Har Nitai
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Har Nitai (Mount Nitai, Hebrew: הר נתאי) is a mountain west of the Sea of Galilee and north of Tiberias, Israel. Due east of the mountain is Mount Arbel. Har Nitai is named after Nittai of Arbela. When looking southwest from Capernaum, on the shore of the Sea of Galillee, one cannot help but notice the beautiful cliffs of Har Nitai and Arbel.
A valley separates Har Nitai from Arbel. A stream runs through that valley. Atop Har Nitai are a grove of trees and the ruins of an ancient settlement. The ruins are unexcavated and their identity remains unknown. The eastern boundary of the ruins is marked by the ruins of an ancient wall. Approximately 80 meters east of the wall is a sheer drop-off, or cliff. Perhaps ancient residents built the wall for safety-reasons (for example, to prevent their children from having access to the cliff). Or perhaps they built the wall to enclose a defendable area, bounded by a wall and a cliff, so that they would have a place from which to defend themselves in the event of an attack. Until an excavation is performed and evidence is unearthed, one can only speculate.
[edit] A Candidate for the Site of Nazareth
Because Har Nitai is a hilltop, with ruins and a cliff, it is a candidate for the actual site of ancient Nazareth, Israel, the town in which Jesus Christ grew-up, based on the following passage from the New Testament book of Luke:
Luke 4:29 (New American Standard Bible) "and they got up and drove Him out of the city, and led Him to the brow of the hill on which their city had been built, in order to throw Him down the cliff."
The traditional site of Nazareth, Israel, does not fit the geographical description, above, that Luke provided in his gospel. Luke wrote that Nazareth had been built on a hill that had a cliff. Traditional Nazareth is not on a hill that has a cliff. In fact, traditional Nazareth is not even on a hill, and the nearest cliff is approximately a mile-and-a-half, or approximately two kilometers, away. The historical record does not mention the location of the traditional site of Nazareth until the time of Eusebius, circa A.D. 300, after Christianity had become legal in the Roman Empire. Thus, it is possible that Nazareth, like many Jewish towns of the first century A.D., was abandoned and lost after the Roman wars. Masada and Gamla, for example, were lost after their destruction due to the Roman wars and were not rediscovered until the 19th and 20th centuries. It is also possible that, after Christianity had become popular and legal in the Roman empire, Christian pilgrims to Israel, in their zeal to identify the places described in the Bible, designated the wrong site as Nazareth. Bellarmino Bagatti, a twentieth century Roman Catholic archaeologist, was an authority on excavations performed on the traditional site of Nazareth. He concluded that, although he personally believed that the traditional site of Nazareth was the true site of ancient Nazareth, there was no archaeological evidence to validate the traditional site.
Because Har Nitai's geography matches Luke's description of Nazareth, and because the traditional site of Nazareth is not validated by archaeology, Har Nitai is not only a beautiful mountain, but is also a site worthy of an archaeological excavation to determine the identity of its ruins.
