Mathew 5: Luke 6

Matthew 5:1 And seeing the multitudes, he went up into a mountain: and when he was set, his disciples came unto him:



The traditional site of the Mt of the Beatitudes is the tree covered hill on the north end of the Sea of Galilee. Like Bear Lake (in both shape and size) that straddles the Utah Idaho border, the Sea of Galilee is surrounded by mountains and hills. There is a natural amphitheater on the left/west side of the Church-topped hill

Church of the Beatitudes (center of photo)

It is easy to image how disciples could have spread themselves along the hill side with Jesus teaching from down blow near the banana plants

On my first visit to the mount in 1979, two friends and I sat on large rocks under the Eucalyptus tree to the right of the church and read the Sermon on the Mount. There are plenty of big rocks for sitting. We then walked down to the shore of the sea while singing the lovely hymn Each Cooing Dove (in the old LDS hymn book). I introduced that long forgotten song to all three semesters of Jerusalem Center Students. Some, like me on my first trip to Israel, connected with the hymn while walking whee Jesus walked in the Galilee. Watch some of the summer BYU Jerusalem Center students sing the hymn at the German Templar Cemetery in Haifa.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PsHWFwZkPJ4
 

 Most enjoyable with the altos, tenors and basses echoing each phrase sung by the sopranos.

The Church of the Beatitudes was built in 1938 with the support of fascist dictator Benito Mussolini of Italy. Ruins of a 4th century Byzantine Church are on the property which adds some possible authenticity to the location.

Glass widows inside the dome state the 9 beatitudes in Latin.

The hill (center) is within easy walking distance of Capernaum (right on the shore), the center of Jesus' Galilean ministry.

14 Ye are the light of the world.

Roman era lamp. Fueled by olive oil.

14. A city that is set on an hill cannot be hid.

source: https://www.ccel.org/bible/phillips/CP051GOSPELMAPS.htm

There were many more cities/villages surrounding the Sea of Galilee at the time of Christ than today. Hippos, one of the cities of the Decapolis which sits atop the eastern hills, would have been easily visible. So too would have been Chorazin north f the sea.

 Ruins of Hippos

View westward from Hippos on the Hill.

Modern day city of Tiberius on the western hills.


Tiberius was mainly just along the shore at the time of Jesus, but today it has grown up the hills. It cannot be hid.

The northern mid hill extension to the north/right is where the Galilee Branch of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints was housed from 2007-2017.

This villa was purchased and renovated by the Church with the specific purpose of it being a place of worship on the hills of Tiberius.
 

In 2017 the branch house was shuttered (with no explanation to local members) and meetings were shifted to first a hotel and then a member's house in Haifa.

The balcony of the Church offered commanding views down to the Sea of Galilee. View to the north.

View to the northeast.

The City of Maghar on a hill to the northwest of the sea.


A village in the West Bank (somewhere between Ramallah and Nablus) that to me is a classic city on a hill that cannot be hid.

41 And whosoever shall compel thee to go a mile, go with him twain.

Roman milestones placed together in the hills of the Shephela

43 ¶ Ye have heard that it hath been said, Thou shalt love thy neighbour, and hate thine enemy.

44 But I say unto you, Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you;



The Holy Land at the time of Christ and today was and is a land of conflict and a land of enemies. I took this photo in the Old City of Jerusalem in 1989 during the first Intifada (uprising). I don't know what had happened, but when I walked by the Israeli solider had all of the Palestinian youth lined up and being lectured to.



My experience over the years has been that there are many good people in the land, many peacemakers and many who love, like, or (better than nothing) tolerate their neighbors. Here I am in 1979 with three Israeli residents of Kibbutz Degania--the first kibbutz (agricultural communal settlement) to be established. We were volunteer workers at the kibbutz for two weeks and our task on this day was to shovel out chicken manure from the large chicken shed in the rear. Interacting this closely with Israeli kibbutzniks was a good experience for the Fall Semester 1982 BYU students. We were warmly welcomed into their midst and were treated with kindness and friendship.




In 1989 I traveled to Hebron (in the southern West Bank) with a friend to see the Tomb of the Patriarchs. An Israeli solider on patrol thought it was crazy for us two foreigners to be walking through the Arab market. I wasn't worried. It was a dangerous place for Israelis, but we both had cameras and back packs and certainly looked like tourists--who were never targeted. I was also wearing a shirt with University of Chicago written in Arabic on the front. The shirt alone was a walking invitation for Arab hospitality. We struck up a friendship with these three Arab men who then invited us to their home for lunch.

