It Ends Here

We visited Megiddo on one of the few rainy days we've had this year. Megiddo's claim to fame is Armageddon (Hebrew: 'Har Megiddo') - the battle between the forces of good and evil that is prophesied to take place in the valley below. All the kings' horses and all the kings' men will gather in the North and come down the Via Maris, that ancient highway of armies, to make war on the good guys (Revelations 16:16).

Every now and then the clouds would break and the sun came out over the Jezreel Valley, green and pastoral – no sign of those evil kings.

Whew.

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Back in the good ol' days here in the Middle East, it wasn't easy to find a water source, arable land and high ground to defend yourself all in one spot, so the few places that had theses essentials became cities. Unfortunately, the ideal conditions that made a place attractive to build a city were also good reasons to conquer it. Over the years, a city would rise, be conquered and destroyed and a new one built on the ruins of the old. This phenomena unique to the Fertile Crescent, layers of civilizations built one on top of the other, produced small manmade hills called 'tels'.

Megiddo is the most visited tel in Israel. It used to have more than 25 strata of civilization dating back to prehistory. "Used to have" because a bunch of American archeologists peeled off a few layers in the roaring 20's of the twentieth century. Fortunately they either got tired of digging or realized that they were destroying the very subject they were researching and only excavated two or three civilizations that nobody cared about anyway. The Americans left the really good stuff for tourists. In the tourist season, probably more people visit Tel Megiddo than lived there at any one time, but hopefully their guides won't drag them out in the rain like our instructor did to my group.

Today the tel is just a hill smack in the middle of Israeli hick country, but in the Bronze Age (Which the local Canaanites called 'the Canaanite Period' for obvious reasons.) Megiddo was a major player in world politics and corresponded with then superpower Egypt. Some of this diplomatic mail has survived (see Amarna letters) and been deciphered by archeologists in spite of their notoriously terrible handwriting. The king of Megiddo complained to Pharaoh about riffraff called 'Hipiru' that were making life miserable. Pharaoh responded by sending Megiddo state of the art military technology – chariots and spears which were Bronze Age equivalents of modern day F-16 fighters and machine guns.

(We visited Megiddo only a week after the war with Hamas in Gaza, and I couldn't help thinking to myself, "This sounds familiar." Little Middle East country fighting terrorism with modern weapons provided by a superpower far away. Hmmm……..)

According to historians, one of these groups of Hipiru called the Israelites eventually whipped the Canaanites and burned down Megiddo. (You will find an entirely different version of the story in the Bible, but since they didn't find any Bibles in Megiddo, archeologists don't buy it.)
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One of the Israelites named King Solomon was very smart and decided that the reason the Canaanites lost the war wasn't because their defense strategy depended on chariots, but rather because they didn't have enough chariots. With this in mind, he rounded up all the Israelites and threw them into forced labor gangs to rebuild Megiddo into a chariot city. (I Kings 9:15) The Israelites were less than excited by this. Like one of them noted, "If we would have known that we were going to have to rebuild Megiddo, we wouldn't have done such a good job of wrecking it in the first place." (Archeologists don't have problems with the Biblical account because they found remains of the stables, which also come in handy when taking notes.)

After King Solomon died, the Israelites divided the country up into two kingdoms; Judah in the south for every one related to Solomon and Israel in the north for everybody else. With lots of chariots and spears, the Israelites felt so confident that they even built a winter palace for their king at Jezreel, not far from Megiddo. (We visited the palace, but take it from me, you need a very active imagination to see any similarity between the pile of rocks our instructor showed us and a palace.)

Solomon was very wise, but his theory that lots of chariots could save the Israelites proved mistaken. One fine day the king of Assyria showed up with something beyond even Solomon's imagination, namely lots and lots of Assyrians. The Assyrians looked at the Israelites old fashioned chariots, just laughed a little and sacked Megiddo (Not again!).


By afternoon the clouds had cleared and the sun came out. We went to Maayan Harod. It’s a natural spring that flows out of a cave at the foot of Mount Gilboa.

Gideon was a prophet that farmed for a living in the valley a few years before Solomon came along. Gideon wasn't as smart as Solomon and his military strategy was very different. He gathered up all the Israelites for battle, but then God told him, "Gideon, you got too many Israelites. Choose 300 and send the rest home, and get rid of those silly chariots while you're at it." This made sense to Gideon, because his strategy was based on trusting God. Gideon and his 300 sneaked up on the enemy at night, broke some pottery and waved torches and chase the bad guys away. (Archeologists don't believe this story, but I do because there's a lot of broken pottery in Israel.)

We finished the day at a look out point on Mount Gilboa. The sun was setting and we were supposed to be listening to our instructor, but something else caught my eye. A reservist returning from the fighting in Gaza, a modern day Israelite, was standing on a rock overlooking the valley. And it struck me that nothing's really changed here in 3000 years.

We twenty first century Israelites are fighting the same kind of battles Gideon fought 3000 years ago. Sometimes the other guys destroy our cities, and sometimes we destroy theirs. We have the latest in military gadgetry. Tanks and planes and guns every bit as good as those chariots that used to dominate the battle field. Lately we have been pretty sure of ourselves.

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But now they say Iran is cooking up something beyond our imagination, and if they're right our tanks will be no better than a bunch of silly chariots. And after the latest round with the Hamas, the question everyone's asking, 'When is it going to end?"

I was talking about it with one of the guys I study with, a believing Jew that's got a little of Gideon in him. He said, "Yeah, it's pretty scary. But you know, when it comes down to it, it's this: you just got to trust in God."

When is it going to end? Nobody knows.

But according to the prophet of Revelations, it ends here.

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