Most people meet the Bible on a page. A smaller number get to meet it on a map. In this episode, Ryan Jones in Jerusalem and David Shishkoff in the Galilee sit down to talk about the strange and moving experience of living in a country where the events of Scripture are not far-off legends but real places you can drive to on an ordinary afternoon.
For Ryan, it began not with a family history in the land but with a church tour. He arrived expecting to see where Jesus walked and left with something larger: the realization that Israel is still here, that the promises of the prophets are not finished, and that the Bible is, in his words, still happening. Years later, living at the eastern edge of the Valley of Elah, he is reminded of it in the smallest moments, like the day his child came home from a school field trip to the very ground where David faced Goliath.
David, up north, tells his own version of the same discovery: tracing Gideon’s ancient victory across the hills near his home, celebrating a son’s coming of age in the black basalt synagogue at Chorazin, and standing below the walls of Jerusalem where an Assyrian commander once shouted his threats at the city. Together they wander from Philistine ruins to Hezekiah’s Tunnel, from the springs of the Galilee to the excavations beneath the Old City, always circling back to the same idea: that faith here is not words on an old piece of paper. It is living, and it is underfoot.
Watch the full conversation:
