Update on Israel Trip

Ministry Background and the Purpose of the Conversation

Welcome to the Wrap Report with your host, Andrew Rappaport, where we provide biblical interpretation and application. This is a ministry of striving for eternity at the Christian Podcast Community. For more content or to request a speaker for your church, go to strivingforeternity .org.

Well, welcome to another edition of the Wrap Report. I'm your host, Andrew Rappaport, the Executive Director of Striving for Eternity and the Christian Podcast Community, of which this podcast is a proud member.

Go check out all the other podcasts at christianpodcastcommunity .org. And I actually have with me an award-winning podcaster himself, Eric Johnson, who when we were giving awards, he had gotten one for his viewpoint on Mormonism Show.

If the name doesn't sound familiar, you're going to have him introduce himself, and we're going to talk about the ministry he's with, Mormonism Research Ministry, just a bit. It's been a while since you've been on, Eric, so let me welcome you and ask if you could just briefly give us some background on Mormonism Research Ministry, how you came out of Mormonism.

Oh, wait. No, you didn't. And then, you know, what you guys do there. And then I'm going to ask you, you know, I want to ask you some questions about what happened this past weekend. Ooh. Let me, before we start talking about that, let me just let folks know right from the get-go, this episode is going to be talking about our trip to Israel.

Eric led this trip. I'm going to get into why I asked Eric to lead this trip and organize it for us. And this is an episode that I will say right up front, we're going to go longer. And I'm going to put a link to the video that we'll put out in the show notes.

The reason I'm going to do that is so you could see the pictures as well. I will try to describe them as best I can, but yeah, words don't always capture what a picture does. And so if you want to watch the video, you can watch the video, encourage you to listen to this as well so that you see what, you know, hear what we're talking about.

But with the video, we're going to show some pictures. We're going to go longer. And I'm not going to do the editing on this because there's a video attached to it. So the reason I'm not going to do the editing that I would typically do is so that if you find something in here where we refer to a picture and you do want to go see it, you can mark that time and know that it's going to be right there in the video.

So if I did any editing, editing out any ums and likes and things like that, then, well, the timing wouldn't be the same. So with that, Eric, if you could introduce yourself and a little bit about what you and Bill do in ministry.

Well, that's a lot of pressure, Andrew. No editing. I can't say um or I can't cough, but OK, well, that's how we'll do it today.

Yeah, so I will be coughing, but I have I have a mute button.

I'm not with that privilege. But yeah, so again, my name is Eric Johnson. I work with Bill McKeever, the founder of Mormonism Research Ministry. He founded it in 1979. We have a website, MRM .org. That's a lot of what we do is right on that website.

We have a couple of thousand hits a day, usually about a thousand or plus visitors. We also have the podcast you mentioned, Viewpoint on Mormonism. That's Bill as the host. I'm the co-host and kind of the color guy, I guess you would say.

And we do a lot of writing. I've written a number of books. I think in the last 10 years I've written six books. So the last one was in last fall. It was called Introducing Christianity to Mormons with Harvest House.

And I really am liking that book a lot. A lot of people have benefited from that. We've sold about 3000 copies. So excited, excited about that. And in fact, from March 28th to I think April 11th, it's going to go on sale 299 on Kindle.

So anybody who wants to get that book, it's available for a really reasonable price. But yeah, I never was a Mormon, a Latter-day Saint. In fact, nobody from our ministry was. Sharon Lindblom, Bill McKeever, Aaron Shoffa-Walloff, myself.

All of us have roles at the ministry. Not one of us has been a Latter-day Saint. But I would say that actually, I think, gives us a strength because we're called to the LDS people. That's our calling.

And we don't have a vendetta. I think that can help a lot when we're talking to a former LDS nicknamed Mormon, of course. And they will sometimes get really angry with us. And they'll say, yeah, you just you just hate the church because you left it.

No, we never left it. And we don't hate we don't hate anybody in the church. We just want people to know the other side.

You have to know the truth. And folks, you often hear me refer to a book that we have called Sharing the Good News with Mormons. Well, Eric is the editor, is his brainchild to come up with the idea of all these different tactics of how to evangelize to Mormons.

And I've always said, Eric, on this show and on Apologetics Live show that the brilliance, I think, of the book is you got 24 different authors writing 24 different tactics of how to share the gospel specifically with Mormons.

But a lot of them aren't or could be used in any event. And so, you know, the one you had me write is on open air evangelism. That's not only the song you do with Mormons. And because each chapter is like six pages, it's really easy to just read any chapter in any order, get lots of ideas for evangelism, whether it's to Mormons or not.