One of the best examples of loving your neighbor and being peacemakers was exhibited by the members of the Galilee Branch during my 1988-89 membership in that branch. Branch President Michael Hansen's (standing behind his wife Ann on the far right) parents (his mom is in the rear  holding a granddaughter) were American Jews who converted to Mormonism and then emigrated to Israel when Michael was a teen. Michael served in the Israeli military before serving his mission. The first counselor in the branch was Ehab Abunuwara (left side second from top) from Nazareth who I refer to as my Israeli/Palestinian/Arab/Greek Orthodox/Mormon roommate. He was first introduced to the Church by responding to an add in the Reader's Digest that offered a free Copy of the Book of Mormon. Other branch members included a mixed Jewish/Mormon family from Argentina (left and back right), a UN solider from Austria (back center), and a physical therapist (center) from Alberta. More recent members in the branch have included immigrants from Russia and Armenia, workers from the Philippines, another Arab family from Nazareth and others. What is impressive about this branch of mixed nationalities and mixed religious heritages is that they all get along. The most impressive example of this is how the branch presidency of Michael and Ehab chose to interact. They both told me on different occasions that since they viewed the Palestinian/Israeli conflict from very different perspectives they had each decided that they would not talk politics at church. They liked each other and were good friends, but they knew if they ever started to talk about the conflict it could be very divisive. These two men had many good reasons to consider the other the enemy, but they chose to act and view the other as a friend.

Ghaleb, Yasmin and Chad 

The BYU Jerusalem Center is also a great example of peacemakers and loving enemies. The staff at the center is purposely comprised of a nice mix of Israeli Jews, Palestinian Arab Muslims and Palestinian Arab Christians. They all get along and are friends.  In each of these photos of local administrators and staff  at the center (and a few Emmetts too) there is no repeat of religion--above photo is Palestinian Muslim, Israeli Jew and American Mormon and below it is Palestinian Christian and Israeli Jew.

Tarek and Eran

Mahmoud and his buddy Will

Hassan and Tawfiq

Malak and Marie

Luke 6: 48 He is like a man which built an house, and digged deep, and laid the foundation on a rock: and when the flood arose, the stream beat vehemently upon that house, and could not shake it: for it was founded upon a rock.

House built on a rock. Southwest of Bethlehem.

John 2-4

John 2: 1 And the third day there was a marriage in Cana of Galilee;

The modern day town of Kafr Kanna with almond blossoms in the foreground. This city is the traditional site of the wedding miracle of water to wine, but the more likely site of the biblical town of Cana is identified by ruins at the base of the distant hills on the northern edge of the Netofa Valley that runs between the two ranges of hills in the top right of the photo. Regrettably I have never been able to visit that site.

This interesting blog post shows the ruins of the biblical town of Kirbet Cana.
https://biblewalks.com/sites/khirbetcana.html

Traditional site of Cana. Today's Cana is just to the northeast of Gath-Helper

source: https://bibleatlas.org/cana.htm

Modern Day Cana is an Arab town that is mostly Muslim.

The Wedding Church of Cana

Wine receptacles

Grapes on the alter

John 4: 5 Then cometh he to a city of Samaria, which is called Sychar, near to the parcel of ground that Jacob gave to his son Joseph.

 Jacob's Well by David Roberts. (1839)

 Nablus/Shechem (1839)

Modern day Nablus. Jacob's well (and Joseph's tomb) lower right corner.

Shechem/Sychar/Nablus (1982 photo) from the southeast with Mt Gerzim (left) and Mt Ebal (right). Jacob's Well--the ancient main source of water for the city and where the Woman of Samaria met Jesus, sits between the mountains on the southeast end of town. In the 5th century BC Samaritans built a temple on Mt. Gerzim (a rival to the temple in Jerusalem), hence the Samaritans woman's comment about having a rival mount to worship on. The temple was destroyed before the time of Jesus but to this day Samaritans continue to hold Passover animal sacrifices on the mount.

Modern-day Samaritan priest in Nablus (1982)

While living in Nazareth (1988-89) I would often travel to Jerusalem. My mode of travel was always aboard Israeli run Egged buses. There were three options; 1) Nazareth to Beit Shean, down the Jordan valley to Jericho and then up to Jerusalem; 2) Nazareth to Hadera, south to Tel Aviv and then up to Jerusalem; or 3) Nazareth to Nablus and then through the hills of Samaria further south to Jerusalem. The third option was the most direct, but it went straight through the West Bank during the height of the Intifada (Palestinian uprising) and was thus not the safest option. I thus alternated between the two other routes.

