.  Our first morning in the city began with our group watching the sun rise over the Mount of Olives, just across the Kidron Valley from our dig site on Mount Zion.  It was a breathtaking sight, and we were lucky enough to have the pleasure of seeing it every morning for the next week. 
Each day began with lugging what seemed like hundreds of pounds of tools to the site, preparing to spend the day digging further and further into the past.  It seemed like every inch we dug into the ground added up to a ton of dust in my lungs, in my hair, and over my skin.  I paid it no heed, though, as each one of those inches uncovered something spectacular that had not been seen for two thousand years.  Collectively, we uncovered numerous coins from antiquity, one of which bore the crest of Pontius Pilate, the prefect of Judea in the time of Jesus.  We also unearthed a seemingly endless supply of mosaic cubes that had covered the floor of the aristocratic house which we were excavating, a weighing stone used in commerce, and a fragment of a large ritual stone vessel, amongst various other exciting finds. 
The find that stands our most clearly in my memory is when I picked a fully intact murex snail shell out of the soil.  This shell is of vast importance to not only the academic study of ancient Judaism, but for modern religious reasons, as the snail is used to make a sacred blue dye for Jewish prayer shawls. Until recently, this sea snail, called a Chilazon in scripture, was thought to be lost.  The shell that I uncovered is only the second piece of archaeological evidence that points to this particular snail as being the correct animal for use in ritual.  It still amazes me to think that I am the first person in two thousand years to have touched something that was so important in the religious lives of so many people.
    We didn’t just dedicate our time to digging, though.  Dr. Tabor and Dr. Shimon Gibson, the director of the dig, both made sure that our afternoons and evenings were well spent.  We spent every available minute of daylight on walking tours of both the city of Jerusalem and surrounding areas of historical and archaeological interest.  We toured various archaeological dig sites around the city, walked to numerous important religious locales, and drove out to one of King Herod’s desert palaces, the Herodium.  One day we drove further out into the desert to visit Qumran, the site of the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls.  We even spent a memorable night floating in the Dead Sea, gazing up at a perfectly clear sky for hours on end. 
The night that is most clear in my memory, though, was a long walking tour of the Jewish Quarter in the Old City.  After our first day of digging, Dr. Tabor convinced us to drag our sore bodies out into the late afternoon to walk for what seemed like endless miles, as he gave us a guided tour of some of the most important spots in Judaism.  The tour ended at the Kotel, or Western Wall, the most sacred spot in all of Judaism, the last standing reminder of the Temple Mount, and the epicenter of the Jewish religion.  Despite years of studying Judaism in a strictly academic sense, and a lifetime of cultural immersion in the Jewish religion, I was not prepared for how I felt finally seeing the quintessential representation of Judaism in person.  Before that day, I never thought that I would be one of the millions of people that walk up to the Kotel only to be overtaken by emotion and tears. Despite my best efforts, though, I stood at that wall sobbing, wondering how I could have gone from my day-to-day grind as a working student only 48 hours before to where I was standing at that moment. 
Everything that we saw and did throughout that week was a thrilling, life-changing experience.  I made friends with some of the most amazing people that I have ever met in my dig teammates and directors, learned more about religion and archaeology in one week than I had learned over several years in the classroom, and saw a land populated by people with more beauty and life than I had ever thought possible.  Before I left for the expedition, the land of Israel was already important to me.  It bore meaning to me as a scholar of religion, and it meant a great deal to me as someone of Jewish heritage.  Upon my return, though, I realized that the land of Israel was more than just a historical setting found in the pages of a textbook. It was more than just some patch of land to be coldly studied and theorized over.  It was a living, breathing, endlessly fascinating place that offered more opportunities for education and personal growth than simply reading texts and attending class alone could ever provide. It not only gave a new life to my education; it gave it heart.  I will be forever grateful to Dr. Tabor and the Religious Studies program at UNC Charlotte for providing the opportunity that I otherwise would never have been able to experience.

Jonathan Hartzell is a senior at UNC Charlotte and is majoring in Religious Studies, with a focus on Second Temple Judaic Studies. He is married, has a child (with another on the way), and works full-time for Wachovia Bank.  After graduation, he plans to continue on to graduate school in order to pursue a career in academia.