But there's also some of them, you know, like Bill's way of doing it with the gold plates really helps you learn more about Mormonism. And now that one specific that would only work on witnessing to Mormons.

But, you know, I think I can remember with Sharon, who you'll know, who wrote the article, the chapter on, you know, the newspapers that you do at the... That was Sharon. It was Sharon. Okay. That's what I thought.

Who had, you know, she goes and talks about how she creates a newspaper for the temple openings. And it's actually a way to share the gospel specifically for an event. And so that gave me the idea of doing some things like that for specific events that we go and evangelize.

So I have recommended for people that want to learn different ideas to evangelize. And then also it teaches you about Mormonism. So it's kind of a twofer in that way. And because each chapter was written, we didn't read anyone else's chapter.

You did, but we didn't until the book was out. And so that was really good to be able to just know that I can read any chapter in any order and it's not going to conflict. And so I will say that we are running a sale on that still.

You can get it at strivingforeturning .org in our store. Sharing the good news with Mormons. 35 off if you use the coupon code LDS. That stands for Latter-day Saints. So now this weekend, what happened this weekend?

Something big. Yeah, a woman named Sandra Tanner, who was the head of Utah Lighthouse Ministry in Salt Lake City. She and her husband, who passed away over a decade ago, Gerald Tanner, were really the godparents of apologetics to Latter-day Saints from a Christian worldview.

She was a Latter-day Saint with her husband. And they ended up discovering that Joseph Smith was not true. They still held on to the Book of Mormon, but then they found out the Book of Mormon, which is a unique scripture in Mormonism, is not true either.

So they ended up leaving. They wanted to go to the truth. They ended up becoming Christians back in the early 1960s. She retired this past weekend. We had a celebration for her on the Friday night. We had probably around 200 people who came to this event.

And I was talking off air with you before we started. I was the introductory speaker, and I kind of tried to set the tone for the night, a little humor, because she has a really dry sense of humor, having a little bit of fun.

But I had her stand up and turn around, and I had the audience wave to her, and she waved back. Then I asked five questions. The first question had to do with how many of you believe that Sandra and Gerald were, at one time, you thought that they were the antichrist, of the devil.

And I probably had about six or seven hands raised. I thought there would be more, because that's very common. She has had a lot of Mormons come to her in recent years and say they wanted to ask for forgiveness because they said terribly mean things about her.

And then later they realized she was telling the truth, and they ended up getting out of Mormonism. I asked a few other questions, but the fifth question was the one that just was incredible. I asked how many people there had left Mormonism partly or fully as a result of the work that she did.

She's written a number of books. Mormonism, Shadow of Reality is a classic. It's no longer in print, but it's like 550 pages full of research. And so I was shocked when I saw, and I was telling you, I couldn't, from the front, I couldn't see all the hands, but 40 or 50 hands went in the air, and then everybody just gasped.

And then there was a big applause. And I think she was kind of shocked how many people were there. I want to say a third, a quarter of all the people there had left Mormonism partly or fully as a result of her work.

Now, obviously, Jesus should get the credit because he's the one who's in production. Sandra was only in sales, but she presented a really good product with integrity. And so it was a lot of fun to see all these people that really appreciated the work that she had done.

The Opportunity Created by Sandra Tanner’s Retirement

Yeah, you know, I've shared this before, but when you organized a apologetics cruise, and that was the first time you and I met, I don't get starstruck. I've met a lot of well-known Christian speakers, and I guess I kind of got used to that.

But as you remember, I had someone that worked for our ministry that was going on that trip, and she was by herself and Sandra was by herself. And so the question was, would she and Sandra share a room?

And so I went to ask her, and I'm trying to explain, she didn't know who Sandra was, and I'm explaining to her, and she goes, Andrew, you're almost acting starstruck. I've never seen you do that with anybody.

I've seen you meet all these people, and you never get starstruck. And I actually did. I remember when we met on the ship that first moment, and I just stared. And it was funny because I have benefited so much from the work that she and her husband did.

Early on in my Christian life, when I was working with a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and trying to evangelize my coworker and just didn't know where to turn. And it was Gerald and Sandra, their work that I turned to.

And so it was like probably the only person I know that I got starstruck with. But she has retired, and with that sold her house, which was right next to the bookstore that she had. And with that, that has opened up an opportunity for you guys at Mormonism Research Ministry.

