The Story Behind the Picture: Tel Hazor, Israel

by Eva Marie Everson

On a crisp September morning in 2001, I stood beside my husband in the middle of 5^th Avenue, New York City, as a plume of smoke rose to the south. We were both in shock; the morning’s events were beyond anything we could have imagined would happen to us during our short stay in the Big Apple. I took a photo, one that has remained in a file titled 9-11-2001 since.

A few months later I received a call from the Israeli ministry of tourism office in Los Angeles. My name had been mentioned, the young woman said, by several of my colleagues, all who said I would be a good candidate to travel to Israel in June as a journalist. I would be, she continued, one of six, all expenses paid (except lunch and souvenirs).

According to the news, Israel had recently been in another state of unrest. Having lived through 9-11 trapped in Manhattan, I thought it best that I decline the offer—even though the representative stressed that part of the reason I’d been chosen was to write articles proving that travel to Israel was, indeed, safe.

“Sure,” Dana (pronounced Donna) Kempler said, “there are places that are not safe, but we can say that about any town anywhere in the world, can’t we?”

She had a point. I knew this firsthand. Still, I declined.

When my husband returned from work later that day, I told him about the call. “When do you leave?” he asked.

I reminded him about the tragedy we’d witnessed with our own eyes only a few months previously, but then he reminded me that if it was my turn to die, it really didn’t matter where I might be at that moment. “Besides, you’ve wanted to go to Israel for a long time.”

“Well,” I said, the excitement of seeing the Holy Land at the expense of Israel now rising, “if she calls me back, I’ll go.”

Dana called again the following day and, later that night, I went out and purchased new luggage.

This trip would change my life in ways I could never have imagined. I’ve always had a spirit of wanderlust in me, always loved to travel. See things. But this . . . this was the Bible come to life.

That June of 2002, we were a troupe of nine piled into a van that bounded and bounced over Israeli roads and into her cities and villages: Rebekah, Christin, Virelle, Sandy, Cate, and me (the six journalists), Dana, our guide and interpreter Miriam, and a driver whose name—I’m sad to say—I’ve forgotten. I can remember what he looked like, and I want to call him “Irv,” but I could be totally off the mark. I can tell you, however, that he reminded me of Danny DeVito.

We had many wonderful days and nights (one in particular when Sandy and I, drunk by too many hot days and a slice of exhaustion, got the giggles over the night’s dessert come to mind). But the turning point of the trip—and of my life—came at Tez Hazor, the only northern kingdom Joshua burned to the ground (Joshua 11). There we met an Arab-Israeli named Hsein el Heib, the park’s director. As a man who spoke in broken English (almost none at all, actually), he depended on Miriam’s translations to be understood as we depended on them to understand.

Excitement sizzled in the air that morning at the tel. Recently, archeologists had dug beneath the rubble to discover what they believed to be the palace of King Jabin, one of Joshua’s enemies. “Would you like to see?” Mr. el Heib asked through Miriam.

“Yes,” we all said.

“But there is one problem,” he said. “You have to climb down to see it. Which means you have to climb back up, and the way is steep.”

Three of us—two being Sandy and myself (I cannot recall the third)—headed down with Miriam and Dana. Mr. el Heib pulled a piece of blue tarp from an ancient wall ribboned by ash. “The soot from Joshua’s fire,” he said, and Miriam interpreted.

Mr. el Heib said we should choose one of the small stones at our feet, then lean over and touch the soot. Rub it onto the stone. Take a piece of biblical history home with us. But to reach the soot, we had to place our hands on a bolder and lean over.

First one of us, then another leaned over the touched, me being the last. As I placed my hand on the bolder, Dana said, “Wait. Let me get a photo of this for the ministry of tourism.”

I agreed, readying for the pose. Then, just as I leaned over, Mr. el Heib (in perfect English, mind you) said, “You are touching the Bible.”

And that’s when I fell. As if someone had grabbed hold of my ankles and pulled, I came down against the boulder. Mr. el Heib scurried to help as did the others. “Well,” Dana said, “Eva falls into the Bible.”

From that moment on, everything changed and I don’t mean just during this trip. The way I looked at the Bible. The way I looked at the Land of the Bible. The way I looked at my life.

That night, I wrote in my journal Today I fell into the Bible, literally, and in love with God all over again.

Five years later, I returned to Israel alone to walk the land with my new Israeli best friend, Miriam Feinberg Vamosh. By now, Dana had passed away from the awfulness that is cancer. I had written ten articles for Crosswalk.com, each titled Falling into the Bible followed by the location. The palace at the ancient tel had been made approachable and carefully documented. Miriam and I had been contracted by Thomas Nelson Publishers to write and photograph a travel book/coffee table book as a Jewish woman and a Christian woman walking through the Holy Land.

One of our first stops: Tel Hazor to see Mr. el Heib and the wall where I’d fallen.

By now, access was much simpler and the wall where I’d fallen was easy to reach. Or, easier. Miriam, of course, wanted a photo to memorialize the original moment as well as this one. Mr. el Heib and I posed, both of us smiling at a memory coming full circle.

This photo became the first of our book Reflections of God’s Holy Land, a book published in 2008, the year celebrating the 60^th anniversary of Israel’s statehood. A book that won us several awards and many accolades, including an ECPA Silver Medallion.

As the three of us stood at the wall, my shoe brushed against two things: a fossilized rib bone (which Mr. el Heib took after I picked it up) and a chunk of the wall that had fallen into the dirt beneath our feet. When Mr. el Heib saw it, he said, “It’s yours.” This small slab has the most perfect line of soot from Joshua’s fire snaking through it. It is, without a doubt, one of the most valuable items I own.

But the memory is more precious still.