What Was Life Like In The First Century? | Living In The Time Of Jesus | Parable

[Music] [Music] my name is aaron kislenko i'm a historian my specialty is the 20th century but i've come here to jerusalem because i want to find out what life was like in the first century look at this a job that's still here after 2 000 years money changer in this famous scene from the gospels jesus sees the money changers in the temple he overturns their tables and drives them out of the temple everybody's always been interested in the commotion jesus caused but i want to know what all these people were doing at the temple that day and what they all did for a living what were their jobs like and what drove the economy the hillsides around the city of nazareth contain ruins that date back to biblical times they've helped archaeologists and biblical scholars recreate what nazareth would have looked like in jesus time james tabor a biblical scholar specializing in the life of jesus is here to show me just how real it is but listen james and was nazareth really like this i don't even think it could be reproduced no matter what you did think about the crowdedness the smells the cacophony of sounds the animals animals walking around the dung in the street i was thinking it must have stunk it would have to we're going to go into one of the houses here notice as we step inside through the door we're actually outside in this courtyard area this workshop area 90 of the life is outdoors even though you're in the house with a bit of shelter from the sun think of all of these activities that go on in a village uh particularly the manufacturing like somebody's going to be making the pottery somebody's going to be baking the bread everybody does that to their house out of their house so it really gives you a sense of of that workshop atmosphere and here's an example of the weaving after shearing the sheep and washing the wool the weaver does what's called carting the wool opening it up and separating the fibers so they can work them on the loom that's been cleaned and worked on how long does it take you to clean the wool like uh three or four miles and can i try all that bad so i'm holding it like this roll it and spinning it yes and move your fingers with it you need to control your fingers with the splinter yes that's it that's easy for you move move your fingers that's it you reckon for it like that yes okay uh i'll just let you do that so everything's done here you dye the wool here we dyeing the wall we're carving the wall we're spilling here and after that we take to the loom to make fabrics but it's take a long long long process but there's another job they're doing in this house that i want to see because it's one of the most famous jobs in the bible carpentry we've all been told that when jesus wasn't over turning tables he was making them now some carpenter's tools haven't changed in 2000 years but some have what's uh what's this tool for dream a drill it's nothing like my drill how do you use it can i try it that's really tricky now i know where they invented power tools yeah this is hard is it common to have a a small child in the workplace absolutely judaism taught that uh if you don't train your son in a profession you've abandoned him basically we're in a carpentry shop most famous job in the world i mean is this how jesus would have grown up yeah i think that's the image people have it's certainly in the movies and the books we've been studying uh the terms that are used and jesus is called a carpenter in english but of course it wasn't written in english written in greek right but the word actually is tecton which means it means sort of artisan or a builder like a stone mason which really doesn't fit woodworking as much right so it could be any kind of builder you notice there's not a lot of wood in a home right but more stone lots of stuff and most of the examples when jesus taught he talks about stone so often so it's jesus the stonemason not jesus that really does seem to be the best interpretation of the original text i mean that's totally different than everything else we've ever been told before yeah i think the carpenter idea is romantic in a certain way a better image is getting up at three in the morning and heading off to cephas nearby for hard labor uh at four or five in the morning coming back near dark stone was the most important building material in biblical times and easy to get from the rocky terrain so jesus the stone mason may have worked right here two thousand years later builders in israel and around the world have hand-operated gantry cranes and water-cooled sawing machines the modern builders here still use the local limestone building techniques might have changed but the ancient skills are alive for some buildings the shaping and cutting of stone is still done by hand so hot on the trail of the job that jesus may have actually done i'm heading off to the nearby town of cepharus because it's here only three miles but a world away from the village where he grew up that jesus may have gotten his first taste of the occupying power of rome this is james strange a world-renowned authority on biblical archaeology he's been excavating cephas for nearly 30 years so he'll know why stonemason's nearby nazareth could have worked here in jesus's time all the houses and buildings that you see over here to the left that's nazareth right there that's right this is the economic center so everybody from 18 miles around can come into this city and buy and sell all the villagers all the little hamlets independent farmsteads whatever they are but also this city is in a major trade route that extends all the way to italy and all the way to egypt so it's a trade hub yeah very much so would jesus have come here when herod the great dies this city revolts and the romans respond by destroying it then hare the