Daily Verse | 2 Chronicles 6:6
“But now I have chosen Jerusalem for my Name to be there, and I have chosen David to rule my people Israel.”
Monday’s Reading: 2 Chronicles 13-16
Welcome to the month of May. We’ve completed the first third of the year and there are only seven months until we vote to put the brakes on the destructive forces in Washington D.C.
A large number of artifacts belonging to the second and third centuries A.D. were unearthed in an underground city featuring places of worship, silos, water wells and passages with corridors in southeastern Mardin province’s Midyat district.
Midyat, which is almost an open-air museum with its history and culture, offers a magical atmosphere to its visitors with stone houses, inns, mosques, churches and monasteries that are thousands of years old.
“An underground city.” When I think of an underground city, it’s hard to imagine anything larger than maybe 200-300 people. Not this one.
“Matiate has been used uninterruptedly for 1,900 years. It was first built as a hiding place or escape area. As it is known, Christianity was not an official religion in the second century. Families and groups who accepted Christianity generally took shelter in underground cities to escape the persecution of Rome or formed an underground city. Possibly, the underground city of Midyat was one of the living spaces built for this purpose. It is an area where we estimate that at least 60-70,000 people lived underground.“
The underground space must be enormous to accommodate that many people.
You would think that 60-70,000 people would be hard to hide, even if they were underground. Wouldn’t it be common knowledge that such a city existed? It’s hard to imagine that they could stay hidden from anyone who wanted to find them.
I imagine, too, that if you lived underground you would have to come up for air, as it were, to purchase food grown in, you know, sunlight. Tough to grow anything underground.
And while I can appreciate wanting to escape the persecution for your faith, it feels bewildering that so many people agreed that hiding was the right thing to do. Aren’t we supposed to be salt and light in the world?
There’s no shame in protecting yourself and your family. But it seems like a Christian’s reach would be pretty limited if they were living underground with 70,000 other believers. This is the “us-four-no-more” principle on steroids, a huge holy huddle.
To date, archaeologists have uncovered 49 rooms, including places of worship, water wells, silos for storage, and numerous corridors and tunnels, and they estimate this is only 3% of the total size of the underground city.
Get a brief look at the tunnels and rooms here.