Good morning, everyone. Glad to see you. Welcome. Those of you who join us online. And we have guests. We'll wait till the 1045 hours to introduce our guests, but glad everybody is here today. We've got an outline. Those of you online got that outline available. All so, and we are going to continue touring Israel and take our stop, number eight today in the virtual and biblical tour and see a few places. Bateshan, Bate, Alpha, and Ein. Harod. How's that for some Hebrew names? We'll talk about them as we go a little bit. Let me lead us in a word of prayer and we'll start. Heavenly Father, it's been fun to go to these places virtually in our mind and in our Bibles, and to consider the things that have taken place in these and to get a little more in touch with the land that you chose as your own. We're grateful. In Jesus name, amen. And so we come here to stop eight, which is kind of right here, right south of the Sea of Galilee, is the first place we're going to stop in our virtual tour this morning. It is a place called Bates. Of course, bait is like when you put it with another word, sometimes it comes up beth and, you know, a famous Bessem. Bait lahem is Bethlehem, the house of bread. So any bait, they're often spelled a little different depending on what they're connected to. Sometimes it's B-E-I-T sometimes it's B-E-T sometimes it's B-E-T-H but it's all the same house of so, bait shaeon and bait alpha, we're going to they're all the house of something, right? It's the house of Cheyon and the house of Alpha. And that's the first two places we're going to look at today. And then Einherod, which is actually spelled wrong on the title there. It should be H-A-R-O-D. Not like Herod the King, but Herod's the shopping department store. H-A-R-O-D. Okay. Beijon so if you come to the Sea of Galilee, come about 17 miles south, just on the banks of the Jordan River, the topography will already begin to change. It's not quite out of the Galilee area, but you can tell, hey, something's getting different. Just 17 miles farther south, it's still kind of rolling hills, but it's starting not to be as green. Depending on what time of year you're there, it might not be green at all. It's starting to get much warmer as you are down. Still staying down below sea level in Bait Shawn, and yet nice, beautiful place. If I were to begin today and say, how many of you remember bait shaeon in the Bible, how many hands would I get up? Not a single one. Bait Shaon is mentioned twice in the Bible, kind of three times. How's that twice and kind of three times. The first time it's just in passing, like we've had with a number of these other places. And that is because the Book of Joshua often mentions these places as places that were conquered. But it's kind of just in a list of places that were conquered in the days of Joshua. And so that doesn't give us much insight other than to say the city was there in the days of Joshua and the conquest 4000 years ago, 3500 years ago, 3750 years ago. And then the second time we see it is in the Book of Judges. What is it? Judges, chapter 17. Do I have on there? And no. Joshua 17. Excuse me. First Samuel. First Samuel, chapter 31 is the second time we see it, verse ten. We're not going to go to these scriptures today as much as we have on some of the other days, but in First Samuel we see Beethon kind of incidentally where in the King James anyway, it is printed as Bethan. Bethshan, same place. And it is that place that Saul and his sons, after they died, their enemies took their bodies to Batesian and hung the bodies on the gates of the city. This is King Saul. So obviously you've got at Bait, Shaon, some enemies of Israel that are living there in the town. Not Jews. More of the Greco Roman world. It would have been Greco at that point, but the Greek civilization that was there really from the Jordan side and had come over. So when King Saul died, hey, this is a big event we don't like King Saul kind of hanging in Effigy. Hang his body from the wall. Remember how King Saul died? Fell on his own sword. That's right. And his sons died in battle. So the enemies in the battle, they took the bodies, they hung them there. Well, there were some good Jewish brethren from a nearby place called Jabesh Gilead who went and rescued the bodies and gave him a proper burial like a Jew should have. And so that's kind of the story that's there. Now, outside of that, we for the most part don't have any record of Beijiang anyway at all. So you might say, well, why would you even stop there or discuss it in a study like this when nothing in the Bible really happened there except they hung dead bodies on the wall. Right. Well, we could go into the hanging into that story a little more and it's kind of interesting, but because of time, we're not going to study that another day. We should do a series on King Saul someday. I haven't done that. But anyway, we could look at that in the New Testament. There is one place in the Gospel of Mark where it talks about the region or the cities of the Decapolis. Have you heard of that word, Decapolis? Anybody want to guess what it means? Ten cities. You got it. We have the smart aggie here today. Polis