Reluctantly we turn our backs on the sweet Galilee but with mounting expectation make our way south towards Jerusalem. This is the day we will wind our way past scores of mountains and valleys so significant that God included them in the only Book He ever gave to man. Tonight, just as the sun drops over the western foothills into the Mediterranean, we will see Jerusalem straddling the mountains of Zion, bathed in the golden day’s last light. But we must not hurry too quickly past the scenes along the way.
Our bus is laboring up the western rim of the basin in which the Sea of Galilee lies. Halfway up we will reach sea level (Galilee is 750′ below sea level). We will also pass from the subtropical, where they grow bananas and dates, to the temperate zone, where they grow apples–on the same hillside! What a country!
Our route will take us through the Lower Galilean mountains until we drop down into the eastern end of the Jezreel valley, really the Harod River valley. Looming before us, one of the shattered hills of the Galilee range that spills into this Armageddon valley, is Mount Tabor. It is the place where met, in post-Canaanite Israel, the tribal territories of Naphtali (the land through which we have been driving from the western shore of Tiberias), Zebulun (around Nazareth to our west), and Issachar (in the eastern end of this great valley).
In the days of the Judges, this was the site of the great battle between the forces of the oppressor Sisera, with his chariots of iron, and Deborah and Barak with their small militia from Zebulun and Naphtali (with a few, it seems, from Issachar, Jud. 5:15). Others did not make it to the mountaintop, did not show up for the battle, and therefore did not sing the victory song. “For the divisions of Reuben there were great searchings of heart. Gilead abode beyond Jordan: and why did Dan remain in ships? Asher continued on the sea shore, and abode in his breaches.” But, continues the triumph song, “Zebulun and Naphtali were a people that jeoparded their lives unto the death in the high places of the field…Curse ye Meroz, said the angel of the Lord, curse ye bitterly the inhabitants thereof; because they came not to the help of the Lord, to the help of the Lord against the mighty” (Jud. 5:16-18, 23).
After a prayer-stimulating taxi ride up innumerable hairpin turns to the top of Tabor, we understand in some measure the daunting prospect the soldiers faced in hurling themselves down these slopes to deliver Israel from its foe. Perhaps we also understand a little the descent of the Lord into the depths in order to deliver us, and why Paul used this story to illustrate it in Ephesians 4:8-10.