From Nimrod Fortress to the Hula Valley

On the second day of our Golan Heights excursion, we left Kibbutz Menara, passed Dan (the ancient city that marks the northern border of Biblical Israel), and continued to Nimrod Fortress, just south of the Hermon Mountain; then to the nearby Banias Nature Reserve; and finally down through the Hula Valley to the Hula Nature Reserve.

Mark Twain visited Nimrod Fortress in 1867 on his way from Damascus to the Holy Land, and it seems to have been one of the few places here that impressed him. It was his description that made me want to visit the fortress and see it for myself.

We reached the foot of a tall isolated mountain, which is crowned by the crumbling castle of Baniyas, the stateliest ruin of that kind on earth, no doubt. It is a thousand feet long and two hundred wide, all of the most symmetrical and at the same time the most ponderous masonry. The massive towers and bastions are more than thirty feet high, and have been sixty. From the mountain’s peak its broken turrets rise above the groves of ancient oaks and olives and look wonderfully picturesque. It is of such high antiquity that no man knows who built it or when it was built. It is utterly inaccessible except in one place, where a bridle path winds upward among the solid rocks to the old portcullis. The horses’ hoofs have bored holes in these rocks to the depth of six inches during the hundreds and hundreds of years that the castle was garrisoned. We wandered for three hours among the chambers and crypts and dungeons of the fortress, and trod where the mailed heels of many a knightly Crusader had rang and where Phoenician heroes had walked ages before them.

Either Mark Twain didn’t have a very good tour guide or archaeologists have since learned more about who built the fortress. He imagined it to be a Crusader castle, but in fact it was the Muslim governor of Damascus who built the fortress in 1227 to defend the road to Damascus and prevent the Christian Crusaders from attacking and conquering the city. The Crusaders tried but failed to conquer the fortress in 1253. With the expulsion of the Crusaders from the Holy Land at the end of the thirteenth century, the fortress became less important; it became a prison in the fifteenth century, and eventually it was abandoned altogether. It is now a national park, and thanks to the Israel Nature and Parks Authority, we were able to drive up to the castle on a paved road instead of taking the ancient bridle path that Mark Twain had to ascend.

Here's the view from the foot of the mountain.

We spent about two hours (an hour less than Mark Twain) wandering among the chambers and crypts and dungeons. In the first picture below, A. is entering through the front gate; the stones of the arch shifted in an earthquake in 1759.

The picture below shows an Arabic inscription from 1275 eulogizing and praising the Sultan Baybars. (You would think that an inscription in Arabic might have tipped off M. T. that the fortress was not built by the Crusaders.)

You can see the castle's donjon or keep in the background of the first picture below.

The first picture below shows the castle's cistern, which once collected rain water.

Mark Twain wrote:

We wondered how such a solid mass of masonry could be affected even by an earthquake, and could not understand what agency had made Baniyas a ruin; but we found the destroyer after a while, and then our wonder was increased tenfold. Seeds had fallen in crevices in the vast walls; the seeds had sprouted; the tender, insignificant sprouts had hardened; they grew larger and larger, and by a steady, imperceptible pressure forced the great stones apart, and now are bringing sure destruction upon a giant work that has even mocked the earthquakes to scorn! Gnarled and twisted trees spring from the old walls everywhere, and beautify and overshadow the gray battlements with a wild luxuriance of foliage.

The trees are still there, working their slow destruction upon the fortress.

From Nimrod's Fortress, we drove about a dozen kilometers (a little over seven miles) to the Banias Nature Reserve. Here again, it was Mark Twain's intriguing description -- his own disinterest notwithstanding -- that made me want to visit the place.

The ruins here [in the village of Baniyas] are not very interesting. There are the massive walls of a great square building that was once the citadel; there are many ponderous old arches that are so smothered with debris that they barely project above the ground; there are heavy-walled sewers through which the crystal brook of which Jordan is born still runs; in the hillside are the substructions of a costly marble temple that Herod the Great built here – patches of its handsome mosaic floors still remain; there is a quaint old stone bridge that was here before Herod’s time maybe; scattered everywhere, in the paths and in the woods, are Corinthian capitals, broken porphyry pillars, and little fragments of sculpture; and up yonder, in the precipice where the fountain gushes out, are well-worn Greek inscriptions over niches in the rock where in ancient times the Greeks and, after them, the Romans worshipped the sylvan god Pan.

The “Corinthian capitals, broken porphyry pillars, and little fragments of sculpture” that Mark Twain mentions are now on display in a small archaeological garden.

The pools of the Banias Springs may be what M. T. meant by the “heavy-walled sewers through which the crystal brook of which Jordan is born still runs.”

The cult of Pan was practiced here as early as the third century B.C.E., but, as Mark Twain noted, it was none other than Herod the Great who erected a pagan temple on the site around 20 B.C.E. Quite the equal opportunist, Herod; he also rebuilt the Second Temple in Jerusalem for the Jews.