great's son herod antipas inherits this city so he gives orders that'll be rebuilt so thousands of workmen have to come in here someone has to cut the millions of stones that are in this mosaic floor jesus very well could have come and worked here jesus his father his brothers could all have been here that's incredible in jesus time the roman empire ruled over judea pagan roman life with its many gods and liberal ideas was very different from how the jewish people lived and how they prayed to one god so the young jesus lived right at the intersection of traditional jewish culture and the urban life of the occupying romans he wasn't raised to live as the romans did but he may have built their houses huge houses here's what remains of one of them i mean look at our feet i think it's the biggest threshold in the state of israel it's the most finely cut so i'm thinking a bureaucrat some kind of bureaucrat in fact i would guess we're looking at a magistrate right we come into the opulence that's right his office i presume there was a pool right over here that's a pool that's a pool there was another pool over here so we had two roman pools inside this building this is astonishingly big and roman even the administrators would be local people in the higher realm so they get co-opted into the into the occupying that's right right that's right so the romans didn't just occupy they influenced many of the jewish people many of them were hellenized or romanized absorbing greek and roman culture right here in the busy city of cepherus what was it like here it's the main road it's absolutely teeming with life people going everywhere they're buying they're selling they're manufacturing there'll be a laundry you can go in there this will be selling spices and it'll be very aromatic it must have really smelled dude oh yeah you bet it did think about a fresh fish shop and you're walking right by it you know with all this fish and the sun's been on a little while and then also there are two drains underneath us on either side of the street actually and all kinds of sewage is running through there so we're smelling fish we're smelling sewage we're smelling cinnamon we're smelling perfume we're smelling people depending on the prevailing winds for example you could be coming in from tiberius and you could actually smell this city before you saw it the ancients speak of that i wanted to ask you though you know i'm always fascinated by these little things so you know what are the people wearing and what are they how do they keep clean in a place like this well if they're wearing white like they're a high-ranking person then it has to be washed in urine that's the roman technology so it stinks it stinks it's noisy it's energetic there's a lot of things going on so it's the fifth avenue of the ancient it's something like that a fifth avenue in a major city right in the ancient world the gospels tell us that when commerce threatened to take over the life of the temple jesus cracked the whip and the seeds for that rage could have been sown here at cepherus where jesus was likely getting his hands dirty while trying to keep his soul clean jesus's job leads him to where the work is and his ideas and philosophy begin to develop with huge consequences this is how every day began in first century villages with women making bread before dawn in the time of the bible the men went out early to work in the fields but the women were up first making a meal for them to take along when it came to biblical jobs women literally kept the home fires burning if you didn't want to use sticks to create friction and heat and if you didn't have a flint to create a spark you kept the fire going at all times to heat your home and cook your meals historian tova dickstein is an expert in the foods of ancient israel she's helping me to prepare your basic year one meal i can't wait to see how it tastes is it healthy i mean yeah this is very healthy why because it's a complete nutrition this is wall wheat right while we twist lentil it's a complete protein it's like meat ah right yeah so the wheat and the lentils together make up your protein protein and here you have calcium they pick up the fig because they knew i don't know how they know it but you get the calcium from the figs so these are the basic basic food groups exactly so simple that's the beauty of it yeah if we were living in biblical times would this be all we'd ever eat no this is the very basic ingredients but people had more like vegetables garden vegetables food olive now this smells amazing it really does and i'm not saying that because i helped to make it so he used the bread as a was a scoop we would have had bread every meal in biblical times right yeah but it was the staple food every meal there there were people that this was the main dish but it was between 50 and 70 percent of the meal really yeah 70 of every meal almost every meal which is probably why the gospel of matthew contains a phrase that many of us know give us this day our daily bread this is far better than i thought it would be this is absolutely delicious this diet provided all the nutrition you would need for a hard day of work in the fields many of the jobs here were connected to the land on the day the gospels tell us jesus overturned the money changers table some of the people in the temple were likely farmers they would have come here to bring their first crops as an offering of thanks your life dependent on your crops and animals you figure everyone would try and get along but the bible tells us that adam and eve had two sons cain was a farmer and abel was a shepherd and we know how that turned out ronit mayoz is an expert in ancient israeli studies and she can tell us what agricultural jobs around here were like a farmer of course would look at the shepherd is something very very low but i think the shepherd