We read about Bet She’an in the first book of Samuel: After the Israelites were defeated on Mount Gilboa in 1004 BC, the bodies of King Saul and his son Jonathan were hung from the walls of the city (see the second book of Samuel, 1:17-27 for King David’s lament over the incident).   The city, which fell in the eighth century after a massive earthquake hit the region, was home to about 15-thousand people and featured an amphitheatre, bathhouses, fountains, shops, and at different periods included a temple, a synagogue, a mosque, and a Byzantine Church.  The most striking sight for me though was high atop the hill where there was an Egyptian administrator’s house, dating back to 12th century BC!   This one location had a real and tangible record of thousands of years of history – of nations, of empires, of people…and it wasn’t in a stuffy museum, it was out in the open, in the actual location where people long ago would have bargained with merchants, had the dust scrubbed off them in bathhouses, taken in a tragedy on stage, and on and on. As I sat on some rocks – or ruins, as they’re literally everywhere -- I imagined all these things happening in this thriving and bustling city… and now, it’s all history.