The Sabbath School

Seventh-day Adventist Missionary Society · Oakland, California · Feb 10, 1881

The Sabbath School.

THE GALILEANS AND THE BORDER LANDS.

A SURPASSING interest centers in Galilee, as the special scene of the ministry of Jesus, and the district in which he spent nearly all his life. It was through its cities and villages that he is recorded to have passed, once and again, teaching and preaching, and it was in Galilee that he had most popular support. To know something of a land whose air he thus breathed so long, amongst whose people he was wont to mingle, and by whose characteristics he must have been affected, almost unconsciously, can but be essential to a vivid realization of his life.

The province, according to "Geikie's Life of Christ" from which the following extracts are taken, lay wholly inland, with Phenicia as its western, and partly its northern neighbor, the small state of Ulatha reaching from where Phenicia ended, to the Sea of Merom, on the northeastern border. The Jordan marked its eastern limit, and Decapolis, with the territory of Samaria, defined its southern border. Its whole extent was inconsiderable, for it measured little more than seven-and-twenty miles from east to west, and five-and-twenty from north to south. Its boundaries varied, indeed, at different times, but, at the largest, it was rather like a moderate county than a province.

Galilee got its name as the circle or region of the heathen nations, and hence, to the southern Jews of Isaiah's days, it was "the heathen country." It included the districts assigned to Asher, Naphtali, Zebulon, and Issachar. But these tribes never obtained entire possession of their territories, and contented themselves with settling among the Canaanite population, whom they, in some cases, made tributary.

The separation from the House of David, and from Jerusalem, under the king of Israel, and the Assyrian captivity at a later date, further affected the northern population. To the prophet Isaiah they were the people "that walked in darkness and dwelt in the land of the shadow of death," alike from their separation from Jerusalem, their living among the heathen, and their national calamities, though he anticipates a bright future for them in the light of the Messiah.

After the exile two great changes took place. Jewish colonists gradually spread over the land once more, and the name Galilee was extended to the whole north on this side of the Jordan, so that the territory of the tribe of Issachar, with the plain of Esdraelon; Zebulon, with the southern part of the Sea of Gennesaret; and Naphtali, and Asher, were included in it. The new Jewish settlers had no longer any political jealousy of Jerusalem, and once more frequented the temple, while the fact that they were surrounded by heathen races made them, perhaps, more loyal to Judaism than they otherwise would have been; just as the Protestants of Ireland are intensely Protestant because surrounded by Romanism. Still, though faithful, their land was "defiled" by heathen citizens and neighbors, and the narrow bigotry of Judea looked askance at it from this cause. Besides Jews, it had not a few Phenicians, Syrians, Arabs, and Greeks settled over it. Carmel had become almost a Syrian colony, and Kedesh retained the mixed population it had had for ages, while the eastern end of the Esdraelon valley was barred to the Jew by the heathen town of Scythopolis,—the ancient Beth-shean. Moreover, the great caravan road, from Damascus to Ptolemais, which ran over the hills from Capernaum, through the heart of Galilee, brought many heathen into the country.

"Cowardice," says Josephus, "was never the fault of the Galileans. They are inured to war from their infancy, nor has the country been ever wanting in great numbers of brave men." The mountain air they breathed made them patriots, but their patriotism was guided by zeal for their faith. While warmly loyal to Herod, in gratitude for his subduing the lawless bands who had wasted their country, after the civil wars,—and quiet and well-disposed to Antipas, during the forty-three years of his reign, they were none the less fixed in their abhorrence of Rome, the heathen tyrant of their race. In revolt after revolt they were the first to breast the Roman armies, and they were the last to defend the ruins of Jerusalem, stone by stone, like worthy sons of those ancestors who "jeopardized their lives unto the death in the high places of the field." There were families like that of the Zealot, Hezekiah, and Judas, the Galilean, in whom the hatred of Rome was handed down from generation to generation, and which, in each generation, furnished martyrs to the national cause. A hundred and fifty thousand of the youth of Galilee fell in the last struggle with Rome, and few narratives are more stirring than the defence of the Galilean fortresses, one after another, in the face of all odds. Even Titus appealed to the magnificent heroism of these defenders of their freedom and their country, to rouse the ardor of his own army. Nor was their devotion to their leaders less admirable. Josephus boasts of the heartiness and trust the Galileans reposed in him. Though their towns were destroyed in the war, and their wives and children carried off, they were more concerned for the safety of their general than for their own troubles.

The Jew of the south, wrapped in self-importance, as living in or near the holy city, amidst the schools of the Rabbis, and under the shadow of the temple, and full of religious pride in his assumed superior knowledge of the law, and greater purity as a member of a community nearly wholly Jewish, looked down on his Galilean brethren. The very ground he trod was more holy than the soil of Galilee, and the repugnance of the North to adopt the prescriptions of the Rabbis, was itself, a ground of estrangement and self-exaltation. He could not believe that the Messiah could come from a part so inferior, for "the law was to go forth from Zion, and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem." Jesus found willing hearers and many disciples in the cities and towns of Galilee, but he made little impression on Judea.

Yet Galilee, from the earliest times, had vindicated its claims to honor for the intellectual vigor of its people. Not only physically and morally, but even in mental freshness and force, it was before the narrow and morbid South, which had given itself up to the childish trifling of Rabbinism. The earliest poetry of Israel rose among the Galilean hills, when Barak of Naphtali had triumphed over the Canaanites. The Song of Songs was composed in Galilee by a poet of nature, whose heart and eyes drank in the inspiration of the bright sky and the opening flowers, and who could tell how the fig-tree put forth its leaves, and the vine sprouted, and the pomegranates opened its blossoms. Hosea, the prophet, belonged to Issachar; Jonah to Zebulon, Nahum came from Elkosh in Galilee, and in the gospels a noble band of Galileans group themselves round the central figure, Peter, the brave and tender-hearted—James and John—Andrew and Philip—and Nathanael, of Cana, not to speak of others, or of the woman of Galilee, who honored themselves by ministering to Christ of their substance. It was from Galilee, moreover, that the great apostle of the heathen emigrated to Tarsus, in Cilicia, for they belonged to Gischala, a Galilean town, though their stock originally was of the tribe of Benjamin.

The Talmud sketches, in a few words, the contrast between the two provinces: "The Galilean loves honor, and the Jews money." The Rabbis admit that the Galileans, in their comparative poverty, were temperate, pure, and religious. Their fidelity to their faith was shown by their fond and constant visits to the temple, in spite of the hostile Samaritan territory between, and it was through their zeal that the passover was celebrated for eight days instead of seven. When Christ appeared, they threw the same ardor and fidelity into his service. In their midst the Saviour, persecuted elsewhere, took constant refuge. They threw open their land to him, as a safe shelter from the rage of the Jews, almost to the last. He went forth from among them, and gathered the first-fruits of his kingdom from them, and it was to a band of Galileans that he delivered the commission to spread the gospel, after his death, through the world.