Faith Connections Travel is excited to have our next Holy Land trip itinerary put together! We are scheduled for departure from Dallas-Fort Worth (DFW) on January 30, 2022. More details will be announced and highlighted in the coming weeks. Currently, we are scheduled to take a direct flight from DFW to Tel Aviv, which is a new opportunity for us. I plan to blog about as many of the places on our itinerary as I can between now and the trip. I won’t necessarily introduce the sites in the order of our travel, but I thought at least I’d begin with the beginning . . . Tel Aviv!
Tel Aviv itself is a relatively young town. The city that we know as Tel Aviv today was founded in 1909 when about 60 Jewish families settled in the sand dunes immediately to the north of Jaffa on the Mediterranean coast. It became independent in 1921. Archaeology tells us that Jaffa goes back to the late Stone Age (at least ca. 5000 B.C.). The Egyptians captured the city in 1486 B.C. and maintained control until the Philistines settled in the area around 1200 B.C.
Also called Joppa in the Old Testament, Jaffa’s main importance in history was as a seaport. The Bible mentions cedar wood from Lebanon coming on large rafts to be unloaded at Jaffa for transport to Jerusalem during King Solomon’s reign (2 Chronicles 2:16). The prophet Jonah famously fled God’s command to preach to the Assyrian city of Nineveh by boarding a ship bound for the west at Jaffa (Joppa).
When Herod the Great built the great harbor of Caesarea Maritima to the north toward the end of the first century B.C., Jaffa became less important as a seaport. However, it regained its position as a primary port city as Caesarea deteriorated after Herod’s death. Peter raised Dorcas from the dead in Jaffa, and he had his vision of the sheet lowered from heaven there also, at Simon the Tanner’s house (Acts 9:36-10:16). The Crusaders held the city from A.D. 1099-1268, and the Mamluks eventually destroyed it and filled in the harbor in 1344-1346. We plan to visit Jaffa on our upcoming Holy Land trip.
Today, Tel Aviv and Jaffa (Tel Aviv-Yafo) are part of a single municipality that is the second largest population center in Israel, after Jerusalem. The population of the city proper is about 460,000, but the metropolitan area as a whole is many times that. The city is a major financial center, technology hub, and tourist destination. It is known for its vibrance, diversity, food and culture, and night life. When we fly into Tel Aviv’s Ben Gurion International Airport, we are actually about 9 miles southeast of Tel Aviv in the nearby city of Lod. This is where our journey in the Holy begins! We’ll say more about these locations as the trip gets closer.
