The Spirit of the Dig

Following is an excerpt from a lecture delivered years ago at Hendrix College in Arkansas by Dr. Nicolae Roddy, Assistant Professor, Old Testament, at Creighton University in Omaha, Nebraska. Having participated myself in the excavation at Bethsaida, I believe Dr. Roddy does a splendid job of relating the very essence of what drives many of us to dig...........


. . . part of discovering what it means ultimately to be human is to confront humanity not as a mere observer, but in an active and participatory way. Digging at Bethsaida in June of 1997, one of my student volunteers who had come along to dig with his girlfriend, suddenly ran up to me with great excitement over having turned over a basalt stone and discovering a bull’s head carved on its downward face. Drew did not want to touch it again. What Rudolph Otto had termed the mysterium tremendum et fascinans—the awesome mystery of the sacred—had actually prevented this young business major from being able to treat this stone like any other stone. I encouraged him to overcome his sense of awe and retrieve the object from the soil. By the end of that day of digging we had recovered not only the three other basalt stone fragments that completed the stele, but had uncovered the basin where it had once stood. We knew from the context of destruction that the once complete bull-headed stele, which once served as an altar for a Mesopotamean moon god, had been cast down by the conquering Assyrian Tiglath-Pileser III sometime around 732 BCE and that its pieces had rested exactly where we found them some 2,730 years later. You could almost run the tape backward in your mind to see exactly how the stele had fallen. Also significant about the configuration of debris is that it indicates that no one was present to pick up the pieces before the dust of time came to cover it over until that exciting afternoon in June. From his experience of coming into contact with the Mesopotamean moon god, Drew not only learned that what it means to be human is to worship, but found out first hand what it means ultimately to be human by experiencing for himself the awesome and transforming power of sacred experience. When Drew goes on to become the CEO of some major corporation, who he is and how he conducts business will be positively affected by his unforgettable, extraordinary experience of disturbing a sleeping god.

By digging in the earth, then, we really encounter a kind of mirror reflection of ourselves. Kneeling there in the dirt and retrieving human artifacts compels one to think about them, and think about the men, women, and children who relied upon them. Like the Great Passing Sights that compelled Siddartha Gautama Buddha to set out in search of the true meaning of reality, we too come around to asking ultimate questions. Can you imagine what society would be like if we could find some way of attracting large numbers of people young and old into doing something that is not only exciting and entertaining but compels them to think about ultimate questions and not rely on the pat answers so many of us are given? Having supervised hundreds of Bethsaida volunteers already in my short career, I have received a great many appreciative cards and letters that speak of enriched lives. Their words serve to remind me of why it is I keep going back and evidence the kind of positive personal transformation I am here to tell you about. . . You see, adventures such as these cannot be so easily dismissed as peak experiences, or mere “nice times.” Journeys are in a sense pilgrimages toward the center, the axis mundi, and it is through pilgrimage that we find the center in ourselves, bringing us into a fuller and more authentic existence. Experiences such as these help make us truer to what we essentially are so that we may be truer in what it is we ultimately may be. Digging in the earth and handling the rubbish of people who are in every essential way just like us, we cannot help but be faced with the paradox I described earlier. You see, it is the journey that really counts, for if your ultimate desire is goodness and you tend only to today’s leg of the journey by doing the good, then the goal will take care of itself.
Ashley, a young volunteer who has traveled with me twice now to Bethsaida once sent me a note that says it best:

"Working in the dirt in places that no one has seen for thousands of years I gained an incredible sense of history. I see just how small I am. We are all just tiny specks of dust in something so much bigger and complicated and integrated than any of us can imagine. We all stand on the earth, but under us is everything that ever was. Someday our children will stand over us."


Excerpt from the lecture, "Recovering the Past; Discovering the Present: What Really Happens on an Archaeological Dig", as posted previously on the weblog, "Archaeological Digs".