would look at the farmer as being a prisoner because he's tied to his land so do you mean that farmers and and shepherds would compete are not friends especially if you have those goats beyond their use as food in biblical times goats were also used for temple sacrifices these money changers that jesus will confront are converting foreign currency and one of the reasons pilgrims needed the local currency is so that they could buy animals to sacrifice in the temple but before they meet their fate as lunch or sacrifice goats have their own ideas if she wants uh to eat from a tree she will climb or as much as she can and she will take the leaves she will also take out the roots something that the sheep cannot do so for a farmer she's really she's a destroyer maybe that's why the farmer came and the shepherd abel didn't get along abel's livestock really got kane's goat and the sheep were useful not just for food but for making clothes but first you had to catch them would you like to leave this vlog would you like to do that sure let's give it a try okay let's go i think you forgot one [Music] oh yes did you see that [Music] champion shepherd is it terrible that i'm thinking lamb kebabs right about now for the biblical farmer the most important task was growing enough food for his family animals provided crucial help plowing the fields and growing staple foods no wonder the bible mentions animals so often they were life and lifeline your mule your car whatever animal you had is really your friend she knows you the most important thing in my world she is yeah yes because everything depends on her yes but in the bible isn't there a reference to plowing a straight line jesus says to his followers if you follow me do it like you were plowing in the field just go straight after me don't look right don't look to the left and that's not easily done all right yes [Music] now the left one yikes i think she's more interested in eating than in ploughing start going you know it's a lot easier to say that than to do that yeah wrong deal yeah very good [Music] that's it yeah yeah look look look i'm doing it from morning to night i'd be out here tonight you'd be plowing now it's really a lot of work i'm sweating now but you know that god said to adam that with the sweat of your brow you will get bred out of the land yeah there we go that's a girl biblical farmers developed a terracing system still in use here they cut large shelves out of the hillside to prevent the soil from washing away here they grew barley and wheat and anxiously hoped they'd chosen the right amount of seeds to eat and to sow so that's the actual barley just the ceilings yeah it's very important that they get settled now on the ground and that they grow and they get roots so what's the worst thing that could happen as a farmer in biblical times no rain the worst nothing gross this is going to be bread so if there is no bread there is no life here from the time of the bible right up to today for the jewish people unless you've broken bread you haven't had a meal and in the holy temple beyond the courtyard where the sacrifices were held was the sanctuary and the only food allowed him there was bread but to grow the grains needed for your bread you needed water being a biblical farmer meant looking to the skies and praying there would be enough rain one of the toughest jobs was hauling water and guess who did that actually you are now doing a typical woman's job you know this is a woman's work very hard work of course very important one of the hardest will be given either to the women or to slaves we're university professors by the way you know that it was very hard job but this is also the place of encounters women found their spouses really yes the most important encounters happen by a well or a sister so this is like all the important marriages this is the first century hangout this is the internet first century facebook of course that's a matchmaking place here at the well chance encounters led to many important biblical marriages moses and zipporah jacob and rachel isaac and rebecca now this place is not as well suited to matchmaking but it's just as important for collecting water ancient engineers designed this wooden treadmill connected to a ring of clay pots called a sakia now how it works is that you walk or run on this part of the wheel and if you're doing it right the wheel spins and those jugs up on top scoop up water from this pond and then drop them into that sluice at the top and then the sluice runs into a trough behind me where people would pick up the water for farming and drinking and so on but you gotta keep going on this because the momentum really drops off quickly so these are the jobs that would have surrounded jesus when he was growing up but many of his followers the disciples held a different profession one we haven't seen so far i want to find out why so many of them were in this profession and i want to try and do this job i'm in israel learning about jobs in the time of jesus and there's a pretty important job you can't miss if you read the new testament because at least four of the disciples of jesus were fishermen so i've come north to the sea of galilee to find out why this isheim weitzman a second generation fisherman who grew up right here on the shores of the galilee we're going to fish where the disciples fished and maybe find out the connection between this job and jesus's earliest followers time we got to get a cover for your boat a little roof one splash guard that's a hat i loved it now i'm a fisherman yes looks good very good so how did the disciples know where to find the fish like heim they knew the waters around here and they used their instincts it didn't always work but they had jesus and the gospels tell us he miraculously knew where to find the fish we have sonar we're fishing for tilapia which has