means ten. No, deca means ten. Polis means city, ten cities, a region of ten cities. And this is one of those ten cities. It is. I think I may be wrong. There may be two, but I think this is the only of the ten cities that's actually in modern day Israel. The rest of them are on the other side of the Jordan in what today would be modern day Jordan. So here is this region of the ten cities. The Decapolis is mentioned. I think some translations might in the Gospel of Mark might say might call this the city of Syphilis. And perhaps you've heard of Syphilis if you've done much GrecoRoman study before, but by the time of Jesus and beyond, it became the city of Sithopolis. Was Jesus ever there? Maybe not. He was in the region of the ten cities. And the region of the ten cities, by the way, is where he cast out the garrisone demoniac and some of this kind of thing. So it was definitely east of the Sea of Galilee, east of the Jordan River, except this one over here on the west. So did Jesus ever go there? Maybe not. It was certainly a thriving city by the time that you get to the time of Jesus, but likely more of a gentile city. And not much going on there in terms of things in the Bible. So here the Dicopolis, or Sythopolis, or the City of Batesian, as it's known in its Hebrew. Shaon, by the way, means Tranquility. So it's the House of Tranquility. Maybe we should rename our town bait Shion. Just a thought. The House of Tranquility. So when you go to Batesion, there's a couple of neat things you can see there's some good bathhouses there. And Romans were famous for their bathhouses because, remember, they didn't have water heaters like we did, but nonetheless, they kept the water warm and they liked a good bathhouse. And it was a community gathering place. They heated the floors and they would throw the water on there and get the steam that would come up in the steam room. And they had the cold room and the hot room and all this. I mean, it was living high on the hog, and probably literally the hog, because it was Roman. They had the bathhouses there, the Roman bathhouses. And there's some really nice remains of the bathhouses there that you could look at. There's the ancient public restrooms. As a matter of fact, if you go there, we'll stop and definitely take a picture of you in the public toilet. And they were not tremendously modest, but they are the you've been there, haven't you, Kevin? Yeah. You can't forget the restrooms, can you? And it is, believe it or not, the largest ancient public restroom that still exists to this day outside of a big theater. Is the theater next? Not really, but we'll jump down to the theater. There is a nice theater that's there. I'll show you a picture in a moment. This is the largest in Israel. It is one of the largest in the world. It would have held 7000 people. This is mostly unrestored. When we were in caesarea, you may remember, I showed you some pictures and we talked about the theater there that Paul was in, and most of that is restored. I said they've got kind of concrete seats instead of the original stone seats, but this one is mostly unrestored, but was found in pretty good condition. It doesn't really need restoration. They still use it on occasion today for a concert or a presentation or something, or certainly a lot of tourists coming in and sitting there and getting their tourist presentation there in the theater. The acoustics there, like all of those Roman theaters, are amazing. And so it goes up there's actually more beyond what's there. There's probably 3500 seats of the 7000 that originally existed in there. And just in case you'd like to know a little word, etymology. You know what etymology is, don't you? The study of where a word came from. In fact, I often talk about Madison. Had an extra credit assignment on it once. You know where I'm going. Thank you. That's what I was looking for. The etymological fallacy. Roger, who listens to us online, sent me a text yesterday says what's that phrase you use for something about etymology? I said, the etymological fallacy. Said, yeah, that's it. Thank you. That's all I need. The etymological fallacy is the fallacy. That the root of a word has anything to do with its current meaning. We might have completely changed, even though I love to study etymology, but when you're in Bateshound, one of the interesting things is the exits to the theater. You got 7000 people in a theater, and they're all going out the exit. The Latin word for the exit to the theater is the vomitorium. You go out through the vomitorium. No, thanks. Okay, we should start using that here. Everyone gathered in the auditorium. In just a few moments, we'll go out the vomitorium. I don't know. Those em words obviously have to do with a place like auditorium and vomitorium. Let's move on. It's a spectacular theater, that is there the cardo. There's another one that we get a root word, obviously, cardiac and all those cardo words. The cardo. Every Roman city had a cardo, and it was the main north south road always went north south, and it was always main street, if you will. It was the shopping area, not the temple area, not the business area. It was stores, it was the mall, it