Dearest Rachel –
After lunch at Caesarea Philippi, we take an hour-long ride into the Golan Heights (still a part of the Galilee region), to a town called Gamla. You would think that a nation barely the size of Rhode Island wouldn’t have such long drives from place to place, and yet, here we are. And this is just the northern part of it; the trip down south could be expected to take that much longer, as Israel is much longer north-to-south (or, in an expression that used to be common parlance a few centuries ago, “from Dan to Beersheba”) than east to west.
(Then again, on our return trip to Nazareth, we are held to an absolute standstill on Route 754 as we pass through Cana. It seems that the half-hour holdup was due to a new Adidas shoe store. Go figure; you just never know what’s taking all that time on the highways here.)
I even take the opportunity to fall asleep, although I can’t hold onto my phone, and I wind up waking myself up. Good thing, too, though, as we arrive at Gamla in a little less than an hour.
We are met here at the national park by our tour host, Omer, who acknowledges that the city is not mentioned by name in the Bible, but then, neither is Zippori, and yet it’s quite likely that it factored heavily in His young life. In fact, Omer asserts that the cosmopolitan and multicultural nature of Zippori in particular allowed him to understand how to relate to gentiles as well as Jews.
Gamla (named for the camel’s hump in the center of the immense ravine it occupied – and make no mistake, it is immense; even the walk down from where we’re standing would take more than two hours) was a large town – the capital of the Galilee, five times the size of Magdala, just for the sake of comparison – and as a major Jewish center, would be the place where the ‘multitudes’ would be coming from.
The central mountain upon which the city was built has a wall running all the way down it, with the synagogue by the wall (that square foundation on the left side of the mountain). It looks small in the picture, but that’s just due to the distance. This was a city containing thousands of people at Jesus’ time, and a synagogue for them would need to be of a fairly significant size to accommodate them.
You can also see, off in the distance on the right hand, a bit of the Sea of Galilee. It would have been about a half a day’s walk for someone from Gamla to travel to the shores of the Sea, and find where Jesus was preaching.
And from where He preached, He (or at least, His audience) might be able to see their hometown – or if not, as the sun went down and the locals began firing up their oil lamps and the like, they could see the light emanating from the heights of the city over the hills that marked the ravine in which it was nestled. Gamla may well have been the ‘city upon a hill’ that could not be hidden that Jesus referenced in His teachings.
Omer discourses on the fate of Gamla, and why it is not as well known as many other Biblical sites. The fact that it isn’t explicitly name-checked is certainly one, as is the fact that it’s located in the Golan Heights, which was not incorporated into Israel until after the Six Day War – and even then, there was some dispute, as the United Nations took some issue with Israel claiming land it had won in a fight it had not started. Had it been part of Israel from the start, however, it would likely have been as famous a place as Masada, and for a very similar reason.
You see, with the Jewish rebellion in the late first century, it came under siege in 67 A.D. After some time of getting nowhere (because from their mountain vantage point, they could easily see what the Romans were up to, and react accordingly as needed), the Romans sent a commando force by night to tear down the watchtower, which they did, allowing the legion to storm in. The citizens, driven out of the city, retaliated by weakening the mountain so as to bring it down upon the Romans, wiping out nearly the whole legion.
However, the Romans would come back shortly thereafter, and many of the citizens (nearly 4,000 of them), realizing the situation was hopeless, leaped from the citadel to their death. Others escaped (if you can call it that) to the Masada citadel, only to suffer one of the world’s worst cases of deja vu.
***
With all this history having been related to us, Omer asks for questions. He is dismayed at the fact that we don’t have any at first; he points out that, along with parables (which have their own touch of obscurity to them, practically begging for His listeners to ask about them), Jesus would teach by asking questions – a tradition still upheld by Jewish teachers to this day. Eventually, we do ask a few questions (more on the why and how rather than the what – we’re kind of at Omer’s mercy when it comes to the history of the place, having to rely on his account, as we haven’t a more accurate story – but I confess to not having taken notes of the specifics.
The day is coming to an end, at any rate, and as the sun descends to the horizon, a park official warns us (or rather, Omer, as he can speak and understand Hebrew) that we need to get going. And I’ve certainly got a lot to compile and send to you, once I get back to the hotel… just as long as we don’t run into any more shoe sales…
Keep an eye on us, honey, and wish us luck. We’re going to need it.
Letters to Rachel 