The Jayrusalem Artichoke

“Day at the Museum”? June 5, 2008

Not sure anyone still sees this (please put a comment below or send me a note if you’re seeing this), but I had to get this out.

“Really insane museum experience” is a phrase you don’t often hear.

So here goes: I hadn’t been to the Jerusalem Bible Lands Museum in about seven years and the geeky historical novelist in me wanted to drop by to see what was new in the world of 3,000 year-old bits of stone. As I buy my ticket, the guy tells me that a (free) guided tour is about to start so if I wait a minute I can join. Turns out I was the only one, so I was really jazzed to get a provate guided tour. Can’t be bad, right? Hmmmm.

So the 70-ish year-old lady begins the tour near the stone seals. This was like that Tamar took from Yehuda — it was a stone ring or etched tube that you’d roll in clay as a signature, guarantee, or assurance of value, etc. So she’s showing me the various designs and she says “they’d take all kinds of weeds and grasses and make ink to dip these in.” Now I happen to know that this wasn’t how they were used. People were using these on clay tablets and jars; there was no paper back then, and ink wouldn’t have held up. I shrugged, thinking maybe it was part of specific use for something. As she spoke I scanned the write-up on the wall. Nothing about ink.

Then we get to a map that she explains is all about how Abraham moves around in long, wandering paths to eventually reach Canaan. I’m looking at the map and I’m seeing trade routes for spices, gems and timber. Still confused (later I’d notice the map she was actually referring to, in a similar position in the next room), I let her guide me to a display of idols. There are two identical idols connected at the feet, and she says “this is a very early example of homosexuality. You see, it was part of idol-worship. When the Ten Commandments talk about not being homosexual, it wasn’t random; it was against a form of idol worship.”

Okay, I’m going through them in my head, and I’m pretty sure homosexuality isn’t in the Big 10. And these two guys are just standing there. Sure, they were naked, but so was pretty every statue or etching in the museum.

At this point, I’m looking around for the candid camera. This is too bizarre. Did she miss the part of class where they, well, EXPLAINED HISTORY? Maybe she stayed too late at recess instead of coming for the game “Match the artifact to the explanation”.

Ten minutes later, after a vague lecture about how the Philistine Sea people came in and found Jews in many lands where they landed along the various Mediterranean countries (um, there were actually not too many Jews anywhere when that happened…it was somewhere around Joseph’s time), we approached a large wooden coffin. I heard about the man’s life a scribe and how the various images painted there tell the story of his life. Later, I returned to read the panel, which explained it was a nobelwoman, the only character clearly highlighted in white, and the images were a narration of the Egyptian afterlife.

Next we saw a statue of an Egyptian warrior holding a bow over his shoulder, and I was informed that it was Moses looking over the Nile before a plague.

Then we saw the Iron-age sword, just the blade and animal-head hilt, missing the wooden handle. (Oops, the card says it’s a board-hunting spearhead with a hilt made to keep it from running through the animal.)

Then we saw a model of Babel, 600 B.C.E.; I’m thinking that it’s pretty cool to see where the Jews were exiled to. She points to a large ziggurat temple and explains that it’s the Tower of Babel where one person asked the other for a hammer and he got a screwdriver. She sort of missed that by like a thousand and a half years.

Finally, we reached the last room, dedicated to Christian artifacts, where she simply mumbled something about “and then there were Christians and things changed.”

At last, she bid me farewell. I took a deep breath, walked to the beginning of the route, and did the whole tour myself.