been swimming in these waters since before the time of the disciples now they call it st peter's fish named after guess who [Music] very good my first fish internet look at that this is bigger but mine's tougher how many fish do we norm do you catch every day it's one 100 kilo 100 kilo 100 kilos well i caught slightly less than that and i'm gonna cook them up biblical style this is varied gross who manages dex restaurant here in the galilee she's to show me how it's done me and otto we'll be happy to teach you great oh yeah all right you take the fish you stick it through it i believe that's the technical term okay great job better than others you see the teacher became the pupil this is a special type of oregano it's called like that yeah this is hot thing and if you want to check if the fish is ready yeah you take the stick of the oregano okay and you try to you know this is my ancient fish thermometer yeah if it goes through it's ready hi jim hello there are you how are you all right look at that i'm impressed ah wait a second a little biblical uh garnish here for you little biblical garnish well very nice indeed while jim enjoys my expertly caught and brilliantly cooked st peter's fish i ask him about the biblical fishing business first of all you fish with nets that's that's what's economical if you're trying to do something commercial and then when you fish with nets in the ancient world you fish at night because the fish can't see the nets at night in order to keep your clothes from being ruined by them wash and bring your nets and so on you usually fish naked the tv viewers will be glad that i i i didn't try that experiment that's a little too much these people i mean fishing in ancient times around here the are they are they poor oh not at all this is the most stable industry for this area according to the writings of the first century eyewitness josephus the galilee had a thriving economy with a salting factory to preserve fish for export and with some of the catch they made fish sauce which was called garum i'm meeting biblical food historian susan weingarten to learn how to do this fragrant job we're going to cut these fish up put them into the pot together with salt the guts of the fish have enzymes in them the enzymes will break down the flesh of the fish the salt will prevent it from producing all sorts of harmful bacteria we leave it around for three months any kind of fish right any kind of fish everything goes in always a bit of salt in the middle now what was garum used for the top quality garum was used as a condiment as a flavoring as rather you use soy sauce nowadays the lower quality ones was the sort of thing that you dip your bread into perhaps and at the bottom there's a sludge which they used to eat the sludge would contain the bones which don't get digested by the enzymes and it's these bones that we find archaeologically and we can identify that this was a place where they made garum whose job would this have been other than mine now the video was right they they will be made in factories we've found the remains of garum factories all around the mediterranean so this would have been a commodity a commodity that was traded widely over the mediterranean king herod ported garam from spain spanish garam was the best they've even found garum in masada would this have been considered to be a a good job as a garam maker or a person working in the garam factory i i guess not but a person that made all his money out of the out of owning the factory i can't imagine this was a glamorous job i can't imagine this either so how long has this garam been sitting this garam's been sitting here for a month and a half in this one for a bit over two months beautiful yeah let's have a go look you can see the fish the way they're all decaying this is absolutely revolting it wouldn't smell nearly so bad at the end of the process this has to rank as maybe one of the worst jobs i would ever have to do we didn't make you eat it did we no and and i'm really grateful that you didn't so there were lots of fish in the sea the sea of galilee which could be sold salted and made into fish sauce for export this was a good business and in the nearby fishing village of bethsaida where many of the disciples came from there's more evidence of how profitable the job fishing could be betsaida is right on a major international trade route the via mars you've heard of the road to damascus well it starts down in egypt and goes right through here this is the site of bethsaida it's a major city in jesus lifetime the image in my head of poor fishermen gets dispelled in betsy where archaeologists have discovered evidence of a middle-class lifestyle how do you know these were houses of the fishermen well because um weights from for fishing nets have been found here um they have actually found the bones of fish here this is the courtyard of the house of the fisherman and this is the wine cellar it's a wine cellar and this is what we need to find out if they're wealthy or not because all the houses look the same on the outside it's what's on the inside it tells us their level of wealth they found tall jars of the type that are used for wine if they're collecting wine and going to a lot of trouble to corbel this over and to make a cool place then they're they're trying to preserve a collection of wine pretty wine yeah yeah you can store quite a lot didn't you yeah so you don't express your wealth by decorating the house on the outside you accumulate things on the inside that indicate your wealth what would this tell you about the life of fishermen around here well it tells us that they can accumulate a lot of capital that they're really rather well off the disciples if they weren't poor they're fishermen they might be fishermen contractors you know they might have a lot of boats out there and they might be doing very well