Pan's Cave, visible in the upper left-hand corner of the picture below, was part of the temple. Ritual sacrifices were cast into a natural abyss reaching the underground waters at the back of the cave. If the victims disappeared in the water, this was a sign that the god had accepted the offering. But if signs of blood appeared in the nearby springs, the sacrifice had been rejected. (As a sociologist, I found this fascinating, but I’ll restrain my natural tendency to go into a long digression here about Mauss and Hubert’s classic study Sacrifice: Its Nature and Function.)

It was the worship of Pan that gave this place its name: Paniyas, pronounced Baniyas in Arabic. But after Herod’s death, his son Philip made Baniyas the capital of his kingdom in 2 B.C.E. and renamed it Caesarea Philippi. As Mark Twain notes, it was in Caesarea Philippi that Jesus said to Peter, “Thou art Peter, and upon this rock will I build my church,” etc. (Matt. 16:17-18).

Below are the ruins of the Palace of Agrippa II, the seventh and last king of the family of Herod the Great (and thus the last of the Herodians). This is probably the citadel that Mark Twain mentions.

These aqueducts, through which water still flows, could also be the “heavy-walled sewers” that M. T. mentions.

This structure among the ruins of Caesarea Philippi has been identified as the remains of a synagogue from the eleventh century C.E.

Here are the remains of Caesarea Philippi's cardo (or cardus maximus), the city's main north-south thoroughfare. As I mentioned in a previous post, there is also a cardo in the Old City of Jerusalem.

Here is A. standing under Mark Twain’s “quaint old stone bridge,” constructed by the Romans near the junction of the Guveta and Hermon Streams.

Mark Twain's account of Baniyas was intriguing, but he failed to mention some of the best parts: the cool streams and the magnificent waterfall.

From Baniyas/Caesarea Philippi, A. and I drove through the Hula Valley to the Hula Nature Reserve. Mark Twain rode through the valley and saw Lake Hula, the Biblical Waters of Merom, on his way south from Damascus to the Sea of Galilee. Unlike us, however, he didn't have to worry about land mines along the way -- a legacy of the wars that have been fought in the region since his time.

Mark Twain described the Hula Valley in 1867 as a region with very limited agricultural potential:

We were now in a green valley five or six miles wide and fifteen long. The streams which are called the sources of the Jordan flow through it to Lake Hule, a shallow pond three miles in diameter, and from the southern extremity of the lake the concentrated Jordan flows out. The lake is surrounded by a broad marsh grown with reeds. Between the marsh and the mountains which wall the valley is a respectable strip of fertile land; at the end of the valley, toward Dan, as much as half the land is solid and fertile, and watered by Jordan’s sources. There is enough of it to make a farm. It almost warrants the enthusiasm of the spies of that rabble of adventurers who captured Dan. They said: ‘We have seen the land, and behold it is very good…. A place where there is no want of anything that is in the earth.’

Their enthusiasm was at least warranted by the fact that they had never seen a country as good as this. There was enough of it for the ample support of their six hundred men and their families, too.

Mark Twain went on to contrast the Biblical history of the Hula Valley – it was, he reminded his readers, “the scene of one of Joshua’s exterminating battles” (Joshua 11:1-9) and “another bloody battle a hundred years later” in which Sisera was defeated by Barak and slain by Jael (Judges 4:1-22) – with the desolation of the valley in his own time.

Stirring scenes like these occur in this valley no more. There is not a solitary village throughout its whole extent – not thirty miles in either direction. There are two or three small clusters of [nomadic] Bedouin tents, but not a single permanent habitation. One may ride ten miles hereabouts and not see ten human beings.

To this region one of the prophecies is applied: ‘I will bring the land into desolation; and your enemies which dwell therein shall be astonished at it. And I will scatter you among the heathen, and I will draw out a sword after you; and your land shall be desolate and your cities waste.’ [Leviticus 26:32-33 –W.Y.] No man can stand here … and say the prophecy has not been fulfilled.

As I noted in a previous post in May, the Hula Valley now looks quite different than it did in Mark Twain's time because Israel drained Lake Hula and its surrounding malaria-ridden swamps in the 1950s for agricultural purposes. (The drainage added 60,000 dunams of farm land for cultivation.) In the 1990s, to address ecological problems caused by the drainage, Israel re-flooded a portion of the original lake and swamp region, creating the present-day Lake Agmon.

Today's visitor finds a carefully balanced mixture of nature ...

... wildlife ...

... and farming.

I think Mark Twain would have been astonished by the degree to which Israel has transformed the region. Standing in the same valley one hundred and forty-one years later, I would reply to Mark Twain's invocation of Leviticus with a very different verse from the prophet Amos (9:13-15): “Behold, the days come, saith the Lord, that the plowman shall overtake the reaper, and the treader of grapes him that soweth seed; and the mountains shall drop sweet wine, and all the hills shall melt. And I will turn the captivity of My people Israel, and they shall build the waste cities, and inhabit them; and they shall plant vineyards, and drink the wine thereof; they shall also make gardens, and eat the fruit of them. And I will plant them upon their land, and they shall no more be plucked up out of their land which I have given them, saith the Lord thy G-d.”