Mount Tabor

Tabor rises from flat land at the eastern end of the Jezreel Valley, about 18 kilometres west of the Sea of Galilee, with the villages of Daburiyya, Shibli and Umm al-Ghanam ringing its base. It is a monadnock: an isolated hill rising abruptly from level or gently sloping ground, not a volcano, and geologically distinct from the Nazareth range beside it.

The published elevations do not agree and nobody has reconciled them. The Custody of the Holy Land's page for the sanctuary says 588 metres above sea level and 450 metres above the plain, and Britannica's 1,929 feet is the same figure. A Custody news report from August 2023 says 580. Wikipedia gives 575. The Israel Nature and Parks Authority, which declared the mountain a nature reserve and national park in 1991, publishes 562 metres and around 400 above the surrounding terrain. The spread is about 26 metres, and no source explains where its figure came from.

Most of the hill is wooded, in Palestine oak and the Mount Tabor oak that carries the mountain's name in its Latin binomial, Quercus ithaburensis. Wikipedia's account records up to 400 plant species here and notes that the woodland was largely felled under Ottoman rule for the charcoal trade and replanted by the Jewish National Fund in the 1960s and 1970s. What a visitor walks through is a reconstruction of an older landscape, not a survival of it.

Tabor sat above an important junction: the Via Maris ran past its foot from the Jezreel Valley north towards Damascus, crossing the Galilee's north to south route. A defensible dome above a road junction attracts armies. In Judges the prophetess Deborah tells Barak to draw ten thousand men to Tabor, and it is the descent from the hill that breaks Sisera's Canaanite force in the plain below.

The Roman-period episodes are the best documented. In 55 BCE, during a Hasmonean revolt against the proconsul of Syria Aulus Gabinius, Alexander of Judaea was beaten at Tabor and as many as 10,000 of his men were killed. In 66 CE the mountain was one of nineteen sites in Galilee fortified on the orders of Yosef ben Matityahu, the commander who later wrote the war up as Flavius Josephus. Vespasian sent Placidus with 600 cavalry; unable to force the summit, he lured the defenders down to negotiate and cut them off from the slope, and the rest held out on top until their water ran out.

The medieval sequence, listed below, is a fortress changing hands roughly once a generation, and its end is what matters on the ground: in 1263 the Mamluk sultan Baibars took the mountain and destroyed every building on it. Everything medieval a visitor sees today is a ruin from before that year.

On 16 April 1799, in the plain between Tabor and the Hill of Moreh, about 3,000 French under Kléber and Bonaparte routed an Ottoman army of about 35,000 sent from Damascus to lift the siege of Acre, for the loss of two dead and sixteen wounded. At the start of May 1948 the Golani Brigade took the mountain. Most of the Arab al-Sabihi tribe living on it were forced out to Syria and Jordan; the Shibli clan refused to leave, and the village at the foot of the road, Shibli-Umm al-Ghanam, is theirs.

• Judges 4-5: Deborah, Barak and the descent on Sisera
• 55 BCE: Alexander of Judaea beaten here by Gabinius' Romans
• 66-67 CE: Josephus fortifies the summit; Placidus starves it out
• 1101: Benedictines rebuild the basilica and fortify the abbey
• 1212: al-Adil's fortress; 1217: the Fifth Crusade fails to take it
• 1263: Baibars levels everything on the mountain
• 16 April 1799: Kléber and Bonaparte rout the army of Damascus below
• May 1948: the Golani Brigade takes the hill

Matthew, Mark and Luke all put the Transfiguration on a high mountain and none says which. The identification with Tabor is a later inference, and the Custody of the Holy Land sets out its reasoning openly rather than asserting the site: Matthew and Mark say Jesus led the three disciples up by themselves, and the Greek can also be read as separately, which suits a hill standing apart from every other summit in Galilee.

The naming runs back to the fourth century at the latest. Cyril, bishop of Jerusalem, states the Tabor tradition in the year 348, and Jerome repeats it. Wikipedia traces the earliest identification to Origen in the third century, an attribution the Custody notes is accepted by some scholars and not by others.

There has never been a consensus. Eusebius of Caesarea, who died in 339, preferred Mount Hermon, and the Custody's own page notes drily that Eusebius knew the psalm verse pairing Tabor and Hermon and hedged by placing the event on both. Nineteenth-century scholarship doubted Tabor outright, Henry Alford in 1868 among them. What the mountain holds with confidence is the tradition, continuously, since the fourth century.

Older layers sit under the Christian one. The Custody records a Canaanite sanctuary of Baal on the summit and the export of that cult to Rhodes, where Zeus Atabyrios carried an epithet meaning of Tabor. In the Second Temple period this was one of the peaks on which beacons were lit to carry news of the new month north.

