Thoughts from our trip to Israel #2: Size is relative

Masada: Looking across to the Dead Sea to the mountains of Moab

The Jordan River, we've got two bigger river flowing through Franklin

Looking across the Sea of Galilee, we'd call it a lake here.

Size is relative, that's a phrase you'd heard before, and one that hits home when you see with your own eyes the Sea of Galilee and the Jordan River.  In many parts of the world, especially places with much higher yearly precipitation totals, neither of these bodies of water would be all that remarkable.  A decent sized lake, albeit a deep one, and a narrow river, wouldn't feature prominently into the narrative of very many historical moments if they weren't located in a place as significant as this one.

Because important things in the Bible, and especially in the life of Jesus, took place around (as well as upon and in) these bodies of water, they have an outsized place in our collective imaginations that looms larger than what familiarity with them would have otherwise given.

Another way to look at it, however, is to wrap your mind around how important these two bodies are water are in this land precisely because freshwater is scarce.  The Sea of Galilee and the Jordan River have been vital to life in the Holy Land for thousands of years, and remain so today, even if they look unremarkable to those who, like me, grew up on a peninsula surrounded by the Great Lakes.  

The picture from the top of Masada emphasizes that the Jordan River Valley, like its namesake river, isn't all that wide (further upstream it is narrower even than this).  As we journeyed south from the Sea of Galilee toward Jericho, it was easy enough to see both side of the river valley from our bus windows.  At times the two hilly/mountainous regions that the river runs between were no more than a couple miles apart, the fertile valley (thanks to the river) between them only a farm or two wide.

For Americans, in particular, used to the vast Great Plains, the Mighty Mississippi, and trips in the car where you can drive for hour after hour without seeing much change in the landscape, this truncated scale takes getting used to.

Lastly, while it is indeed a small land when compared to other places on the planet, the events described in the Bible were taking place at a walking pace, we might be able to drive from Galilee to Jerusalem in considerably less time than it takes to cross Ohio on I80 (mores the pity: it is obligatory to make as many Ohio jokes as possible when you grew up in the Mitten), but it still took a goodly number of days to make that journey on foot.