Let's talk about that before we talk about Israel, just briefly, because I want people to know about an opportunity that they could get behind, they could help, and a vision that you guys have.

A New Utah Bookstore, Library, and Bible Museum

Yeah, well, for 50 years plus, she's been in the Salt Lake City area and had made her home available in the beginning to have people come and purchase the books that they were printing. They actually run their own printing press.

Gerald ran it for years, and then they actually had somebody all the way to the very end, February 28th, who, his name is Tony, and he printed everything that they put out. But the thing about this store, and it's hard to explain, Andrew, because we're in the internet age and everything can be done via the internet, YouTube.

Why would people want to go to a store when they could buy everything online? No, people came in to talk, and I'm a testimony of that because I talked to hundreds of people in the last 10 years that I helped her on Saturdays.

Bill and I would volunteer on Saturdays, took over the bookstore. We'd have people come in, and I did more evangelism in that store and more opportunities to be able to talk to people, and then encourage Christians and help them in their attempt to try to share their faith with Latter-day Saints.

So we want to do the same thing at Mormonism Research Ministry. Again, we have a website, we do a podcast, we do evangelism. I like to go to Temple Open House events that the church puts on and do evangelism there.

We go downtown and other places, do evangelism, but we're looking to create our own bookstore. It wouldn't just be a bookstore. The store, it's not gonna be like a Lifeway that's gonna have all the paraphernalia and all the different books, all the commentaries.

It's not gonna be that, but it's gonna have major books on Mormonism, both from a Christian worldview as well as a scholarly worldview, and to try to understand what Mormonism is. We'd like to reprint some of her books.

We also wanna have apologetic works that people would be able to use to counter atheism, agnosticism, and all the other skeptical things that are out there, to be able to give them reasons why the Bible is true, et cetera.

So we would like to do a bookstore. We also would like to put together a library of LDS materials. We have a lot in our arsenal, and Sandra's giving us a lot of her stuff. I mean, we're talking, we have all the magazines going back decades, all the research you'd ever wanna do to look at the Journal of Discourses or the History of the Church or these other books.

We wanna make a place where Mormons or even former Mormons could come in and they could take a look and see these for themselves, open up the books. I think there's power in that than just looking at something on the internet.

And then we wanna have a Bible museum, and that would include old copies of the Bible. We have King James versions. For instance, I have two, 1630 and 1633. I've got several other older versions of Bibles that are incredible, but I also have archeology such as pottery, coins, spearheads, things like that, that come from Israel, that date from the time of literally Abraham all the way to the time of Jesus.

And to be able to, it's mainly my collection that I've collected over the years going to Israel, and to be able to long-term loan that to the museum and make it so that it would be a place where you could really have confidence that the Bible is about real places and real people, describing real events as you got a chance to see on your Israel trip.

This is not make-believe. Book of Mormon has nothing compared to what the Bible has. We also wanna use some of the things we have in Mormonism. We have some LDS materials that are incredible, as well as a display.

For instance, we're gonna have the lead plates that imitate the gold plates that Joseph Smith supposedly carried for three miles. People don't realize that gold, that would have been a six of a cubit foot, which is what the gold plates would have been, six by eight by six.

Gold weighs 2 ,000, or excuse me, 1 ,200 pounds per cubit foot. So that would be 200 pounds. We have lead plates that weigh 118 pounds, and you should see people trying to lift those and realize that's impossible.

So we're gonna have that kind of a display. And then finally, we're gonna have a classroom, a classroom that would have, we'd like to have 50 chairs and to be able to do things throughout the week and on Saturdays, because a lot of people won't go to a church that's not their own, to be able to go to any kind of a conference or apologetics lecture.

And so we'd like to have a neutral place where not only Christians could go, but Latter-day Saints could go. I did a class at the Utah Lighthouse bookstore back in 2019, and I wanted to do an experiment to see how the class would work.

It was on the gospels. I had 20 people the first day, and including a Mormon, and the Mormon went to every class all the way to the end. Now he didn't leave Mormonism, but man, oh man, he had a whole new appreciation for the gospels.

So with all that said, that's our dream, Andrew. And we have just decided in the past couple of weeks that we are going to do this. We are already looking at properties. I don't know where the faith comes from because we're not charismatic, but we believe that God has a desire for us to do this.

And we're not scared about raising money. We wanna pay cash for a store that would be within five minutes of the I -15 freeway, somewhere in the middle between Ogden and Provo. And Salt Lake City is also in there as well.

