The Search for Roots—Israel’s Biblical Landscape Reserve

If archaeology is the search for roots, so is Neot Kedumim, The Biblical Landscape Reserve in Israel. The one is figurative; the other is literal—for Neot Kedumim literally searches for the roots of the Bible in the realities of Israel’s nature landscape.

The patriarchs, the judges, the kings and prophets of Israel, Jesus and his disciples—all had revolutionary messages to impart to the world. But in their day, they spoke and moved among common people—the farmers and shepherds of ancient Israel, who lived their lives amidst nature’s reality—Israel’s plants, its animals, its climate, its agriculture, in short, its ecology. Farmers and shepherds intimately knew the trees, the shrubs and the weeds, the animals, the birds and the pests of the land. “The rain in its season, the early rain and the late rain” (Deuteronomy 11:14), the tragic consequences of prolonged drought—all this made up the core of daily reality.

The Bible’s metaphor, simile and parable are couched in a kind of ancient Esperanto—the language of nature. It is this “language” that Neot Kedumim is bringing back to life, so that the Bible will literally live again in the nature setting of Israel, where it arose.