and they were better off than other trades people basically some of them lived here yeah some of them actually lived here came from bedside peter and andrew particularly right in this neck of the woods isn't it yeah we could be looking at their houses and not knowing it you know it makes sense that the disciples would have had well-paying jobs because the jesus movement is a rebellion a revolution and that takes cash as well as belief we're seeing a transition between the old testament and the new and jobs are one of the key differences in the south the farmers and shepherds of the bible are at the mercy of the rain and the seasons but in the north the new testament stories are all about fishing a year and stable business all right we've seen the nice guys in the nature who isn't happy to meet a farmer or a fisherman they provide food but there were guys who did another kind of job in jesus time and everyone hated them no one was happy to see them show up and yet it's a job that one of jesus's own disciples did in the first century the roman empire ruled over judea but not only were the people colonized they had to pay taxes to roma and what did the romans do with all the money some of it went in to build places like this i'm here in the ancient city of betcheon and all i can say is wow this place is incredible it is beautiful it's massive and i'm thinking that at its height it must have been incredibly opulent everybody has that reaction their mouths just drop open they think you know am i in rome or greece and here we are in jewish roman palestine this area has been inhabited for over 9 000 years and no wonder two rivers converge here in the lush jordan valley making for a plentiful water supply as well as rich soil and its location also has strategic importance as the road north from jerusalem intersects here with the coast road from lebanon so i gotta ask i mean how on earth would you pay for something like this well the simple word is texas and the romans insists that conquered territories pay their own way as well as pay for this sort of massive building what kind of taxes are we talking about there are individual taxes per head and their property taxes their cuts into a certain percentage of produce we think it might be anywhere from 30 to 50 percent for the poor it had to be truly oppressive it wasn't graduated so if it was 30 of a smaller amount i mean you could barely get enough to eat [Music] so when it comes to first century jobs ruling over another country and collecting taxes from them is certainly one of the most profitable so if it's an oppressive tax regime i mean is this like 1776 where you have the taxation without representation actually i think three times we have record that herod antipas who rule galilee he reduced the taxes and the only reason he would do that is uh the people were finally saying is enough is enough right and the final revolt was even over taxes so what happens if if you can't pay is there any sort of tax break i think it's almost like tightening screws the client ruler herod is watching to see how much pressure you can put on in addition to all this splendor which may not have interested the local workers who were paying for it the romans also used tax money to build roads and aqueducts which did interest the locals so there were mixed feelings towards the roman conquerors and towards tax collectors not the most popular job then or now but one of the disciples of jesus was a tax collector levi who was also called matthew with jesus so opposed to roman oppression why did he have someone like this in his entourage the gospels tell us that jesus is looking everywhere for sinners to repent and i guess that includes tax collectors now we know how the irs reacts if you don't pay your taxes but what was it like in biblical times so what happens if there's a drought or a famine and you can't pay your taxes there's no mercy you could go to jail you could lose your land you know maybe you own a family plot of land and all of a sudden uh it's uh given over to some rich landowner were people killed for this was there execution for not paying your taxes we do have examples of 2 000 people being crucified up and down the road here in galilee for not paying their taxes because they joined an anti-tax revolution imagine seeing crosses up and down a roman road yeah i'd start paying my taxes at that point that's exactly right beyond your basic greed the romans also found that taxing everything and everybody dovetailed nicely with that other pillar of empire building trade trade routes allowed them to tax goods at every stage of the journey and it was merchants another important job in the time of the bible who had to deal with both taxes and trade getting your wares to the big cities sometimes involved a great deal of travel especially for certain goods that the city absolutely could not do without for instance in jerusalem they had to have frankincense without it there could be no temple worship why not what is frankincense anyway and where does it come from i've come to the negev desert to trace the frankincense trail and learn more about the men who couldn't do their jobs without it the priests the same men who clashed with jesus from this famous scene in the new testament where jesus overturns the money changers table i've been learning about the jobs all these people did in biblical times and how their professions could have brought them all to the holy temple in jerusalem on that day there was another very important job practiced by those who were already at the temple the priest priests were the link between the people and their god performing animal sacrifices and burning a special incense called frankincense as an offering frankincense begins as a tree resin from southern arabia but to get it to jerusalem it used to have to go through this i'm in the negev desert