The Bedouin: The People and Religions of Israel

Life in the Land: The Bedouin, part 1

I saw my first Bedouin encampment flash by the right window of my tour bus in 1999 as we descended east along Highway 1 toward Jericho from Jerusalem. Is this how Abraham and the patriarchs once lived? How different from the life I’ve always known!

Bedouin means “desert dwellers” in Arabic, and it’s simply amazing how they can live in the harsh conditions of the Judean desert with barely two inches of rainfall a year, daytime temperatures routinely exceeding 100 degrees in the summer, and no electricity, running water and sewer, forced to travel from camp to camp throughout the year in order to find water and vegetation for themselves and for their goats, camels and sheep, yet they thrive.

They are known for their gracious hospitality, camel races, sword dances and poetry recitation. They’re perhaps best known, however, for selling camel rides to tourists at the Sea Level marker along Highway 1 and for having first discovered the Dead Sea Scrolls near Qumran. They have a fierce loyalty to their tribe, perhaps even stronger than their devotion to God, and although a small number of Bedouin are Christian, most identify as Muslim. They are Arabs, having migrated from the Arabian Peninsula between the fourteenth and eighteenth centuries.

More recently the Israeli government has encouraged the Bedouin to relocate to urban areas, most in southern Israel, but some in Galilee, where they are provided with free education and medical services. In fact almost half the total Bedouin population has relocated, though high unemployment, high crime, gang activity and rising Islamic fundamentalism have reshaped their ancient ways. The Bedouin have one of the highest birth rates in the world, growing at a pace of 5% annually, but at present they make up only 3% of the population of Israel. They have been granted full Israeli citizenship, but only 4% have graduated from high school and 1% from college. A few, however, have chosen to serve in the Israel Defense Force where they are often assigned to elite tracking units.

Daniel McCabe

Jericho: The Archaeologists Disagree

Scripture and Archaeology: Jericho, part 2

There have been three major excavations in the biblical city of Jericho. Oh, what a tangled web they weave!

Excavation #1: A German team from 1907-1911, led by Ernst Sellin, a distinguished biblical scholar with practical experience in archaeology, and Carl Watzinger, a trained secular professor of Classical archaeology who specialized in art, architecture and history. The team initially dated the destruction of Jericho to approximately 1400 B.C., which comports well with the biblical date of 1406, but twenty years later Watzinger revised his dating based on a reevaluation of the city’s pottery and stratigraphy to reflect a much earlier date of approximately 1600 B.C.

Excavation #2: A secular, British, Classical archaeologist named John Garstang who excavated from 1930-1936. He too assigned the date for Jericho’s destruction to 1400 B.C. after a particularly in-depth examination of its pottery. Although not a trained ceramicist by specialization he had a more widely acknowledged expertise of its usage in dating Near Eastern cultures than did Watzinger. Even so, Garstang’s dating of Jericho’s destruction has been almost universally ghosted by modern archaeologists who champion the dating of Kathleen Kenyon, Jericho’s third lead excavator.

Excavation #3: The British School of Archaeology under the direction of Kathleen Kenyon who excavated the “City of Palms” from 1952-1958. She assigned a date for the destruction of Jericho to no later than 1550 B.C., contradicting both Garstang’s findings and the biblical record which date it to around 1400 B.C. Kenyon’s primary argument for a sixteenth-century conquest of Jericho was based on the absence of any Cypriot pottery at the site, which had been reliably present at many other Levantine sites from the same period.

Now I’m no expert on pottery, though I’m admittedly quite fond of the Wallace and Gromit mug which I use here on my office desk to hold my pens and pencils, but what do experts say about the absence of Cypriot pottery as a dependable time marker in Near Eastern archaeology, the same experts, by the way, who have almost universally applauded Kenyon’s methods and findings at Jericho? Well, the American Journal of Archaeology, a formidable secular publication, actually cautions against treating the presence (or absence) of Cypriot pottery as a definitive chronological marker because its distribution can be uneven and context-specific. Other reliable sources also acknowledge that Cypriot pottery was largely absent outside of coastal trading zones, and last I checked Jericho is not so near the coast.

