Kiddush with Grace

Joshua Berman from Mosaic for Times of Israel

This was an academic conference like no other.

Barely an hour after landing in Houston, following 19 hours of travel from Tel Aviv, I found myself sitting in the courtside front row of Toyota Center, home to the NBA Houston Rockets. The fourteen biblicists, archaeologists, and Egyptologists flown in were special guests at this January night’s game against the Oklahoma City Thunder. Three feet in distance and a foot in height were all that stood between me and scoring sensation Kevin Durant. It was a pinch-me, Willy Wonka moment. But it was hardly the last.

The next morning we arrived at the conference site, the well-kept 40 acre estate of a prominent Houston attorney. The eye is drawn to a magnificent Gothic library, housing over 100,000 volumes devoted to the Bible and religion. Adjacent is the attorney’s private chapel where the conference proceedings would be held: a full scale replica of a sixth century Greek Orthodox church, replete with masonry, vaults, two-foot thick walls, frescoes of biblical scenes, and pews for nearly 300 people.

But between the two edifices you see narrow gauge train tracks, the type you see at the zoo, or at an amusement park. Walk a little further into the estate (we were encouraged to) and you come across a full size replica of a 1940′s retro-style station house. Dummies in period dress wait for the train. And then there’s the train: Thomas the Tank engine, hooked to cars for forty passengers. A certain whiff redirects your attention to the llama corral, and the enormous lemur enclosure. Where am I? The NBA? Oxford? Byzantium? Neverland?

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