taking the same route the merchants and camel drivers took [Music] and i'm here to meet eunice aburbaia and his herd of camels this is my camel okay what's his uh what's his name uh shyla okay the java camel driver hasn't changed much in 2000 years the most important thing is to look after your animal because we're a long way from anything they're incredible animals smarter than the vehicles that replace them and unlike cars and trucks they can go over almost any terrain cover up my big head well thank you very much [Music] foreign bedouins always feed their guests and if we were ancient merchants we would certainly need to be fortified for the journey taking frankincense through the desert to jerusalem that is delicious now i'm ready for my first camel ride okay okay oh i'm on a candle that's great and now what do i do how do i uh you know i should have read the manual before i uh i bought the camera okay there's no instructions for this all right whoa that's the big head whoa that is something else this is the only way to haul cargo in the desert these guys are the 18 wheelers of the middle east out here i can imagine that in the first century there would have been hundreds of camels and caravans stretched out across the horizon hauling goods from thousands of miles away towards jerusalem and there were jobs along the way too since camels shed their owners made money from their hair which was used to make clothing remember spinning the yarn back in nazareth imagine doing it while on the road to jerusalem out here you make use of everything you can and you paid a toll or tribute to rome and territories you passed through no wonder frankincense was so expensive by the time it got here to jerusalem it had been taxed to the hill [Music] i'm in the sook or a marketplace here in old jerusalem a lot of things have changed over time but you can still get goods here that were sold during biblical times this is frankincense we know it best as one of the gifts that was brought to baby jesus by the three wise men how much is this this is 100 grams 12 12 shekels for one for one yeah for one yes can i smell that yeah sure sakura it's very beautiful frankincense that's beautiful it's good for a smell good for memory good for anything because that many people before 2050 years ago he has put all of this in his home so two thousand years ago yeah this was used so everyone everyone some people believe frankincense to be an effective anti-inflammatory and current medical studies are testing other benefits but the ancients knew that burning frankincense was an offering they had to make to god it's still burned in churches today and 2 000 years ago pilgrims coming to jerusalem and entering the temple would have inhaled its sweet fragrance three times a year the jewish people came to the temple from all over the world for the major festivals i'm in old jerusalem and this is the western wall it's the only above ground structure that's left of the temple that the romans destroyed the temple mount is the holiest place in judaism and the western wall is its only physical remnant just up here on temple mount the very first temple was built about a thousand years before jesus was born people come here 365 days a year 24 hours a day to pray in this square many of them write prayers on small scripts and place them in the wall others kiss the wall the pilgrims brought animal sacrifices to the temple but they didn't bring a goat or a dove with them halfway around the world so the first thing they had to do was convert their currency so that they could buy animals to sacrifice so what about this job money changer did jesus really object to it after all without it pilgrims couldn't buy and offer their sacrifices it wasn't the job it was where the job was located inside the temple this crowded city of pilgrims attracted merchants of every kind it was a good place for business but jesus didn't want the temple turned into a business and some say the priests were allowing it to happen i want to find out more about this job which was unlike any other an answer to a boss unlike any other in the pressure cooker of jerusalem how did these priests balance religion commerce rome and the first century rebel in the time of the bible jerusalem was as busy as it is today three times a year pilgrims came from all around to offer sacrifices in the temple that used to be beyond this wall jerusalem's pilgrims were great for local jobs then and now [Applause] there were food vendors there were hostile owners and there were merchants of every kind but unlike today there were thousands of priests who served in the temple these priests were in the temple to represent the people before their god and nothing could interfere with them performing their holy functions the most important functions were performed by the high priest but under roman occupation there was plenty of interference with this job and rome made sure that the man it wanted was appointed his duty was to god but pleasing rome allowed him to fulfill that duty so he and the other priests had a delicate tightrope to walk shimon gibson is a world-renowned biblical archaeologist who directs excavations in israel he can bring us closer to the lives of these men for whom ritual purity was the key to being able to do their job so here you can see one of the gates uh which led into uh the temple area this is the place where all the pilgrims who had been purified in the salon pool and including the priests who would come from the upper city would enter into the temple so everybody comes right through here exactly and it must have been a a pretty chaotic scene if you've got all these people coming in fairly chaotic but you had a very very strict administration hustle and had uh the temple administrators they would make sure that only those who had been purified in the pools were allowed into the