was the cardo. And the cardo in Beijian is fabulously preserved. The roads, the pillars. You can see the shops on the sides, even the mosaics on the floor. We'll take a look at that in just a moment. So it helps you get a good picture when you're in Beijan of what an ancient city an ancient Roman city especially would have looked like Jerusalem had a cardo. Any big city had a cardo. That Main Street. Then there is the tell. We've talked about what a tell is. It's a mound of ancient civilizations, one built upon another, and the main Roman city is not on the tell. It was bigger than the tell, but they obviously built at the bottom of the tell. And the tell, again, just going back, I'll tell you how old it is. At the top of the tell is the Egyptian era, so you can dig way down. I'm sure you would be in the Sumerians, the Babylonians, the Sumerians way back in that area when the town originally started. So it makes it one of the oldest cities of the world. Today, Beijian is a city of about 18,000 people, and it is a very religious city in Israel. Some cities are more secular. They tend to gather together based upon their religious observance, and that's often true in a kibbutz on a smaller level, but even the larger levels, for example, you probably know, if you know anything about Israel, that Tel Aviv is not such a religious city. Tel Aviv is kind of Sin City. It's a secular city. Jerusalem pretty religiously oriented city. Beitian, that's where you go if you're super religious. It would be the ultra Orthodox that live in beiton. Beijon does have a McDonald's, however, and it is completely kosher at the McDonald's because they're very religious there. And therefore you cannot get a cheeseburger at McDonald's in Beijon because that would not be kosher. And it's kind of a farming area. It is an area, however, though, that I usually go in the fall of the year, and the weather is nice in the fall of the year. If you get, say, past April 1, going through about November 1, it's going to be hot. Beijon is the hottest place in the world. I don't know what it is about that place, but it's hot in Beijing. So there we go. I think I have a few pictures I can show you here of Beijan. There we go. There's the theater and the seats here again, not restored. This is that first level, and it goes up. And of course, it's completely in the round, so there's a lot more to it than you see here. Got the great marble pillars. It was a very fancy place for the Roman theater at one point. Remember the Romans, their view was bread and circus. Give people bread and circus and they don't need anything else. They'll be happy and do whatever you want as long as you entertain them and give them some food. And that kept the Roman Empire going a long time until they ran out of bread, at which case the circus is never good enough. But that is the ancient Roman city. The city, by the way, was destroyed in an earthquake in seven. The dates on there, but I'll say 750 Ad. 750, and never was rebuilt after the earthquake. I'll show you a picture here in just a moment and really was not even discovered again, or they sort of knew it was there, but they didn't know what was all under there with the earthquake silt coming in over the top of it. And over hundreds of years, it just kind of got buried. And they found really tops of pillars sticking out. So they knew stuff was there and they decided we should dig it out. And digging it out, they did find this just amazing kind of stuff over here. Here's a little in the background, up in the upper right hand corner there is the Tell. I'll show you a better picture of that in just a moment. Here's one of the pillars that fell over in the earthquake. They left part of it, and I wish I could put the full perspective of that picture on there, but this is a huge pillar. I mean, we're probably talking six, seven foot in diameter of granite, I suspect that is. And you can see how it fell over onto the foundation of whatever that other building was and just broke in half. And it's been laying there ever since. And when they found the city, some of the pillars were upright. Many of the pillars, of course, had fallen down in the earthquake, and they put up a lot of them, they could tell exactly where they had fallen and they put them up so that you could see how the city was. But some they just left to show how they, how they got they got it. But that basalt stone on the bottom, that's local stone, that's cheap stuff, and probably would have been covered, no doubt would have been covered in plaster and you wouldn't have ever seen it. But the granite pillar, those things are brought in from somewhere probably in Europe or Arabia. And so it was a rich city. There we go with the picture. You can see the Cardo going down through here with the pillars really on each side. And this is actually with the red granite that's at one of the many temples there. They had a temple to every god. Kind of reminds you of Paul when he was in Athens, and he says in my paraphrase, you all got a god for everything. I even noticed you got an unknown god. Let me tell you about him. And so through Beijian, you see all of these things to God, which tells you this