Speak Slowly and Understand Deeply

As some things get older their utility changes. No I am not talking about people here I am talking about non-living materials. Let me give you an example. This past weekend I went to Gezer with my classmates here in Jerusalem. The Tell at Gezer is full of old materials strewn through out the area. This place was once a thriving city and is now a hiking path with some old vestiges of what once was. One of these vestiges is a small grouping of standing rectangular stones reminding of an incomplete stone hedge. Historically we have no idea why these stones are where they are or to what purpose they served. Some suggest a religious monument of sorts while others think town square material, but the idea is these stones had a purpose because they did not just place themselves there sometime in the past. Today we leave them as they are because of the mystery they portray to all historians and archaeologists. The beauty of the past is that we have a rough idea of what it may have been like but there are details of past cultures that we just can't grasp because of the change that hundreds of years amounts to. It also must be said that 99.9% of ancient writings were written for and sometimes by the elite or ruling people. So even if the elite say something about these standing stones of ours we can only say that this is how the elite viewed them.

So let's say we find a written record from the governor of Gezer that says these stones are memorials to a great battle fought on the plains of Gezer. We have the official label but we still lack the day to day utility of the stones. Maybe the people of Gezer would use the stones to remind themselves of their young men who fell in that battle like the way the Vietnam Memorial reminds our American culture of that war. Maybe this was a place of celebration because of the great victory achieved by the men of Gezer's arms and it was a way in which the memorialized their comrades similar to the Leonidas statute raised by the Athenians celebrating Spartan military prowess that gave them time to abandon Athens. So yes these stones could be a memorial or shrine of sorts and that would make lots of sense given the fact that nearly every culture has memorialized something or has designated a physical place of worship, but today we use it for something else. We use it to challenge ourselves to understand ancient and foreign culture more deeply and as a jungle gym. I was attempting to get a picture of just the stones but my some of my classmates saw an opportunity to climb and honestly I would not be surprised if the youth of Gezer also climbed on these stones like my classmates.

A lot can be said historically, but do not let anyone tell you that they know every detail because even in the present we miss little details in our writing of history.