Years of studying Hebrew have prepared me for this moment...now I will never go hungry. Actually, their is no Hebrew word for McDonald's. As with other foreign words, they just use the Hebrew letters that sound like the foreign word.



The Ancient Jerusalem City Walls, with stones from Herod, the Muslims, the Crusaders, the Maccabeans, and others through its many reconstructions.



This is Hezekiah's tunnel. When King Hezekiah learned that the Assyrians were coming to invade Judah, he built a long tunnel through the bedrock underneath the Temple Mount (the huge platform the Dome of the Rock sits upon). The purpose of this was to provide a secret water source to the inside of the city so that the Assyrians could not cut off Jerusalem's water supply and thereby dehydrate the Jerusalemites into surrender. The tunnel is long and at points the water is up to the mid-thigh, other points down at the ankles. Sometimes the tunnel is 4' 5" tall and at other points is appears to be about 20' tall. If you are claustrophobic, this is not the activity for you. We walked for what felt like a mile or more. Hezekiah's men started on either side of the massive bedrock mound and tunneled through until they met each other in the middle. To this day it confounds archaeologists how they were able both teams found one another. Along the walls you see pick marks facing in a distinct direction. Halfway through the tunnel the pick marks change direction, indicating where the teams met. At the end of the tunnel, there is a Hebrew inscription left by the teams stating that they had done this. The Hebrew is quite ancient (paleo-Hebrew), so I am not able to make it out. This is the Hebrew before our earliest copies of the Old Testament. Obviously it has been translated and you can probably look it up online if you want.


Don't let the brightness of these photos deceive you--it was pitch black in the tunnel. The flashlights behind me were blocked by the width of my shoulders, so I couldn't see very well where I was walking. I just turned the flash of my camera on and aimed into the dark. The guys behind me are college students who, whether out of nervousness or a need for attention, chose to sing "Barbara Ann" and "Party in the USA" (Miley Cyrus) at the top of their lungs.