Earth-moving and a Stone Memento

July 3, 2013  Wednesday

Today we took a movie of the crane that hauls away Pete's masterpieces.

After the work day ended, we got ourselves to west Jerusalem to complete the project we started last week.  The first or second day of the dig, Pete picked up a chunk of limestone that was a byproduct of Yousef's work with the 5-kilo sledgehammer -- the first rock he smashed up for us.  (Wish I had a photo of him in action with that thing!)  Here's the stone:

Pete had been trying to think of something that would make a nice memento of our time here, and was thinking about these verses from the book of Zechariah:

²⁰ In that day shall there be upon the bells of the horses, Holiness Unto The Lord; and the pots in the Lord's house shall be like the bowls before the altar.

²¹ Yea, every pot in Jerusalem and in Judah shall be holiness unto the Lord of hosts: and all they that sacrifice shall come and take of them, and seethe therein: and in that day there shall be no more the Canaanite in the house of the Lord of hosts.  (Zech. 14:20-21)

Pete wanted our piece of Jerusalem limestone engraved in Paleo-Hebrew with the phrase from those verses:  "Holiness to the LORD".  So he researched Paleo-Hebrew and documents such as the Jehoash Inscription (below) in order to come up with the correct lettering.

We asked around and learned that stone cutters and engravers might be found near cemeteries.  We had been in the cemeteries on the Mount of Olives and hadn't seen stone cutters.  We happened to have a conversation with a woman in the Old City one day, and asked her advice.  Her children had recently ordered a headstone for their father (her ex-husband) and she called up her son to ask where they'd had it made!  Armed with her info, we found a stone cutter near the cemeteries on the west side of Jerusalem (Mount of Olives is on the east side).  Last week we took our stone and our hand-written lettering to him, and this week we picked up the finished product.   (Something about our lighting affected the photo.  The stone hasn't changed color.)

Our stone cutter Barak took a little creative license in deciding how to slice the stone, and we're satisfied now that we have something that Moses and Aaron could have read!  (Reading right to left, the letters are K-D-SH-L-Y-H-W-H, "kodesh l'Yahweh", literally "sacred/holy to the LORD".  

So how's that for a souvenir?

We grabbed a bite to eat at one of the train stations, and made it back to the hotel in time to shower and attend the evening lecture.