Shalom everyone!
Chris and I are back home… Sadly we did not get to start the dig or advance the date. As some of you know the dig was scheduled for the first part of December, but with the involvement of an ecologist things got changed to April so Chris and I hoped to convince the ecologist that there was no danger to the environment while doing advance preparations for the dig...but the war put an abrubt stop to that plan. Some people had asked me if the government was holding us up by way of the ecologist intentionally or was it just simply fate. My answer is, it was just fate, nothing more.
Thank all of you that recommended that we take some time for our families…because the last week has been so nice, just relaxing and spending time with my wife and grandchildren adjusting to the jetlag once again. I am in the midst of writing letters, updating our budget expenditures and coordinating speaking engagements.
Yuval and I had met a couple of times at the site where he was doing the emergency excavation. The name, “emergency excavation” means nothing more than a dig conducted as a result of an accidental antiquities discovery by a construction crew but one of Yuval’s roles with the IAA is to do that very thing. After some small talk and interesting discussion about the site he was currently on he explained what he knew about the problem with the ecologist wanting us to wait until April of 2009 to begin the dig. Yuval was as in the dark as we were about the reason. In-fact, the best possible reason for the delay came from a most unlikely source…a waitress in one of the only restaurants in the small city of Arad by the name of Emmie.
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Thank you all so much for your prayers for our safety and success!
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www.copper-scroll-project.com Jim Barfield