Jordan Day Gimmel

Day three started out at Petra which was absolutely incredible! It is probably best known for the Indiana Jones movie. It was incredible to see the treasury and to see all the others buildings the Nabateans had built. The Nabateans were a people group back from 300 BC to about 300 AD. There are no known living Nabateans now. They were a group that are famous for their desert cities which were check points along the trade routes from Arabia to Gaza. They are the only known group to ever conquer the desert back then. No one else would attempt it. They were able to harness water in ways not even understood today. Because of this they were tremendously wealthy. That is why the treasury was built. The architecture they get is from all over including Egypt, Rome, etc… Because of their travels they were able to understand these architectural wonders and recreate them all in their cities like Petra. Another Nabatean city I visited earlier in the semester was Avdat. They were an incredibly brilliant people. My friend Teresa and I rode donkeys up to the high place where the Nabateans used to do Sacrifices. We took some fun pictures “sacrificing” each other up on the alter. The high place had some amazing views of Petra, both the ancient and the modern city. It was unbelievable to see how many buildings there really were. Those Nabateans were pretty busy! Their dwellings not only line the bottoms of the canyons, they go all the way up to the tops of the canyons. At Petra there was also a great theater that they had built. The tremendous wealth of the city at that time astounds me! Teresa and I also went inside several caves and public buildings of the ancient site, one of which had amazing acoustics so we sang in there for about 10 minutes. It was so much fun! After that we took the bus to a lookout at the Wadi Dana which was another access point from the Negev to the Rift Valley. It was beautiful to see the canyon in the haze leading out away from us. Then we continued our journey to Bozrah where there were many local children surrounding us, putting scorpions in our faces and being giggly not having seen white people very many times in their lives. Bozrah is located on Cenomanian limestone with high steep hills. There was lots of terracing done in this area as well. It was one of the gateways to the Rift Valley. In Ancient times as described in Obadiah, Bozrah was a city that was pretty haughty about their location and city. They would boast that they were better than Jerusalem, God’s city. And because of that they could be a little more self sufficient. For this, Obadiah spoke out against them. The way the city was built was much like Jerusalem as well. The Temple and Palace were established at the side that was not naturally fortified and the hills surrounded the rest of the city.