5-31-15. Tell Meggido, Israel
I packed up and left my Tiberias hotel early, planning to squeeze in one more site visit before leaving Israel on a mid-afternoon flight. I decided on Meggido, better known by its Greek name: Armageddon.
Few places on Earth have witnessed more violence than the green fields around this city. With weapons of stone, of bronze, of iron, and finally (at the end of the First World War) with machine guns, armies moving north or south across Palestine have been compelled to take the strategic chokepoint that Meggido guards. Some have succeeded, others failed – but all shed blood, in quantities that encouraged the author of Revelations to predict that the Last Battle would be fought here. For the time being, however, things are relatively quiet, and I was able to spend a pleasant hour and a half exploring the remains of the thirty superimposed cities that have arisen, flourished, and (often as not) burned atop the low hill of Megiddo. The ruins ranged from the Stone Age to the Persian period, with particularly impressive buildings from the Late Bronze (Canaanite) and Early Iron (Israelite) Ages. The highlight, however, was certainly the elaborate shaft and tunnel built sometime in the eighth century BC to safeguard the city’s spring; if not quite on the scale of Hezekiah’s tunnel at Jerusalem, this project, which involved cutting through hundreds of feet of solid bedrock, lay at the boundaries of what was technologically possible for Iron Age engineers. After emerging from the tunnel, I walked along the field below the tell, leaving a trail of dust the color of clotted blood.