So why build the strength of one’s argument on the absence of something? My seminary professors often addressed this point in my own formal training, warning that it is unwise at best and perhaps even dangerous to lean on an argument from silence, and yet that appears to be exactly what Kenyon has done to the universal cheers of fellow archaeologists. Sure, she arrived at her date for the destruction of Jericho by examining other factors, but she admittedly found the absence of Cypriot pottery to be the tipping point in her evaluation of the city’s conquest.

But let me add this one final note. Bryant Wood, a leading archaeologist with Associates for Biblical Research, has studied all the pottery unearthed by Garstang as well as that by Kathleen Kenyon, and he finds abundant evidence of local Canaanite pottery consistent with a dating of 1400 B.C., including what he calls imitation Cypriot pottery.

In any event could it be that modern archaeologists are actually more biased than biblicists like myself in that they refuse to give proper weight to the biblical evidence for the ancient dating of events like the exodus and the conquest of Jericho even while attacking Christians for being biased? Some trained archaeologists have rightly questioned the speculative pottery analysis at Jericho in favor of the proven reliability of the biblical text, and I find myself standing with them.

Daniel McCabe

Trivia

What are the names of the three major religions that consider Jerusalem a holy city?

Watching Jesus Pray, Part 5

Luke 22:39-46,

Ok, so far we’ve seen that prayer was a habit for Jesus and that prayer keeps you from sinning. But from watching Jesus pray, we also learn to pray wisely.

III. Learn to pray wisely (v. 42).

a. It’s o.k. to pray for tough times to pass. Jesus did! In v. 42, Jesus prays, “Father, if it is Your will, remove this cup from Me; nevertheless, not My will, but Yours, be done.”

b. Notice too that Jesus didn’t pray just to get his way. I’ve prayed like that. In the past I’ve prayed that God would let me date a certain girl. Or be able to afford a certain car. Or be able to get over my sickness before Tuesday. Things like that.

There’s certainly nothing wrong with asking God for things we desire. He may certainly be pleased to answer your prayers, but we are wise to remember that he knows more about what you need than you know.

c. Have you ever prayed for the wrong thing? Let me tell you a great story about a man who learned an important lesson about how to pray wisely.

“A man was being pursued by a hungry lion. Feeling the beast’s hot breath on his neck and knowing that his time was short, the man prayed as he ran. He cried out in desperation, ‘O Lord, please make this lion a Christian.’ Within seconds the frightened man became aware that the lion had stopped the chase. When he looked behind him, he saw the lion kneeling, lips moving in obvious prayer. Greatly relived at thTrivia

What are the names of the three major religions that consider Jerusalem a holy city?

D. Judaism, Christianity, Sikhismis turn of events, and wanting to join the lion in prayer, the man now started walking toward the lion. But as the man drew closer to the lion he heard him praying, ‘And bless, O Lord, this food for which I’m exceedingly grateful!’”

Pray wisely!

There are so many other things I see in this passage that we simply don’t have the time to explore in depth.

For example, we see that God sends comfort and strength when we pray (v. 43).

We see that it is important to be persistent in prayer (v. 44).

Finally, we learn that it is important to support others with our prayers (vs. 44-45).

We’ve learned so much from simply watching Jesus pray!

I hope I’ve encouraged you to pray.

Daniel McCabe

Scripture Study: Theology Proper-God’s Essence (continued)

God alone is self-existent. He owes His existence to nothing and to no one. He just simply is, and one of my favorite Scripture combinations (Exodus 3 and John 8) makes a wonderful connection point between the Old Testament and the New. When Jesus tells the crowd in John 8, “Before Abraham was, I Am,” He’s quoting Exodus 3. When God reveals His name to Moses, He says, “I Am Who I Am.” That was the best name He could give Himself. He’s just the one who is. Nobody else is. Only God is. He is self-existent. He has no master and He owes His existence to nothing or to no one else.

