Raul lifted the stone cap slightly of what must have been a vent to the underground chamber and dropped it, revealing the echo of a large space under the solid ground on which were standing. “This is the place where St. Paul was imprisoned for the two years before returning to Rome where he was martyred, beheaded, he said.”

We stood around him under the blue skies, surrounded by the ruins of Herod the Great’s palace in Caesurea, on the shore of the Mediterranean in norther Israel. Original stone walls formed the boundaries of the palace and rebuilt newer walls were rising to re-create the palace. Herod the Great was the Herod who met the wise men that told him of the coming Messiah King after which he ordered the slaughter of all the Bethlehem boys aged two and under. He was called “the Great” because of the tremendous amount of architectural building and construction that occurred under his rule, including the break walls at Caesurea, the aqueduct, the hippodrome on the beach at Caesurea, and the Amphitheatre Maritime, the latter three all demonstrated in the video of the day.

It was an incredible day, albeit a long one. We ended the day with a mass in the  Stella Maris Monastery on Mount Carmel in Haifa, which is the site of the cave of the prophet Elijah, in about 870BC. It is also thought that Joseph hid his family there while escaping Herod’s purge of the infant males. Many miracles have occurred at that site, specifically related to healing.