temple everyone had to immerse in a special pool called a mikvah before entering the holy temple its purpose was not for physical cleanliness but for ritual purity there were large mikvahs for the pilgrims like this one the pool of siloam mentioned in the new testament and recently discovered near where the temple stood and the water was on different levels so um whenever the pool was at a lower level then you'd descend the steps if the water was at a higher level then you could so remain uh closer so this went continually down all the way down to the bottom and the steps were on all four sides which is quite nice so you've got to imagine almost like a theater with all these people sitting around and they've all come here in order to purify themselves before going up to the temple it was critical that priests become pure before entering the temple one became impure by coming into contact with death for instance being in the presence of a dead body and life's potential was sacred so both the presence of semen that had not conceived as well as menstrual fluid required a trip to the mikvah the priests believed that if they were impure when they entered the temple everything they were trying to accomplish in the prayers for their people would fail there were and still are strict rules about what kind of water could be used in a ritual bath it couldn't be brought in by unnatural means it had to be rain water or from a spring or river since nothing was more important than this ritual purity some of the priests had their own private mikvahs shimon gibson is digging in what is believed to have been a priestly quarter of ancient jerusalem and he has discovered what is believed to be a priestly house so we're going to go down here we're actually going to descend through time because we're at the level of the ottoman period greater bridges yes which is uh uh mid 16th century and we're going to go all the way down to 2000 years to the levels from the first century from the time of jesus so we're going to descend the elevator of time how do you know that there are priestly houses as opposed to somebody else's house well we have historical sources we also have um archaeological findings excavations revealed a house uh with an inscription indicating that this was a house which belonged to the priestly family i mean these were the neighbors of king herod the great and subsequently of the the roman governors of jerusalem because the roman governor was situated just up slope from where we are jerusalem was a very wealthy city at being the focus of pilgrims uh three times a year those who lived in jerusalem were able to sell their goods to them were able to rent out their houses so you don't have a lower class in jerusalem you have the middle class those who are better off and those who are less better off and the aristocracy and the priesthood people also think of jesus coming to to jerusalem and then uh moving in and around the in between the houses of the poor but there were no poor people the juice of the time that's fascinating i never thought that so there's a lot of animal bones here and you can see them sort of scattered around here you can see a red bone oh look look there's a coin you see that green it's corroded that's why it's got that green sort of skin to it that's really cool and what's nice is it's caught between these two stones it'll give us some information about when this wall was constructed check it out you were actually trusting me well since you're here on the site you got to dig it out the one thing you don't do is rub the surface because it's corroded and so it can actually peel away almost like an onion and and with it it can take the image which is on the the the koi itself on the metal this is the loose change just like you find loose change all over the place modern at least change you know same in antiquity i have to give it up yes you have to so there we go and that is my uh my first ever archaeological find your fingers have touched history that's beautiful it really is it's exciting there's always a first time isn't it touching history is quite a change from teaching it but there's more to see as we descend further into history shimon is using geophysical mapping technology to see what hasn't yet been excavated and he discovers something incredible at the lowest level of this house and lo and behold uh in this area we found this hidden chamber with its ceiling still intact well fantastic it's really amazing you're in the cellar of the priestly house and it's here that you have this mikveh which is this uh ritual pool if you came in from the marketplace you might have brushed shoulders with a lapa which had made you impure so if you're entering into the house the first thing you did was you went to purify yourself and in the maker finding a mikvah in the home of a priest tells us just how crucial ritual purity was it wasn't only in the temple they needed to be pure everywhere they went in the city of god when jesus overturned the tables of the money changers these priests would have felt that he was overturning their world the delicate balance they had achieved between their god and the romans and here in his house we can touch this man's life this vanished job temple priest but this is extraordinary by doing their jobs and finding out about their everyday lives i've learned a lot about all the people who would have converged on the temple on a fateful day in the first century

Channel: Parable - Religious History Documentaries

Views: 20,475

Rating: 4.7368422 out of 5

Keywords: parable, parable channel, parable documentary, religious history, religious history documentary, bible documentary, bible documentary bbc, jesus documentary, bible history, jerusalem, jesus in jerusalem

Id: 18XiSrioXyQ

Length: 49min 57sec (2997 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 13 2020