is not a Jewish city. Even in the days of the Northern Kingdom, remember, they created their own idols, but they didn't have just like hundreds of gods. And here they would have. But there's the main road, the Cardo, the Tell. Here, all of these cities built upon another. And we let the young men run up to the top of the tell and take a picture and then show it to us. I've been there once. That was enough. Here is a mosaic in one of the stores that was there. That's definitely like a 2000 year old mosaic, first century mosaic. And just spectacular. All the little stones there that they get. This one again, I only got part of the picture there, but fascinating find there. Again, here's the cardo going down with the pillars on each side, the stores there. So we're talking cosmopolitan, wonderful place of opulence there in Beijian. So we go to Beijian. Always one. It's spectacular to the eye, like a lot of other places are spectacular to the mind and the heart and the soul. You say, Whoa, this is where Jesus did this or did that. And it's inspiring, but not necessarily even, let's say, the Mount of Beatitudes. Well, there's nothing there but a mountain that looks like every other mountain. You know, it's a hillside. But spiritually there's a lot more impact. Beijian, not much spiritual impact. Very little, again, in terms of what happened in the scripture, but I don't think you can study the Bible very well without studying some GrecoRoman history and the world as it was in Jesus's day and the influence of the Romans and the Roman culture upon that society. And so Beetheon is just a wonderful place to go study how the world used to be in that time. Now let's go along to bait Alpha. Bet Alpha is one of my favorite little stops. Only for one little thing. There's not really all that much to see in Beta Alpha. There's actually more there than we ever go see. Beta Alpha is just a kibutz, remember? A Kabutz is a little Jewish village that was started in the days of independence for the nation of Israel back in the, say, from 1900 to the 1950s. And when they were preparing the fields in the Kabbutz, they ran across an ancient synagogue. And it's that ancient synagogue that I like to take our groups to see. And the picture is right there. That's the picture of the ancient synagogue floor. This is a mosaic. And what is interesting is not that it is all that great of art in mosaic. The one of the lion a couple of pictures ago was much better art. So whoever did this was probably low budget, shall we say. It's like, hey, we want a mosaic on our floor, but we can't really afford one. But here's a guy that he'll do it cheap. Okay, let's get it. So his artwork wasn't really good. Here at the bottom, you see, this is a picture of Isaac. Abraham and Isaac coming to the sacrifice. And here's the ram caught in the thicket. Here they are making their journey over there. And you can see that, like, here's Abraham right here. It's Picasso like, wouldn't you say? Not really. The proportions are not great. So maybe you could argue the artist that was his style. I think you probably would have to argue he just didn't have a lot of experience. He didn't know what to do. There are some unbelievable mosaics throughout Israel from that time. I think that more of a realistic style is what they preferred. It's different, but all through we won't go all through. We've got different biblical scenes here. Then what's interesting there is this right here. Now that's you probably can't see, that all that well. But what we've got there in fact, let me just here's a close up of it. What we've got there? Anyone? Can you guess what it is? The zodiac. You're exactly right. That is a zodiac. And so then, of course, you say, why in the world do they have a zodiac on the Jewish synagogue floor? And just to help you out here, here is virgo. Now, the Hebrew, remember, reads right to left. So this one goes a different direction than we would expect. But it's the same order as if you study the zodiac today, the same order that we would have. You got the virgo, you got Libra. There's the two scales. You got scorpio. You can go around all the way around. Over here, you got Gemini, you got cancer, you got Leo. And it works its way through the twelve signs of the zodiac. Now, what in the world is that? Therefore, the presentation they give at the synagogue. I always let the group watch and I always tell them I don't agree with it. I don't think they got it right. The presentation is, we want a mosaic. We can't afford one. But here's this apprentice from over at Bateson about 6 miles away. Here's this apprentice over here, and he can do it, but he only knows Greco Roman art. He says, let's put a zodiac. Sure, it's cheap. Yeah, let's put a zodiac. This is a first century synagogue, and Jews weren't compromising like that in the first or second or third centuries. They would have said, no, this is a synagogue. We don't do Greco Roman gods in our synagogue here. You'd have to be unbelievably bad Jews to say, yeah, sure, it's cheap, let's put it here. So why is it there? I think it's there because you and I have studied some before. We ought to dig deeper and go back because it's been