I first visited Nablus in 1982 as a BYU study abroad student. As part of that field trip we visited Jacob's Well and a Samaritan Synagogue on the slopes of Mt Gerzin. As we were descending from the synagogue some Palestinian boys pelted our bus with stones--assuming we were Israeli visitors to the city. The front wind shield of the bus was cracked and one rock came through an open window and hit one of the professor's wives. That incident was during a fairly safe time in the Holy Land.

In 1989 Nablus was no longer as safe for such field trips. That I knew, but the geographer in me wanted to see the West Bank and Nablus once again. So, I took the early morning, once-a-day-bus to Jerusalem via Nablus and the West Bank. I figured that this route would not be very popular. It wasn't. Except for me, all of the passengers were Israeli soldiers in olive green uniforms coming and going from duty in the occupied territories with its daily confrontations between stone throwing Palestinian boys and rubber bullet shooting Israeli soldiers. I was the only unarmed person on the bus. As our red and white bus approached Nablus from the northwest, it stopped to have metal gratings placed on the front wind shields to protect them from stones. As we drove (me very wide eyed) through town nothing happened. South of town just past Jacob's Well the gratings were removed and many of the soldiers got off at a military installation to begin their duty. Our bus proceeded on to Jerusalem without incident.

During the time of Jesus, Galilean Jews traveling to Bethlehem to be taxed or to Jerusalem for one of the religious holy days would have had similar travel and safety choices: the coastal Via Maris or the Jordan River valley were less direct but they both skirted rival Samaria. Unlike most other travelers, Jesus on at least one journey chose not to avoid Samaria. He ventured in to "enemy territory" where he reached out to those who were traditionally scorned by the Jews. In particular he reached out to a troubled woman of Samaria and offered her living waters.

Years later as the first bishop of the newly created Spring Creek 18th Ward, it was my responsibility to select wall decorations for my office. One of the several paintings I chose was Carl Bloch's Jesus with the woman at the well. I chose it because it represented Jesus reaching out with love and forgiveness to a woman, a Samaritan, and a sinner. Many times when visiting with people in my office I referred to that painting and that story as a reminder of how loving, kind, forgiving and welcoming Jesus is to all.

John 4: 10 Jesus answered and said unto her, If thou knewest the gift of God, and who it is that saith to thee, Give me to drink; thou wouldest have asked of him, and he would have given thee living water.

Large ruins of the Nabatean town of Avdat on the caravan route between Petra and Gaza. The hole in the center is a collapsed roof of a broken cistern.

Collecting rain water run off into cisterns is a common way to store winter rain water for use in the long hot summer. By the end of the dry season the remaining water can be pretty rank. This broken cistern was no longer in use and it was uncovered leading to the gross green color.

The fortress of Masada had large cisterns which made it livable for King Herod and later Jewish zealots

This ancient and large cistern still has plastered walls to help hold in the water.

Ramla on the coastal plain half way between Jerusalem and Tel Aviv was once a provincial Arab Capital, It is now a mixed Arab-Jewish city.

Ramla has no natural source of water (rivers or springs) so its residents survived for centuries on water collected in large cisterns. Now the city is connected to the National Water Carrier which brings in water from the Sea of Galilee. No longer needed, one of its largest cisterns has been turned into a water park, where visitors can rent row boast to float around the underground enclosure.

Cistern water insured survival, but the flowing and fresh living waters of rivers, springs and wells have always been much more preferable. Here is the Dan spring in Northern Israel that feeds the Dan River that is one of the three main tributaries of the Jordan River.


Fresh, life giving water seems to bubble up every where.

In not time those springs have formed a river.

The springs of Banias at the base of Mt. Hermon and a second source of the Jordan River.

Elisha's Spring in Jericho. This spring has enabled Jericho to be one of the longest continually inhabited cities on earth.

BYU Professor Craig Manscill cooling off with some refreshing water from the spring.  

Both Jesus and Jeremiah used living water as a teaching tool:

Jeremiah 2: 13 For my people have committed two evils; they have forsaken me the fountain of living waters, and hewed them out cisterns, broken cisterns, that can hold no water.