A new shrine was begun in 1912 with the engineer Giulio Barluzzi and stopped by the Italian-Turkish war. The commission passed to Giulio's younger brother Antonio, who had drawn plans before the First World War and returned to Jerusalem after it to find the new Custos, Ferdinando Diotallevi, holding them. The foundation stone went down on 21 October 1919, the seventh centenary of Francis of Assisi's arrival in the Holy Land. Custos Francesco Patton, opening the centenary jubilee in August 2023, dated the building to 1921 to 1924 and called it Barluzzi's first work.

The style is Syro-Roman, after the churches of the fourth and fifth centuries, and the plan is three naves with two towers at the west end. The towers are not decorative: on the Custody's account they stand over the ancient oratories of Moses and Elijah, and each holds a chapel dedicated to one of them, Elijah in the south tower and Moses in the north. Steps climb from the side aisles to the raised high altar under the apse mosaic, and a second staircase, as wide as the central nave, drops into an open crypt where the ancient apse has been preserved in place.

The mosaics were made by the firm Monticelli to preparatory drawings by Rodolfo Villani, and the crypt scheme takes trans-figuration literally: Jesus in the successive figures of his birth, the Eucharist, the cross and the resurrection. Wikipedia's account adds that on 6 August, the feast of the Transfiguration, the sun strikes a glass plate set into the floor and briefly lights the gold mosaic above the altar.

The most interesting thing about the building is a failure, and only one source states it. Wikipedia's article says Barluzzi roofed the church in alabaster panels to flood it with light, but that the alabaster could not be made watertight and had to be covered with an ordinary opaque roof. The Custody's own page does not mention it and no second published account was found, so it is set down here as Wikipedia's claim rather than as fact. The light theme itself is not in doubt: the alabaster window survives in the crypt.

The fabric still needs work. The engineering practice R-Struct records its 2019 appointment to consolidate and seismically improve the two bell towers and rebuild the bell frame, having found corroded steelwork with plates detached and holes opened in the profiles.

The road ends at a fork. Left goes to the Greek Orthodox property, right through the arched Crusader gateway everyone calls the Gate of the Winds into the Franciscan enclosure. Just inside on the left are a small cemetery and the Chapel of the Descendentibus, unglazed and rebuilt in 1923, named for the disciples coming down the mountain in Mark 9.

North of the basilica lie the ruins of the medieval Benedictine monastery: a chapel, and behind it the chapter hall and the refectory. The watchtower south of the church is Saracen work, on the Custody's attribution, and the wall lines further down the slope are Roman. Quarry caves in the summit rock supplied the stone, and one of them, under the Greek church, is open to visitors.

The Franciscan monastery in front of the sanctuary was built in 1873 to 1875, with a Casa Nova attached as a pilgrim hostel. Since 2006 it has been run with the help of Mondo X, an Italian association founded in 1961 whose members are people recovering from drug dependency.

The Greek Orthodox side is the half most visitors never see. Its main church was begun in 1859 by the Romanian monk Irinarh Rosetti, who died that year, and finished by his disciple Nectarie Banul in 1862; the Custody dates the church of St Elias on the same property to 1911, raised on Crusader foundations that stand in turn on Byzantine ones, as the mosaic floor shows. The Parks Authority states that it opens only a few days a year, the all-night vigil falling on 19 August.

The night before 6 August is the one to know about. Christian families from across Galilee come up the evening before and sleep in tents on the summit, a custom the Custody traces to Ottoman times, when the friars owned the place but were allowed onto it only once a year.

• The Gate of the Winds, the Crusader arch into the Franciscan enclosure
• Chapel of the Descendentibus, rebuilt 1923, unglazed
• Benedictine chapel, chapter hall and refectory, north of the basilica
• Saracen watchtower to the south; Roman wall lines further down
• Franciscan monastery and Casa Nova, 1873 to 1875
• Greek Orthodox monastery church, 1859 to 1862, rarely open
• The Melchizedek grotto, restored 2009, usually locked

The summit road is the practical problem and the reason the visit needs planning. It is narrow, steep and folds back on itself repeatedly on the climb from between Daburiyya and Shibli; two unconnected visitor accounts count the bends at sixteen. The Israel Nature and Parks Authority states the consequence flatly: the winding road makes it impossible to travel by bus, so a visitors' centre has been set up at the foot near Shibli, and taxi rides to the top are organised from there. Private cars and vans can drive up; coach groups transfer at the bottom.

There are two free car parks at the top. The one by the Church of the Transfiguration is the larger and fills; the Greek Orthodox one is usually emptier and leaves a walk of roughly 500 metres to the main entrance. Neither the Parks Authority nor the Custody publishes a fare for the taxis, so budget for a negotiated local price rather than a posted one.

On foot there are four marked routes, all listed by the Parks Authority: a black loop around the mountaintop past the viewpoints, a steep green trail up from the west side of Shibli along the Foresters' Road, a blue trail from near Gazit Junction up the eastern slope, and a red trail from east of Umm al-Ghanam. The Israel National Trail comes in on the blue, joins the black and leaves on the green; the walk up from Shibli is about five kilometres.