October 22, 2007

Emma Hanks
Br. Ludlow’s Class Jourals
October 22nd 2007
Another great day to be in Jerusalem! It was a day jam-packed with activities. After class we crushed and pressed olives in the Biblical Gardens…Most people stumbled out into the sunlight with bleary eyes because they had been napping and I’m pretty sure that although Tuni was out there she never was quite awake.
It was pretty interesting to see how they turned little green thingys growing on trees into useable oil. First we picked the olives, then we washed them and put them into the circular mill. We were the oxen that powered the huge millstone and before long we had a nice mushy paste. This led to an olive mash fight, naturally. What do you expect with 80 college students and a potential mess?
After putting what was left of the paste into mesh bags we pressed them in a screw press and another press weighted with stones and the oil came streaming out. It was sobering to think of the atonement of Christ in a place called Gethsemane which means “The oil press”
Later that evening we had a very cool FHE with the entire class. We walked over to a fire pit nearby, sang some hymns accompanied by Archie on the xylophone, yeah that’s right a XYLOPHONE! Only Archie would think to bring a xylophone to a campfire program. We had a couple of nice talks, and then Grandpa Ludlow started to talk…each of us were enlightened by a fascinating talk on compatibility in marriage. Wow, if you didn’t hear the conversations afterward, you should have because everyone was trying to figure out their compatibility with everyone else…great…good-bye to the no dating policy…
The highlight of the night was the food. Strawberry smores are probably the best thing invented since bobbie pins.
My highlight from the Old Testament was coming to understand the poetic forms used throughout the Bible so many times. To be honest it is something that I had never really taken the time to understand. The chiasmus form is fairly well known but all the different forms of parallelism and symbolism and structures were new to me.
For me this was important because symbolism and structure is one thing that really helps me understand things on a deeper level. It is kind of like it takes words and turns them into meanings, something with substance. And I really loved analyzing certain passages of Isaiah and the Psalms and drawing lines all over them to connect the different ideas…call me a geek if you want, but as brother Huntington would put it, it’s what gets me “all tingly”