The Holy Land Experience

Last Tuesday, Ben and I visited the Holy Land Experience. It was a neat place to visit, though not cheap. I wouldn't recommend taking little kids to it because it isn't as kid-oriented as, say, the Disney parks are in Orlando. We enjoyed the buildings and exhibits. It was fun to imagine we were actually in Jerusalem. They have several shows and reenactments throughout the day that you can sit through. We were able to visit the "Wilderness Tabernacle" where they showed us step by step how the high priest would enter the Holy of Holies each year. Of course I had a mental picture of what all of this looked like from reading about it. But it was incredible to actually see what it would have looked like with the veil, candles, table of the shewbread, golden lampstand, etc. Our favorite part of the theme park was the Scriptorium. It was a 55 minute presentation through multiple rooms in a large building, with each room showing a different stage in how we got our English Bible, starting with the earliest (cuneiform) writing and working up to our present day Bible. The attraction in the Scriptorium is the Van Kampen collection of biblical artifacts, some of which are on display in every room. It is a genuinely outstanding collection, dating back to the aforementioned cuneifiorm cylinder seals, to early Greek N.T. papyri, to various Hebrew and Latin and other Bibles along the way. You can read and see more about the collection here.