No Pig Bones

While some folks struggle with the idea of having to interact with the shephelah, preferring instead to take a more separatist approach to the culture around us (this is my struggle, by the way), others will have the opposite struggle.

As for the folks who are more missional, they started back down the mountain and into the hills of the shephelah before they even finished reading the last post. And this is a good thing, because God needs His people in contact with the broken world around them — He needs them to be shining light in dark places. As one of my co-workers put it the other day: “You cannot be a rotem if you aren’t in the desert.”

Well said.

The dig at Beth Shemesh in 2008

But those who are rip-roaring to find themselves an adventure will need to take heed of the findings at the archaeological site of Beth Shemesh. The ancient city of Beth Shemesh sits down in the shephelah at the edge of the Soreq Valley. If you were to look at a topographical view of the land of Israel, you would notice that you cannot penetrate the land of Israel from the coastal plains without traveling through the many valleys that head up into the mountains. This meant that the people who lived there had to establish fortified cities to protect the vulnerability of the valleys of the shephelah.

Beth Shemesh was one of these fortified cities guarding the way into the Soreq Valley. Archaeological excavations have made some very interesting discoveries. As they uncovered the remains, they would often run into evidence of the diet of the people who lived in the city of Beth Shemesh — according to the Text, a city inhabited by the Israelites. Excavations of the time period of the Judges revealed that their meat diet consisted primarily of pork.

And yes, for an Israelite city, this is a very telling problem. They are letting the culture around them influence their walk, rather than the other way around.

One would expect that in David’s day this problem would be much less of an issue, but excavations showed that, while improving, about 20% of the bones in the food waste were pig bones. But the Text will end up telling us that a king named Hezekiah leads reforms in the land of Judah, from boundary to boundary. As it was told to me in 2010, they have yet to find a pig bone in the excavations from Hezekiah’s era.

Because it’s hard to live in the shephelah without the shephelah living in you.

It’s going to be difficult to live in the chaos and bring shalom. So you better remember the desert. And you better remember to take a community with you. But you have to be there in order to partner with God’s great project. You have to be a kingdom of priests for the people of the shephelah.

But you can’t have any pig bones.

The rabbis teach that you don’t defend Jerusalem at the gates of Jerusalem; you defend Jerusalem at Beth Shemesh. And they mean this as a metaphor. If you think you’re going to fight the hard battles of your life and of your will when it gets to the heart, you are a fool. You don’t wait to fight the work of evil when it finally arrives at your door; you fight evil with all of the small decisions you make every day.

To say it another way: Jerusalem falls when you have pig bones at Beth Shemesh.

But it’s hard to live in the shephelah. It’s dangerous and full of temptations. But you can’t run off to the mountains of Ephraim, either. Because God is not interested in abandoning the people of the coastal plains.

The call to be a priest is not without cost, discipline, adventure, and peril.