Mark9chapter 9

Which mountain is unknown. Tabor is the traditional site, but Tabor had a settlement on top in this period, and the story's position just after Caesarea Philippi has led many to look to a shoulder of Mount Hermon, the snow-capped range rising nine thousand feet to the north.

Elijah's appearance raises the question the disciples then ask, because Malachi ends the prophets with a promise that Elijah comes before the great day. Scribes taught it as a fixed sequence, so a Messiah arriving before Elijah was a problem to be solved.

The boy's symptoms as Mark records them — sudden rigidity, foaming, falling into fire and water — are described with a precision unusual in ancient texts, including the father's note that it has happened since childhood.

The closing sayings use two hard local images. Gehenna was the Valley of Hinnom running along Jerusalem's southern side, remembered as a place where children had been burned in sacrifice, and Isaiah's closing lines about the undying worm stand behind the phrase. Salt was a preservative and a fixture of sacrifice — the Law required salt on every offering — and in the Roman world it was so basic a commodity that soldiers' pay was reckoned partly against it.