A couple of days ago we visited Mount Tabor, some 10 miles west of the Sea of Galilee.
The Mount’s appearance, on approach, is quite remarkable, an almost perfect half-sphere rising unexpectedly from a gently undulating plain. Wikipedia classifies Tabor as a ‘monadock’ – an ‘large hill’ or ‘small mountain’ that stands alone. Imagine something like the man-made Silbury Hill chalk mound in Avebury, but natural and much larger (Tabor is nearly 600 metres high).
Like so much here, the Mount is steeped in history – and blood. It was the site of a battle recounted in the Book of Judges during the period of the prophetess Deborah (one of the hamlets at the base of the mountain still bears her name.) It featured in two Jewish uprisings some 2000 years ago: the Hasmonean rebellion of the first century BC, and the First Jewish-Roman War 100 or so years later, when in 66AD Galilean Jews under the command of Yosef Ben Matityahu, better known as the historian Josephus Flavius, defended Tabor against Roman assault. Many centuries later the valley below the Mount was the site of a 1799 battle between a French force led by Napolean and an Ottoman army.
Please click the thumbnails below to view larger versions. More images are available on Flickr.
Over the millennia tens of thousands have died on and around the mountain. But it has a more positive association: with light.
During the Second Temple era (from around the sixth century BC to 70AD) Tabor was one of the mountain peaks on which beacons were lit to inform Galilean villages of Jewish holy days. And in Christian tradition it is identified as the Mount of Transfiguration in the Gospel story in which Jesus appears illuminated by light before the apostles Peter, James and John. The Mount became a place of Christian pilgrimage in the fourth century when the Church Fathers decided on Tabor over Mount Hermon as the most likely site of the unnamed ‘high place’ referred to in the Gospels.
The remains of Byzantine and Crusader churches are still visible on the Mount’s summit, now incorporated within the grounds of a Franciscan monastery complex, the focal point of which is the current Church of the Transfiguration, completed in the 1920s.
The church and its grounds are designed to evoke a sense of light, and succeed quite spectacularly. Immaculately kept gardens open out onto balconies offering brilliant panoramas of the Galilee. The church itself is suffused with a golden glow, illuminated with bright mosaics. With its avenues of Cypress trees, colourful gardens, sand-coloured stone and crisp mountain air the monastery evokes something of the sense of a Tuscan hilltop village.
The Transfiguration story seeks to break the open the gulf between the temporal and the eternal, claiming that heaven and earth met in the person of Christ. Clearly that is a matter of faith. Christians themselves differ as to whether the Transfiguration should be read as myth or as an event that took place at a particular place and time. And who knows whether that place was Mount Tabor.
But whatever one makes of the Christian claim for Tabor’s significance, the dazzling light here, opening onto horizons dissolving into a pure white haze, seems an invitation to transcend some kind of border.