As we left Yad Hashmonah and were on our way to the Valley of Aijalon we passed by Emmaus, which is not the Emmaus that Jesus walked on with two disciples. The Emmaus that Jesus walked to was only seven miles from Jerusalem and this one is about twenty. During the time of the Jewish rebellion the fifth Roman legion was placed there. On our fist stop looking at the Valley of Aijalon we were at the fork where the Beth-Horon ridge route comes into the valley.
We drove up to a hill overlooking Upper and Lower Beth-Horon and the ridge route.
It was crazy we took the bus up this one lane road with a deep valley on one side and the hill on the other. It was pretty steep going up too. The Beth-Horon route was used a number of times throughout history. When Joshua was fighting the Amorites they fled down the route and God threw down large hailstones only killing the Amorites, and when Joshua needed more daylight to finish them off God held the moon over the Valley of Aijalon and the sun over Gibeon (found in Joshua 10). Among the many times people used/fled down this route, the Philistines fled from Samuel, Saul, and David on all three separate occasions.From there we went to a former mosque on a place called Nebi Samwil where Solomon might have asked God for wisdom in the “High Place of Gibeon” found in 1 Kings 3:3-15. From there we could see Gibeon where the Canaanite people tricked Joshua into making a peace treaty with them and Israel has to protect them at times. At the mosque they have what they think is the tomb of Samuel, but it is not it because we are told that he was buried in Ramah, his home town. Ramah was also where the Baasha and Asa of Israel and Judah would battle. Ramah was an important city because of its strategic location on the Road of the Patriarchs going to Jerusalem.
We then went to Gibeah of Saul where Saul made his capital during his reign. This is a strategic place in protect Jerusalem from the East. King Hussein of Jordan began to build a palace for himself, which could be on top of Saul’s palace, but only was able to finish a portion before the 1967 war. The people of Gibeah before the time of Saul were responsible for sparking the civil war with Benjamin that led to only six hundred men surviving from Benjamin who fled to Rimmon (found in Judges 19:10-16).
On the way to the pass between Geba and Mickmash we passed the area where Rachel was probably buried. When we came to a spot looking over the pass there was a cistern that Bill showed us. They can be twenty to thirty feet deep and they gourd shaped. In the Bible we see that Jeremiah and Joseph were thrown into cisterns; also Proverbs gives the symbolism of dinking from your own cistern.
The pass is a sloped area that is just after a steep canyon making it possible for people to cross. This is a strategic piece of terrain that was used for military campaigns, such as Jonathan. He crossed the pass and battled the Philistines and killed all twenty men in the deployment force, which is followed by the panic of the entire Philistine army who flee from Mickmash all the way through the Aijalon Valley (found in 1 Samuel 13:16-14:23).We drove through the wilderness down to get to Jericho. As a side note, Israel, I think, has the most diverse terrain in the world. I would say that in the area surround Santa Clarita there is a pretty diversity of terrain too. Within an hour or two we can be in the mountains, desert, farm fields, or beach. In Israel, you have all that (except they really don't have mountain ranges, its the hill country...real hills, rocky hills). I haven't been to the beach yet, but from where we are we could get there within at the very most, an hour. Within a few miles apart you can be out in the warm farmlands and then be in the hill country where it is usually windy and cool, and then within a few miles you can be in the desert like Lancaster. Its weird. We go to the barren hot desert and then you look at the map and only ten miles west is Jerusalem in the green windy hills. Jericho is the oldest city found.
The biblical city is only 200 x 300 yards. Jericho was conquered by Joshua in 1406 BC (found in Joshua 6). The city wall had a foundation of rock with mud bricks on the top of that. When they conquered the city the text says that “wall fell underneath itself” meaning that the brick fell down enabling them to get in. Since we were on the Palestinian side of Israel they weren't too strict about getting artifacts. 
I got a number of pieces of clay pots and shells, one guy in the group got a small rock in the shape of a ball that Bill said could have been either a projectile or a weight. There is a spring right outside the city that Elisha made drinkable. After Elisha saw Elijah go up to heaven on the other side of the Jordan he came back and made the spring drinkable with a bowl of salt (found in 2 Kings 2 and yes I did drink from it). We then went to the outskirts of the modern city where there were Roman ruins of government buildings were. We can then understand that Jesus healed Bartimaeus between the two areas of Jericho. One area is the municipal area of Jericho and the other is the residental area of Jericho. That is why it may seem like there is a contradiction in the accounts found in Matthew 20:29 and Luke 18:35.
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