a long time that I actually think the zodiac has totally been perverted in today's world. But God actually placed those twelve signs in the sky and those twelve signs actually share the message that God has got for Israel, that it's a very Jewish message. Now, in your horoscope today, in the zodiac today, there is nothing biblical, nothing Jewish, nothing good at it at all. But isn't this kind of what the devil likes to do? Take something that has a message and so pervert it and cover it up that nobody would ever see the real message? And so I think that these Jews understood this. As a matter of fact, let's just go from let's skip all but the first and the last. So it's clearly a story that always starts with virgo. Doesn't matter where you go in the world, what time you go in the world, it's always virgo, that is at the beginning of it. And virgo, every time you study it, is a virgin who has seed in one hand and a branch in the other. Virgin seed, branch. That seems kind of reminiscent of some Hebrew prophecy, doesn't it? Of the seed of a woman who will become the branch. Interesting. And we could go into a lot more detail on that. Obviously, that's not what this study is about. And we could get into, okay, there's a balance here. There's a battle here the stinging on the heel, for example. Here's the guy that comes with the arrow, by the way, that arrow is always pointed at Scorpio. There's going to be this cosmic battle, if you will, and the great warrior is going to win. It goes on. We can look at all these, but it ends in Leo. That Leo is always a picture of reign, of victory, of power. So you come from here's. The hope of a child all the way around to the child is now the king. Maybe you can say, oh, it's just purely coincidental that you can make that story fit the biblical narrative exactly. Maybe it's coincidental, but I think I could give you some biblical grounding for it. Like Psalm 19, the heavens declare the glory of God. Night after night they pour forth their speech that here's a message that is going out on that. So I like to go there because one, it gives me five minutes, like I've taken this morning, to say, hey, this whole Zodiac thing, maybe we ought to dig a little deeper, we ought to study a little more. There's some interesting biblical connections to the Zodiac in addition to historical connections to the Zodiac that we could see. And then besides that, if you live up where you can actually see stars like we do, then you can look up in the night sky and say, oh yeah, this is reminding me that whatever it is like cancer, by the way, see right here, cancer, it's normally what like the crab looks kind of like a crab. It's actually the Hebrew word concer, which is to enclose, to gather, to bring in. Like God is going to do right before Leo the lion comes. He's going to gather his people, he's going to protect them in the wilderness. They are going to be his, and then he is going to come and he is going to redeem them, reign over them, provide them all victories. So many stories and illustrations and don't have time to go into it again here today. But if you look into the names of the stars, which are ancient, I doubt there are any names of anything that are more ancient than names of stars. And the names of the stars are all Hebrew, biblical, connotation kind of names that are there. Now, later on, scientists came and they said, let's just call this star Alpha and Beta. And going through letters of the Greek alphabet, I wonder if one of the reasons they didn't do that is because it would give way too much of a biblical story if we actually called them what the ancient names are. So, Beta, Alpha, fascinating place to see some of the other things. They got a water system there. They've got some of that that you might want to see. If you look at it. They've got a Kabutz of about 500 people that live there, mostly do farming. Now let's go to the last place, and that's ayn Harod. I don't have any pictures of Ein Harod, though I have some pictures somewhere, I just couldn't put my finger on them real quick. Einharode. I go there sometimes. I don't go there sometimes in the tour. It just depends on how our schedule is, but anybody well, sure you do. You've already looked ahead on the outline. Know what happened at Einharode? Go ahead, Dana. You're right. Gideon Spring. We usually call it Gideon Spring. And even over there, if you went and said, Where's Gideon Spring? They would say, right there, ein Harod ayn means fountain. Fountain or spring. All the Ein words, like nearby Einharode is the place called Eindor. Remember Eindor? There was a famous actress named after Eindor. No, the part she played was named after Eindor. She was Samantha's mother in law. Mother. Samantha's mother, Indora. Thank you. Indora. I'm talking bewitched. Remember the old guys, you can Google it, the old Bewitch series. Samantha the witch, her mother was Indora, which shows us that even Hollywood in the 60s had a foundational, biblical knowledge that was carried out in popular culture. Because Bewitched was not really like a church show or anything like that. Though by today's standards, it was pure as the driven snow. But anyway, it had