A place where people could come. Provo is where BYU is, Ogden is up north, and then Salt Lake City is about maybe 20 minutes away from where we would like this store to be, 15 to 20 minutes, and have a place where people could come to ask questions.

So we're in the process right now. We're in our main newsletter, and we're gonna do it on our podcast as well. We're gonna talk about how we're gonna try to raise this money. And we have about a quarter of it without even having asked yet.

We already have a quarter. And then somebody has told us they're gonna give us $100 ,000 grant matching funds. You know how that goes. So we think we're gonna need seven to $800 ,000 to get a 2 ,500 square foot facility.

That would be retail. It would be with parking and all the rest. And if people wanna learn more, they can go to utahchristianbookstore .com, a website domain that we bought, just so that we could tell people what that is.

And if people want to find out more, we have an email. We haven't sent the first one out yet, but we're gonna be doing that here in the next week. And they can send me an email, eric, E-R-I-C, at mrm .org.

That's Mormonism Research Ministry. Eric at mrm .org. Send me an email, ask to be on the bookstore email, and you'll be the first to know any information being on that group email.

And what was the website for the bookstore?

Utahchristianbookstore .com. One word, utahchristianbookstore .com. We believe that God does not want this to end because Sandra ran that store, I think 1986 is when they bought the house next door, turned it into a bookstore.

It was a farmhouse from the 19th century. They turned it into a bookstore and a meeting room. They actually built onto it. Well, now it's gone. They've sold it. It's gonna be destroyed to make apartments.

There's nowhere for people to go to see a face. And this is gonna change the trajectory of our ministry. That's for sure. It's gonna require a lot of work, a lot of time. Obviously, we're gonna be at a store now that we could work from our homes before.

But we think that this is something that God wants, not just for now, but in the future. Because Bill and I are in our 60s, and I don't know how much time we have left, but we're not retiring anytime soon.

But then to bring in the younger generation, we wanna have a place where Christianity can be described in a rational way so that people can take a look at the evidence of Mormonism and then come in and talk to us.

And we're gonna go to the inference of the best explanation. Let's lay out all the evidence and let's see where it lands. I think a lot of Latter-day Saints are finding out that the church has nothing, but too many are leaving the church and they're going to atheism, agnosticism, or nothing at all.

And that's not what we desire. We want them to leave Mormonism, but we want them to come into relationship with Jesus Christ.

That's right. Yeah, so you're gonna have all this archeological evidence for the Bible. And my understanding, you're gonna have a whole room devoted to the archeological evidence for the Book of Mormon, right?

It's gonna be an empty storage room.

Caesarea, the Roman Theater, and Archaeological Evidence for Pilate

Well, we've talked about that. One thing I've thought about doing, remember we were at Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Memorial, and they had this one exhibit. I was taking some pictures in there, even though I wasn't supposed to, just for examples of what we could do.

And I was doing that in the Israeli Museum as well. But they have like a drawer and you pull it out and you can see, you know, whatever, actually it was with some of the people who were heroes that were helping the Jews.

They had Oscar Schindler. And so you pull this out and they had some of the things that he owned in there. And I was thinking, wouldn't it be fun on one side to say, here are some of the coins of the Bible.

So here's a shekel, here's a denarius, here's a widow's mite. And then on the other side, put a shiblam. And they have names for their coins actually in the Book of Mormon and just have the names there.

I don't know if that would be considered too rude or not, but they have nothing. They don't even know where these events took place. Did they take place in North America or in Central America? You have a big division within Mormonism.

They don't even know where it is. Here, we're standing at Caesarea. We go to Caesarea Philippi. We're at these places where, I mean, Lachish, you can still see the ramp that the Assyrians built to get up there to destroy Lachish.

You can go through Hezekiah's tunnel on the same day, built 2 ,700 years ago by King Hezekiah. Those are the kinds of things that you can do when you go to the Holy Land. And so these are coins that are real coins and nobody disputes them.

Atheists believe that these are from Tiberius and Augustus and Pontius Pilate. So this is the kind of the fun stuff we're hoping to be able to do.

Yeah. So let's get into discussing Israel. So for folks to know, I reached out to you because, well, I saw how you organized the Apologetics cruise, and this was actually four years in planning, right?

Because this was, what was that thing called that disrupted it? COVID, yeah. That little thing. We actually had it planned. We were going to go to Israel, I think it originally was gonna be in 2023. No, 2021.

