Saturday, June 20, 1998

McMurry students visit archaeological sites in Holy Land

By LORETTA FULTON / Abilene Reporter-News

Traveling down the King's Highway of the Old Testament, preserving a massive Bronze Age gate, and peering into the Promised Land from the same spot Moses did are all well and good.

But an archaeological trip to the Holy Land for three McMurry University students and their professor has an extra added attraction.

"We're going to see if Indiana Jones is still in Petra," said Jeramie Ellison, who is making the month-long trip along with fellow students Bryan Hamm and Michael Khoury and assistant professor of religion and history Bill Libby.

The Jordanian city of Petra, featured in the Indiana Jones movie, <I>The Last Crusade,<I> is one of many places the students will visit. But their main job will be to help preserve a stone gate believed to have been built between 2500 and 2000 B.C.

The site is between Madaba and Dhiban. Libby has been to the site the past two summers, but this is a first for the students.

Khoury, whose father moved to the United States from Nazareth in 1968, is a religion and Bible major at McMurry. He has been to Israel before, but not Jordan.

Traveling to the Holy Land puts his religious studies into perspective, he said.

"It really brings the Bible to life. Having that experience will make it that much better," he said.

Ellison also believes the trip will have a spiritual element to it.

"Just seeing where Jesus was will be great," he said.

The students will make side trips to Israel while working, but most of their time will be at the dig, Libby said.

Excavation of the 8.5-acre site is sponsored by a consortium of Drew, Gannon and Lubbock Christian universities. McMurry has been invited to join the consortium as well, Libby said.

The group of students will work in cooperation with the Jordanian Department of Antiquities to preserve the massive stone gate and other findings at the fortress site.

Discoveries of the past two summers already have influenced scholarly thought about nomadic life and urbanization between 2500 and 1500 B.C., Libby said.

The inscribed Mesha Stone found at Dhiban, named for the Moabite king, is now preserved in the Louvre in Paris.

"It has from his point of view a fight with the Israelites," Libby said. "He wins."

The group will share a house in Madaba, about 20 miles southwest of Amman, Jordan, with students from the University of Chicago. The students and professors will eat food prepared by an Arab cook, and some of the low-fat fare may be unfamiliar to the Americans.

"They'll probably lose 10 to 20 pounds," Libby said.

But the students aren't concerned about what they'll eat on the trip. Ellison has a foolproof method of knowing what to chow down on.

"What he eats, I eat," Ellison said, pointing to Libby.