Very beautiful on a clear day is this panorama, and striking indeed is the jagged and broken hill horizon, purple against the orange sunset.
Here, then, the Saviour may have stood, and seen before His eyes the theatre of many a tragedy of Jewish history. Tabor, from which the army of Barak burst on the host of horse and chariots by the Kishon springs beneath; Endor where Saul crept round the hillside by night to the witch's cave; the broad valley down which Gideon drove the Midianites, up which Jehu came in his chariot to Jezreel, visible on its rocky knoll; Gilboa, on whose slopes Saul and Jonathan had perished, caught between the Philistines and the precipices; Carmel, the site of the great triumph of the God of Elijah, and the great sea on which still in autumn the little cloud comes up like a man's hand and swells till huge thunder-pillars are piled black and high above the mountains. On the north Sepphoris the Roman capital, Seph the "city set on a hill,â Rumeh where some said Messias was first to appear, the road to Capernaum, and the solitary ridges of Hermon where the transfigured Saviour was seen by the three Apostles.
But, as we look round, nineteen centuries later, we mark the influence of the history of the Gospels, and of the growth of tradition. On the south the traditional Leap of our Lord, two miles from the city built on the brow of the hill. In Nain, beneath and unseen, the Christian chapel, commemorative of the raising of the widow's son, now in turn a Moslem mosque. On Carmel a grotto of Elijah, venerated by Christians and Druses. On the hill of Sepphoris a ruined church, six centuries old, once thought to be the home of Joachim and Anne, the Virgin's parents. On the plain, a ruined Cana, perhaps only dating from Crusading times. On Tabor a false site for the Transfiguration, and three churches in ruins.
Yet with a history so long and eventful, the land itself is unchanged; the brown plains, the grey barren hills, the wooded cliffs of Carmel, the gleaming sea, the snow-clad Hermon, are still the same that Christ once looked on; and we merely add to the theatre of Jewish victory or defeat the sites venerated, in loving, if mistaken zeal by the Christian pilgrims of the eighteen centuries before our time.