Oh, yeah, okay. Yeah, we had to cancel that trip, wasn't it? Yeah, sorry. And then we tried to extend it to 2022 and it didn't work because, well, they did not get rid of the vaccine until March. And that was something for that trip, we weren't going to go if they required a vaccine.

So it got canceled twice or postponed, I guess you would say. Well, it got postponed and then eventually canceled.

And then you had a trip planned before all the cancellations, you had a trip planned with Matt Slick. We had a trip planned with Justin and I, Justin Peters and I. You had a trip planned with Justin's old pastor, which is Jim Osmond.

And out of that, and actually with the trip that we were doing, we were adding a friend of mine, David Cunningham. And when everything got kind of rearranged, we ended up doing where Justin went with Jim and that was one trip.

And then Matt and I ended up doing the other trip and David's doing it with just with his church. But the reason I reached out to you is because of the way I knew that the detail you put into things, the organizing that you do, I knew that what we were going to be able to do for Striving for Eternity and people that came with us, there wasn't going to be anything left undone.

We were going to see a lot. I knew you would be detailed enough to explain to everybody exactly what was going to happen and what they need to do so that we wouldn't have the problems I've heard about with other trips where people just don't know, things happen and information just isn't known.

I knew that wouldn't happen with you. And so that's why I had reached out to you. And so we did, it was mostly, we had mostly Matt and I doing most of the devotions, but not all of them. We had a couple other people that came along and we asked them if they would do some of the devotions.

We started off and I'm going to, like I said, I'm going to show some pictures because I think it's going to be helpful for folks. But we started off with this guy right here, Matt Slick. And this was neat because this was, Matt was in this picture, you'll see that we're in an amphitheater.

And this was, if I remember correctly, Caesarea?

This is definitely Caesarea, the theater that's described in the Bible where Herod Agrippa I died of worms. Right here in this theater. In fact, right below where Matt is standing, that's an area right down there.

So isn't that kind of fun? Yeah, so this was a really neat to, I could see, it's just beautiful overlooking the water. That was really neat to have. You could see how many people this would have sat. But the neat thing, I mean, your voice carries in this, in theaters.

And that's something, we didn't do it in this theater because there were people, but there was a different theater that you took us to, and there was nobody there. And you turned to me and said, okay, Andrew, you want to do some open air preaching?

And so I just did a short little open air. And it was funny because some of the folks in our group were up at the top. And afterwards, when I came back through, some of those people were still there. And so they shouted down to me, hey, just use your natural voice.

I just want to hear how it is. Just using a natural voice at the top of that theater, they said they could hear me fine. So what was it like when I was doing that open air? They were like, dude, you were so loud.

It really, you don't appreciate how these theaters, with the way they designed it, you really can't, your voice can carry, you can reach out to speaking to many, many people. There was a spot that we got to see where it would have been that whoever actually, whoever was in charge, the leader, Herod in this case, would have been sitting just off actually to the right of where Matt is.

It was really neat. And this is right in that area where we saw where Paul had been, where he would have been to be able to go where Paul was. Was really neat.

Yeah, I mean, you got to see where Herod had his palace. You saw his swimming pool. You saw mosaics still on the beach. We're talking 2000 years ago. You can still see the harbor that Herod, an ingenious man, built using ash from volcanoes and it would harden into concrete.

That's how he built the harbor there. That was the main harbor to get out. And that's how Paul got out of Israel to be able to go to Rome. That's where he left there, but he had been in prison. And you actually got to see, Andrew, that was the first time I had seen the digging that they did underneath the area where Paul would have been.

And according to our guide, Andre, very likely, this is where the prison would have been. And here you're seeing it not far from where the palace is. Oh, wow. I mean, how much more clear can you get when it comes to archeology and understanding how important Caesarea was?

And by the way, that theater that you pointed to, those seats have been recreated. So those were not original. But in 1961, an Italian team was digging there and they found a pavement stone that was being used just to hold something up and they pulled it out and they actually saw the name of Pontius Pilate on there.

You can go to the Israel Museum today. It was the first archeological evidence that there was ever a man by the name of Pontius Pilate. Anybody who would have doubted it, I don't know if anybody did before 1961, but here is evidence that he was the procurator of this area.

This is where he would have lived most of the year. The only reason he was in Jerusalem during the trial of Jesus is because he went there for every Passover to make sure that peace was kept. But he put his name in tribute to Caesar Tiberius.

That stone today is, like I say, found in the Israel Museum. And we found something else just a few years ago, actually. We found it at the Herodium where Herod spent a lot of time and where he was eventually buried.