God is indivisible and is always one. We see this in the great Shema, “Hear, O Israel, the Lord, your God. The Lord is one.” One God—there are not three, and we’ll get to the Trinity soon. There’s one God. He is infinite. He’s beyond man’s ability to grasp, yet I love this so much about God. We can never fully comprehend Him because we are limited. We are the created. He is the creator. We are finite. He is infinite. We are temporal. He is eternal. I think when we are with Him in the new heavens and new earth, in the infinite state, we can be with Him for ten quadrillion years and still never fully comprehend Him. He’s so far beyond us. We can, however, apprehend Him. We can learn about Him and that’s why we study Scripture, in order to know God better and to know Him as deeply as we possibly can. Our intellect can only grasp so much, but on some level we can still apprehend Him.

Now let me address the best and classic example of this—the Trinity. God is triune. That is what Scripture presents. He exists in one essence while subsisting in three persons. We can never fully comprehend this. God is so unique. The Trinity is so unique. There’s nothing else like God. It’s beyond our comprehension to fully wrap our minds around Him no matter how arrogantly we might think to ourselves, “I can get it if I just have enough time. I’m smart enough to figure it out.” No, we are not. We can’t!

You aren’t going to find the word Trinity in the Bible. But what we see in Scripture is a clear presentation that the Father is God, the Son is God, and the Holy Spirit is God. All three persons of that Trinity, or subsistencies, if you will, all three persons are fully God. In two future series on Christology and Pneumatology we’ll talk about the personhood of the Son and the Holy Spirit. But in the Great Commission found in Matthew 28:19 we see this Trinitarian expression in reference to baptism. All three persons are fully God—the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. All three are equal in essence and nature, and ultimately all persons of the Trinity are worthy of the same adoration.

But all three are also distinct from one another. Scripture is clear on this. There’s a distinction between the Father and the Son, the Son and the Holy Spirit, and the Holy Spirit and the Father. Even so there exists only one true God. Though each member of the Trinity is equal, there is an economical order of priority in their function, the function of God. There is a role that the Father has taken on as well as the Son and the Holy Spirit distinctly, and we see this throughout Scripture. Since the Trinity is unique, well-intentioned metaphors to describe it will always break down at some point. You may have heard different attempts to describe the Trinity. How can it be explained? Some say that the Trinity is like the sun in outer space in that it has heat, light and fire—three aspects, but only one item. Some people liken the Trinity to an egg that has the yolk, the white and the shell. Again, one item, but three distinct parts. If we press each metaphor, however, they will always break down at some point because nothing is quite like the Trinity.

But there is one decent illustration of the Trinity, known as the Trinitarian shield. It is a triangle with one person of the Trinity placed at each point. It doesn’t matter at which point you place them, but there’s the Father, the Son, and Holy Spirit at each corner of the triangle. Now at each side of the triangle you could write the words “is not,” so the Son “is not” the Father, the Son “is not” the Holy Spirit, and the Holy Spirit “is not” the Father. Then from each point you can draw a line towards the middle of the triangle to a circle that says God, and on each line that goes from a point to the circle you can write the words “is,” for the Father “is” God, the Son “is” God, and the Holy Spirit “is” God.

The point is this. God is unique. He transcends our thoughts and our ways. We can never fully comprehend or get Him. That’s a big part of what makes Him God. If we could get all that is God and fully comprehend Him, He wouldn’t really be God. We would then be equal with God, and we are not. We cannot be. So even though the word Trinity is not in Scripture, it clearly presents the picture that God is triune.

Adam Keim

Answer to the Trivia

B. Islam, Christianity, Judaism

Who We Are

Shalom Y’all Ministries is a 501(c)(3) organization, and all gifts to our ministry are tax-deductible. SYM was formed in 2021 to teach the Bible and lead tours to Israel. Our teaching and presentations feature the acronym S-H-A-L-O-M, which means “peace” in Hebrew.

Our Mission

To teach and encourage those who love the Bible, the land of the Bible and the people of the land and to lead educational tours to Israel that forever change the way you read your Bible and worship the Lord

Our Prayer

“The Lord bless you and keep you; the Lord make his face shine upon you and be gracious to you; the Lord lift up his countenance upon you and give you peace” (Numbers 6:24-26).

Shalom Y’all!