Olive Press

 

It was a very hot, fun day to crush olives. We had loads of Olives to crush, so everyone had to do their part in crushing. We found out that in Hebrew oil is Shemen which we would have called it Gat-Shemen which means press of oil they went to spell it in Greek "Gethsemane"
Virgin olive oil means the oil you get from the first press (The really good rich oil). They will press mash multiple times to get everything it's worth out.

We started out pushing a massive rock, one similar to the one on the right, except we were the donkey in this situation. It looked so easy, but was so heavy. The olives would be dumped into the center and we'd crush for a couple hours in order to get enough mush. Then we would place them in Agal baskets getting our hands all gushy and oily. We stacked these and placed them under the oil presses. We learned in class that the Virgin Olive Oil we find on our bottles is taken from the very first press of the oil. This was the oil leaking out of the baskets from the place we smashed the olives to the press we distributed them to.

There were 2 olive oil presses that we used, one we used with stone and the men hoisted the stone up into the air by 2 sticks. The oil was cascading down the track of it. It lead into two pools filled with water, one would catch the juice of the oil and the other would catch the oil. When the water had settled you could skim the pool off and get the oil out.

This normally would have taken place in a cave, because the sunlight makes the oil bitter. Brother Chadwick tasted it right away and immediately could taste the difference of the oil we would normally cook with.

In ancient times they used Oil for three main things:
1. Eating- They would put it in all their bread, cook it with everything
2. Sores- anointing many times on wounds like Neosporin could be used today.
3. Oil Lamps- Whenever a candle is mentioned it's talking about an oil lamp! They would soak the wick in oil and it would supply them light for some time in the evening.






The second press was the screw press. This one was a lot more symbolic of the blood Christ bled for each of us as we could see the oil looking like a blood/brown running down the white limestone.

(I do wish we wore overalls like the girl in this picture. I'll post more recent ones next week.)