witchcraft in it. But Indora. She was named after Eindor. Why? Because what happened at Eindor? You're right. The witch at Indoor, Eindor conjured up Solomon's spirit to King Saul and told him, you're going to die in the battle. And he fell on his sword and they hung him at Baitian. All all took place right there in that neighborhood. Now, that doesn't have anything to do with Ein Harode, except that it's in the same region. And I is a fountain. You'll see a number of fountain, spring, all those kind of things, like Colorado Springs, Colorado. How's that? So Ein Harode is on the edge. It's at the bottom of Mount Gilboa. Mount Gilboa is really kind of a range, more than a single mountain. But Gilboa is where Solomon died, Saul died, and there is the spring there today. And this is one. Of those X marks the spot. We know it happened here. And the main reason we know it happened there is that the name Harod, the spring of Harod has lasted from biblical days. That's what it's always been called, ein Harod. And furthermore, there's not another spring to choose from. This is the spring at the bottom of Gilboa. And furthermore, the Bible talks about the battle that took place with Gideon and the midianites. He went to battle against the midianites. And it says there, the passage of scripture is listed on your outline. It says that Gideon and his men were at the spring of Harod, and just across the valley, the midianites were at the hill of More. Well, guess what you see if you're standing at ayn Harod? The hill of more. It's a great place to look at the topography in the Bible and see that the topography of the Bible as it was described is exactly like the topography that's there. This was not some fictitious kind of made up thing where, yeah, that mountain doesn't really it's kind of like speaking of old television shows, maybury, right. I think Maybury maybe was idealized on some town in North Carolina or something. But the place never existed. Right? Gilligan's island did not exist. So you look at that and you say, okay, this is fictitious. None of this was actually ever even here. But when you get to the Bible, it's a great place not only to go over the story of Gideon again, which is a wonderful story, but also just to look at the telling of the story in the Bible and how it's describing the topography or describing what's around and say, hey, yeah, this is exactly what happened. And you can almost envision the midianites over there on the hill of Moray. And here's Gideon and his men at the spring. And this, of course, is where the army was whittled down, if you will. First of all, he downsized by what was that? What was it? What was the the first way to get rid of people? He said, if you want to go home, go home. That was his first thing. Whoever doesn't want to be here, go on home. And a lot of them, of course, went on home. They said, the minionites are over there, my wife is back there. I think I'll just go home. Then. The remainder is where if I have my story right, the remainder is where he brought them down to the spring and just sort of watched how they drank from the water. And there was what were the two? One was lap like a dog, and the other one was they cup the water and bring it up. I have to say, I probably would not have made it into the army, because I think I would have scooped it in my hand. I tried to figure out who lapsed like a dog. Like I've never seen a human put their tongue down to the stream and do toddlers do that? I don't think sometimes eating and drinking is a cultural thing. And so I actually even did a little bit of research to try to say, you know, is there any culture in the world that actually drinks like that? And or do they put their hand up? That's a hard thing to study culturally, because that's a good point if your hands dirty. And I kind of wonder too, if there's not a little bit of let's call it a Hebraism there. What does it mean to laugh like a dog? Maybe the guys who just plunge their head down in there say they're not scaredy cats, let's go with them, something. And maybe honestly, the Lord said, this is not normal, but I'm going to select 300 of them, and for some reason they are just going to be compelled to lap it like a dog. And that's how Gideon is going to know, because Gideon, he's also the one that had the fleece, remember? Put it the fleece out and see if it got the dew and whatnot, and then try it again the other way the next day. So this was definitely a day in which God was giving those kind of manifestations of sign. There wasn't the indwelling of the Holy Spirit, there wasn't the scriptures to go by, there wasn't a group of believers to gather together and get some good advice from, none of that. So you had to have some kind of a clear word. If God wants something specific, he's going to have to spell it out for you. And so he spelled it out for them how exactly? It had something to do with lapping water like a dog. But what exactly does that mean? I'm convinced maybe we don't know exactly what that means. It's just hard for me to imagine, even if I don't remember what the number was before that, 3000 or something like that. Even out of 3000, I can't imagine 300 people