Interesting find at a place called Tel Motza, not far from Jerusalem – a cache of vessels and figurines inside a 2,750-year-old temple. At that time, this would have been part of the kingdom of Judea.

According to the director: “The finds recently discovered at Tel Motza provide rare archaeological evidence for the existence of temples and ritual enclosures in the Kingdom of Judah in general, and in the Jerusalem region in particular, prior to the religious reforms throughout the kingdom at the end of the monarchic period (at the time of Hezekiah and Isaiah), which abolished all ritual sites, concentrating ritual practices solely at the Temple in Jerusalem.“

We’ll be taking part in the OSS December Dip at Parliament Hills Lido. The water temperature will be anything between 6 degrees and 0.1 degrees. We are already in training, taking an ice cold shower every morning.

We’re doing this to raise money for Open Doors. You can find out more at our everyday hero sponsorship page.

We’re raising money for boreholes in northern Nigeria, where women and children often have to walk miles to collect water from wells in hostile communities, risking their personal safety to meet their family’s needs.

Please help us to make a huge SPLASH and change thousands of lives in northern Nigeria. Donate here – and you can lie in your snug warm bed with a clear conscience on December 8th.

UPDATE

The swim was duly completed. Thanks to everyone for their generous support, we raised over £2300. And here’s a video to prove that we did it:

The article’s author, writes that “it seems likely that some manuscripts from Qumran were carried south [i.e. in the direction of Masada] by refugees fleeing the Roman destruction of Qumran in 68 C.E. But that’s only a best guess.”

via Popular Archaeology.

According to the story, the archaeologists, “This temple complex is unparalleled, possibly connected to an early Israelite cult – and provides remarkable new evidence of the deliberate desecration of a sacred site.”

The desecration in question, according to this story, is that when the Philistines took over, they not only destroyed the temple, but used it as animal pens.

Presumably the Philistines gained temporary control of Beth-Shemesh, and brought in livestock to live on what they knew had been a sacred site to their enemies.

Once the Philistines withdrew from the area, the descendents of the original worshippers returned to and religious worship resumed at the site.

In biblical terms this would have been around the time of the Judges. In the biblical account, at the time of the temple 1100 BC, Samson was living two miles away, across the valley in Zorah. It has been suggested that Samson’s name is a diminutive form of šemeš (sun), i.e. “little sun.” ‘Sunny’, maybe. Since Beth-shemesh means “house/temple of the sun [god]”, (Šamaš = the sun god), maybe there’s a link there.

As to the Philistines, a bit later, Beth-shemesh plays a prominent role in the story of the Philistine capture of the ark of the covenant (1 Sam 6:9–15). The ark is carried from Philistine territory to Beth-shemesh, which was a border town just inside Israelite territory.

Below, a fab panorama of Jerusalem. And there are photos of the church of the Holy Sepulchre, complete with ladder (which is still standing there today).

And I love this one of the road to Bethlehem from the Jaffa gate.

I often use older photos in my books because I think they give more of an impression of the ancient city – at least in scale and size. (Also they’re out of copyright which always helps!)

Painted some time before 79 AD (the date when Pompeii had that little run-in with Vesuvius) the painting is the earliest known painting of a biblical scene, and it shows Solomon sitting in judgment.

But according to this article from the BAR, the painting also features the philosophers Socrates and Aristotle. The idea, apparently, was to show Greek philosophy showing respectful attention to Jewish wisdom.

Personally I’m more interested in their comedically large heads.

First was the sheer breadth of imagination. The stories in that collection were so finely crafted and yet so wild, spun out of sheer inventiveness.

There was the children’s playroom where the virtual reality comes terrifyingly alive; the trudge through the incessant rains of Venus for the sanctuary of the sun-domes; the man who builds his children a rocket in the backyard. And as I discovered more stories, there are other images which stay with me even now: how one false step off a path changes the course of history; authors spirits dying out as their books are burnt; a weird little tale about a miner who sees goblins passing through rock as if it were water; and all those stories of the colonisation of Mars which were filled with an aching sense of loneliness and loss.

But the second was the voice. He didn’t write like anyone I’d ever encountered. There was poetry in his voice. He wasn’t just an ideas man, anyone can be an ideas man. He was A Writer. This comes through most forcibly, of course, in his novels, Farenheit 451 and Something Wicked This Way Comes:

First of all it was October, a rare month for boys. Not that all months aren’t rare. But there be bad and good, as the pirates say. Take September, a bad month: school begins. Consider August, a good month: school hasn’t begun yet. July, well, July’s really fine: there’s no chance in the world for school. June, no doubting it, June’s best of all, for the school doors spring wide and September’s a billion years away.

There’s that voice at full blast. Nostalgia and a sense of something lost, for sure. But also magic, the thrill of being alive. In Dandelion Wine he writes of the joy of a new pair of tennis shoes, of how a boy who wears those could run like the wind. For me, the first time I read it, young as I was, I remembered what it was like to be ten, a time when you ran everywhere.

So Bradbury taught me what it was to imagine. But he also taught me that imagination is not enough. There was a something in his writing which showed me that you had to work at this thing. Looking back I think he showed me that it was a good thing – an important thing – to be a writer. (One of his least known books is Green Shadows, White Whale, a thinly-disguised autobiographical account of his time working as a writer on John Huston’s film of Moby Dick). There was nothing accidental about his writing. It was the product of years mastering his craft:

“You must write every single day of your life… You must lurk in libraries and climb the stacks like ladders to sniff books like perfumes and wear books like hats upon your crazy heads… may you be in love every day for the next 20,000 days. And out of that love, remake a world.”

A great writer. A great man.

Chief among these is a free, downloadable discussion guide to accompany all the videos.

The guide is perfect for homegroups, Bible study groups, or small, clandestine meetings of subversive organisations. or all three. Oh, and churches as well. And heck, even youthgroups. And schools.

Oh, just go here and download the thing.

There are also some extra links and resources, which I’ll be adding to over time. You can find all the links on the section of this site I am calling, with stunning originality, Kingdom of Fools.

The final installment in a series of four videos to accompany the book Kingdom of Fools. See more at the Kingdom of Fools Vimeo Channel.

This is possibly the most contentious video of the series – it explores the attitude of the early church to violence and warfare. The members of the early church were adamant that it was impossible for a Christian to take revenge or to inflict violence on another person. In the words of Tertullian, they believed that ‘Christ, in disarming Peter, unbelted every soldier.’ Their emphasis on love, peace and forgiveness was one of their most distinctive characteristics.

According to Walter Wink, the New Testament passage quoted more than any other during the church’s first four centuries was

‘But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be children of your Father in heaven; for he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the righteous and on the unrighteous.’ (Matt 5.44–46)

So this video looks at whether we’ve forgotten this a bit. At whether we are so accustomed to the idea of power, so habituated to being in charge that we no longer as Christians question the use of violence as the way to solve problems.

This is something I’ll be blogging more on in the coming weeks if I get time. In the meantime, enjoy the video.

The third in a series of four videos to accompany the book Kingdom of Fools. See more at the Kingdom of Fools Vimeo Channel.

This video looks at Paul’s arrival in Philippi and the conversion of Lydia. She was a ‘porphuropolis’ – a buyer, or dealer, or dyer of purple cloth. Purple was a luxury product. Its wearing was restricted by law to certain high-status groups of people. ‘Wearing the purple’ was a sign of prestige and power.

So it’s interesting to explore the attitude of the first followers of Jesus to wealth and power and the status-symbols that went with it. Through looking at the example of Lydia, and a third-century Christian called Cyprian of Carthage, we can see that when it came to purple, they may have been slightly colour blind…