In this episode, Ancient Mysteries looks into the impact of what happened in the bible at the Sea of Galilee. (Biblical Mysteries EP02) The Return of Jesus to Galilee is an episode in the life of Jesus that appears in three of the Canonical Gospels: Matthew 4:12, Mark 1:14 and John 4:1-3. It relates the return of Jesus to Galillee upon the imprisonment of John the Baptist. According to the Gospel of John: The Pharisees heard that Jesus was gaining and baptizing more disciples than John, although in fact it was not Jesus who baptized, but his disciples. When the Lord learned of this, he left Judea and went back once more to Galilee. In the Gospel, this episode takes place after the Baptism of Jesus and the Temptation of Jesus and marks the beginning of the public ministry of Jesus in Galilee, as he begins to preach there. Galilee (Hebrew: הגליל‎ HaGalil, lit: the province, Ancient Greek: Γαλιλαία, Latin: Galilaea, Arabic: الجليل‎ al-Jalīl) is a large region in northern Israel which overlaps with much of the administrative North District and Haifa District of the country. Traditionally divided into Upper Galilee (Hebrew: גליל עליון‎ Galil Elyon), Lower Galilee (Hebrew: גליל תחתון‎ Galil Tahton), and Western Galilee (Hebrew: גליל מערבי‎ Galil Ma'aravi), extending from Dan to the north, at the base of Mount Hermon, along Mount Lebanon to the ridges of Mount Carmel and Mount Gilboa north of Jenin and Tulkarm to the south, and from the Jordan Rift Valley to the east across the plains of the Jezreel Valley and Acre to the shores of the Mediterranean Sea and the Coastal Plain in the west. According to the Hebrew Bible, the Galilee was named by the Israelites and was the tribal region of Naphthali and Dan at times overlapping Usher's land, however Dan was dispersed among the whole people rather than isolated to the lands of Dan, the caste of the Tribe of Dan were as the hereditary local law enforcement and judiciary for the whole nation. Normally, the Galilee is just referred to as Nafthali. Chapter 9 of Isaiah, and verified by Josephus as the belief of the Jews, that Solomon later rewarded his Phoenecian ally, King Hiram I, the Galilee for the nations. So that he could recipricate previous gifts given to David, he accepted the upland plain among the mountains of Naphtali. Hiram renamed it "the land of Cabul" for a time. The region's Israelite name is from the Hebrew root galil, an ultimately unique word for "district", and usually "circle", a noun which has standardized since antiquity in Hebrew grammar, to be in the construct state, and requires a genitival noun. Hence the Biblical "Galilee of the non-Jewish Nations", Hebrew "galil goyim" (Isaiah 9:1), it previously had other suffixes and following the end of the Phoenecian Empire had different suffixes to the Hebrew culture and its derivatives interchangeably. The "nations" would have been the foreigners who came to settle there, during and after Hiram I of Sidon, or who had been forcibly deported there by later conquerors such as the Assyrians. The region in turn gave rise the English name for the legendary "Sea of Galilee" referred to as such in many languages including ancient Arabic, however the Jews maintained other Hebrew names for the lake, usually Kinneret (Numbers 34:11, etc.), from Hebrew kinnor, "harp", describing its shape, Lake of Gennesaret (Luke 5:1, etc.), from Ginosar (Hebrew) ge, "valley", and either netser, "branch", or natsor, "to guard", "to watch" (the name which may have been a reference to Nazareth city, alternatively renamed the Sea of Tiberias (John 6:1, etc.), from the town of Tiberias at its southwestern end, named after the Greek Tiberius following the 1st-century AD Roman Emperor's Greek derived name. Which are the three names used in originally internal Jewish authored literature rather than the "Sea of Galilee". However, Jews did use "the Galilee" to refer to the whole region (Aramaic הגלילי), including its lake. In Roman times, the country was divided into Judea, Samaria, and Galilee, which comprised the whole northern section of the country, and was the largest of the three regions under the tetrarchy. When Iudaea became a Roman province, formed from a merger of Judea, Samaria and Idumea, Galilee was briefly a part of it, then separated from it for two to three centuries. The Galilee region was presumably the home of Jesus during at least 30 years of his life. The first three Gospels of the New Testament are mainly an account of Jesus' public ministry in this province, particularly in the towns of Nazareth and Capernaum. Galilee is also cited as the place where Jesus cured a blind man.

• published: 11 Dec 2013
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