Mount Tabor

What is not in dispute about the ground is simple. Tabor is a single rounded hill standing out of the Jezreel plain in lower Galilee, at the meeting point of the borders of Zebulun, Issachar and Naphtali. Three border descriptions in Joshua 19 run to it or to places named after it. A settlement of the same name stood on or beside it and was given to the Merarite Levites. The River Kishon runs from its side across the flat plain, under Mount Carmel, and out to the sea. Its shape is the reason Jeremiah could use it as a figure for something conspicuous. The numbers in circulation for the mountain's height do not agree with one another. Albert Barnes, commenting on Jeremiah 46:18, gives Tabor's height as about 1,805 feet above the sea and about 1,350 feet above the plain of Esdraelon, which this page prints as his own figure rather than a surveyed one. What every early description agrees on can be said without a disputed number: Tabor stands by itself, out of level country, with a broad flat top. The summit's shape is the part the Judges account depends on, and two independent descriptions of it survive. Albert Barnes describes a broad top of nearly a mile in circumference, affording a strong position out of reach of Sisera's chariots. Adam Clarke quotes Henry Maundrell, the English chaplain whose travels in 1697 are one of the standard early modern reports of the country, describing a level area at the top of an oval figure, about one furlong in breadth and two in length. Two accounts that agree on a level top of that order are enough to say that the mountain could hold the ten thousand men Judges 4:6 puts on it. The Kishon belongs to the same piece of ground. Barnes, commenting on Judges 4:7, says the stream rises in respect of one of its feeders in Mount Tabor, and runs nearly due west through the plain, under Mount Carmel, and into the Bay of Acre. The river Deborah names in verse 7 begins at the mountain she names in verse 6, which is why one command covers both. Several commentators explain the rout by a storm, and every one of them is reading Judges 5:20 and 5:21 rather than reporting a source. Barnes says Josephus relates that a violent tempest with rain and hail drove into the Canaanites' faces at the start of the battle, and he gives no reference for it, so this page reports it as what Barnes says Josephus relates. The passage itself is Antiquities of the Jews, Book 5, Chapter 5, Paragraph 4, where Josephus writes that as the armies closed, a great storm came down with a vast quantity of rain and hail, blowing into the faces of the Canaanites, while the Israelites, who had it at their backs, were not troubled by it. Jamieson, Fausset and Brown carry a reconstruction credited to Van de Velde in which heavy rain raised the Kishon suddenly and the warriors sank in the marshy bed. Matthew Henry reasons from the text alone that a stream ordinarily shallow, whose fords the army would have known, could drown men when it ran in flood. The Bible itself never uses the word storm. These are readings by named men, offered as readings. The strongest objection to the Tabor tradition concerns the state of the summit in the first century. This site's study of the transfiguration cites Josephus, in The Jewish War, Book 4, for a town and a garrison on top of the mountain in that generation. The passage is Jewish War 4.54 to 4.61: it reports a village on the summit and a fortification there from the time of Alexander Jannaeus, which Josephus himself refortified in AD 66 as one of nineteen strongpoints he prepared in Galilee, and which fell to Vespasian's forces not long after. This page carries the citation at that level and does not quote the Greek. The objection itself is plain enough to state: if a town and a garrison stood on Tabor's summit then, the phrase Matthew and Mark use, up a high mountain by themselves, is difficult there. Byzantine churches and later Crusader churches stood on the summit to mark the tradition. The present Franciscan basilica was built from 1921 to 1924, designed by the architect Antonio Barluzzi, on the ruins of the Byzantine and Crusader buildings before it; its two towers stand over older chapels remembering Moses and Elijah. Archaeological survey also finds traces of a Hellenistic enclosure wall on the summit, from the period when the mountain, called Itabyrion in Greek, served as a fortress taken by Antiochus III in 218 BC, along with traces of Roman-period walling from the fortification Josephus describes. Where a page has nothing, it says so rather than filling the space. One more absence belongs here. This site holds no image of Mount Tabor itself, and no plate of Deborah, of Barak, of the muster on the mountain or of the descent. The art below is the end of the day that began on Tabor, and a scene the Gospels do not locate.