laughing like a dog. I can imagine them getting some water out of there, whatever, but who knows? Anyway, he ended up with 300. And this is the one where they went in the middle of the night to the Hill of Moreay where the Philistines were camped, and they had torches and vessels, vases, clay pots and what, hammers, and they hid the light and then they broke it. And all of a sudden they were surrounded by clanging pottery and lights all around, and the Medianites ended up killing each other. It was kind of great warfare, wasn't it, Trickham? Which is probably still good warfare affair to this day. Trickham and that is what happened at Ein. Harrode. What else have we got there? Einharode. There's actually two kibutsim at Einharod, just in case you want to have a little bit of Israeli political history to kibutzim. Why are there two kibutsim instead of one kibutz? Because they got mad at each other. That's why in the 1950s, they got mad at each other, and it was a political division, and they decided, you all go this way, and we're going to go that way. They were both socialist, both left wing in the day, which a lot of Israel was at that day. And yet one side was kind of aligned with David Ben Gurion, who was the prime minister at the time. The other side was aligned more with Russia. And was Stalin still alive in 52? I think he was, wasn't he? And they were more towards the Russian style communism, and they got at odds with one another, and they split. And now there are two kibbuts there, neither of which are socialist. They changed their mind after many years, but it kind of shows you there. There was also a big battle there at the Arab Israeli conflict, which we might call the War of Independence in 1948. Big, huge battle that took place right there at Einharod. So there's some modern stuff of significance there, which is interesting, by the way, since I've got two more minutes. Speaking of Israeli politics, we know today the last 15 years or so, but even a little more than that, israeli politics is kind of right wing. Of course. Benjamin Netanyahu is in the likud party. That may ring a bell to you, may not, which is right wing. Right now, his coalition, governing coalition is farther to the right than probably any government in the last 25 years anyway that has existed. But all of Israel's early years, from 1948 to 1977 were very left wing, progressive, socialist. That's where Israel got its start, as in today, it's very right wing capitalist. Republicans would be friendly there, like what's going on in the government for the most part. Now, I mentioned 1977. Does anybody know what happened in 77 that turned them from left wing to right wing? You should study your Israeli history more. Manakambegan was elected as prime minister. Manakambegan was very right wing. He was the first right wing prime minister the country ever had. And everybody said, oh, my goodness, jimmy Carter was in the White House, remember? Oh, my goodness. He's going to start World War Three. And they all fretted worldwide. And he went down to Egypt and made a peace treaty that has lasted to this day. And a lot of the Israelis said, you know what? That leftist thing wasn't really working for us, but the right wingers actually accomplished something and brought about peace and safety and prosperity. And it's been kind of that Manakambegan style before. By the way, Manakambegan, if you Googled him, you probably find out he was a terrorist because of his involvement in the War of Independence and some of the things he did at the War of Independence, even including bombing the King Herod Hotel. King herod King David Hotel. But I'm out of time. We'll have to save that for your Google there. We've been to those three places. Next week in our virtual and biblical tour, we're going to go down the Jordan River. Let's go to Jericho. Let's go to Kumaran where they found the Dead Sea Scrolls. And maybe we'll go to I don't know if we'll go to Mastata, if we'll get that far down, we'll work our way down to the Dead Sea anyway. We'll definitely hit the Dead Sea and Kumaran and Jericho next week. I'll lead us in a word of prayer and then we'll take a little break. When we come back in our worship service in a few minutes, we will have some singing and we will have our service. Today we're unlearning, that's what we're doing. And we're going to unlearn some things we've been taught about the New Covenant that just might not be true. We'll look at the scripture and see what it has to say with the New Covenant and come up with a response. Let's have a word of prayer. Heavenly Father, thanks for the gathering, the fellowship and thinking about some of these places that have been significant down through the ages have modern significance, have ancient significance, even before the time of Jesus going all the way back, even before the time the Jews came in in the days of Joshua and conquered the Promised Land. And whether we ever get to go there in person or just in this virtual tour, we pray that understanding this will help us understand the Scriptures and understand the word of God. We pray it in Jesus name. Amen. Take a little break. Those of you online, we'll see you at 1045.