They found a ring. They found it, I think, 20 years ago, but it was only three or four or five years ago that they were looking closer at the things they had and the ring has Pontius Pilate's name on it.

Now, was it Pontius Pilate or somebody who worked for him? We don't know for sure. But another piece of evidence, archaeology has a way of digging out the truthfulness of the Bible.

Water, Cisterns, Ritual Baths, and the Geography of Israel

Yeah, and one of the advantages of going with you and with Andre, who guided us, is we came across this. This is basically three tombs that are literally just on the side of the road. In the picture, people can see the guardrail.

We stopped in the bus so we could take pictures of it. What this was helpful for was to see, this is what the tombs would look like. You can see the size of the stone, the size of the hole. You can end up realizing that when people say, oh, Jesus, he could have just gotten up and moved the stone.

No, you weren't going to lift that thing. That was some of the neat stuff that we could see. And I'm probably going to write a couple articles for, you know, blog articles. I'm striving for turning down a couple of things.

The first one that really made an impression on me was water. The importance of water. We take for granted because, look, Eric, you and I both, and you who's listening probably, especially if you're here in America, you just turn the faucet on and there's water.

But you took us down into a cistern, several of them. I want to show this one because the neat thing with this picture is you're seeing people walking down a flight of stairs. And it's many stairs. But this is a cistern.

This is where people would walk down to get water. They try to fill this thing with water because it would be so important. The thing that blew me away, I don't know, maybe I'll show this picture later, but we had, where we went into Masada and Masada, they dug this cistern.

This was like Herod's summer home. We don't know if he actually was there, but it's his summer home. They dug out this huge cistern and then had to carry water up this mountain to get it in. Now, folks, we were doing that at a fast pace, some of us, to go up the...

Now, I have a friend of mine. Now, we had some folks that did it in about a little over 20 minutes and they were booking. I had friends of mine that weren't on our trip, but they were on a different trip.

They just happened to be there at the same time. And one of my friends, his brother did the trip, did that same run. He did it in just under 20 minutes and he was running. So, I just want you to know, we talk about Masada and it's huge, but to get this water up, water is so important.

They were carrying it up this long. I mean, they had a way of getting rainwater, but let me show this picture to give you another view of a cistern that we ended up going. I want you, you could see just how deep this cistern is.

This is, I mean, you could see it goes around and around, the stairs are going around and around and around to get down. And then the cisterns under that caged area. So, what you end up seeing is that water was so important.

We had Joel Cramer that was on our trip with us for several days and helping. He has done archeology in Jordan, in Israel, in different areas. So, this is what he does, archeology. He's an archeologist and such insight that he provided.

And this is, I'm just going to say this folks, having Joel Cramer is a reason that we went with Eric because no one else gets Joel Cramer to go and do these things where you get these, you know, giving all the background on the archeology.

And one of the things Joel said is, we know we found an archeological location when we find water, we find a cistern or a well. And you and I take water for granted, but when that was one of the things that amazed me was how important water is.

These cisterns, I mean, you took us to several cisterns, Eric. They're just these huge caverns for them to collect water. And I realized water was far more important, but I'm going to say this, there's something else that I ended up realizing.

And I was joking with our friend, Matt Slick, who's Presbyterian. And there was another guy on the trip that was Presbyterian. And so, it was funny to talk with them, but the number of ritual baths that we found.

When you think about how important water is, and then you get to temple steps and you see all of these ritual, it's covered with ritual baths. And the joke that I was doing was that, these baths were big enough for submersion, not sprinkling, right?

And so, because you'd wash yourself before doing something holy. And so, these synagogues, the temple would have all these ritual baths and start to realize water is so important. And here, they're making sure that there's water for their spiritual cleansing.

And you end up seeing so many of those everywhere that we would see a Jewish community. That's something I was a little surprised by, I wasn't ready for. Let me see real quick, Eric, if I could pull up the picture that we're at with Masada.

And while I look for that, maybe you can explain some of what goes into these cisterns, either why they would build them or the process they had for trying to build these things.

High Places, Fortified Cities, and the Sea of Galilee

Well, if you're talking about cisterns and Masada, I mean, they've got, I think like 12 different cisterns. Most of them are being filled up when there's a monsoon, which happens, it happens in the desert.

And so, when it rains, it would run off the mountain. I think I showed you the one where they had the channels that would take it into that cistern. But the one that you saw was on top of the ground, and there's a hole at the top.