Sea of Galilee

Sea of Galilee, called in the Old Testament the Sea of Chinnereth or Chinneroth (Numbers 34:11; Joshua 12:3), is the freshwater lake of the upper Jordan valley in northern Israel. The Jordan enters it from the north and leaves it at its southern end, so that the lake is in effect a widening of the river on its way to the Salt Sea, the Dead Sea. Its surface lies about 210 metres below sea level, and it is roughly 21 kilometres from north to south, up to 12 or 13 kilometres wide, about 165 square kilometres in area and up to about 43 metres deep. The name survived in Greek as Gennesaret, used of both the lake and the plain on its northwestern shore, and the lake was eventually also called the Sea of Galilee and the Sea of Tiberias, the names under which it appears in the Gospels.

Names

Three distinct things carry the name in the Old Testament. The town of Chinnereth was one of the fortified cities of the tribe of Naphtali, listed with Hammath and Rakkath (Joshua 19:35); it is identified with Tell el-Oreimeh, now Tel Kinrot, on the northwestern shore. The district of Chinneroth was the land around the town, which the Aramean king Ben-Hadad I of Damascus struck together with Ijon, Dan, Abel-beth-maacah and the land of Naphtali when Asa of Judah paid him to break his treaty with Baasha of Israel (1 Kings 15:18-20), an attack that fell early in the ninth century BC. The lake took its name from the town. The Hebrew form is popularly connected with kinnor, "harp" or "lyre," on account of the lake's shape, but the town's name is already recorded in Egypt before Israel entered the land and is probably Canaanite, so that derivation is doubtful.

Biblical Account

The lake appears in Scripture only as a boundary marker. The eastern border of the land promised to Israel was to run down from Shepham to Riblah and "reach to the shoulder of the Sea of Chinnereth on the east" before continuing down the Jordan to the Salt Sea (Numbers 34:10-12). Moses gave the Reubenites and the Gadites the Arabah "with the Jordan as the border, from Chinnereth as far as the Sea of the Arabah, the Salt Sea" (Deuteronomy 3:17), and the territory of Gad is later described as reaching "to the lower end of the Sea of Chinnereth, eastward beyond the Jordan" (Joshua 13:27). The kingdom of Sihon had stretched over the Arabah as far north as the Sea of Chinneroth on its eastern side (Joshua 12:3). When Jabin of Hazor summoned the northern kings against Joshua, they included those "in the Arabah south of Chinneroth" (Joshua 11:1-2), the Jordan valley below the lake; see the Conquest of Hazor.

Geography

The lake fills a basin of the Jordan Rift, the same fault valley that holds the Hula Valley to the north and the Dead Sea to the south. The Jordan's headwaters rise at the foot of Mount Hermon. Hills of Galilee rise on the west and the plateau of Bashan on the east. Hot mineral springs rise on the shore and on the lake bed along the rift's faults; the Naphtali town named Hammath, "hot springs," stood beside them (Joshua 19:35). The first century AD historian Josephus gave the lake's size as 140 stadia by 40 and praised its sweet drinking water and its fish (War 3.506-508).

Archaeology

Beth Yerah (Khirbet Kerak), at the point where the Jordan leaves the lake, was a walled Early Bronze Age city of some 50 to 60 acres with a mud brick fortification wall nearly 8 metres thick, abandoned at the end of the Early Bronze III period, in the second half of the third millennium BC; the distinctive red and black pottery first recognised there is known as Khirbet Kerak ware. Tel Kinrot, the town of Chinnereth, was occupied in the Early, Middle and Late Bronze Ages and is named as K-n-n-r-t in the topographical list of Thutmose III. Excavations by Volkmar Fritz in the 1980s and 1990s and by the Kinneret Regional Project (founded in 2002 by the universities of Bern, Helsinki, Leiden and Mainz, with field seasons at Tel Kinrot from 2003 to 2008) uncovered a large, planned Iron Age I city of the eleventh century BC with wide streets and olive processing installations, destroyed in the first decades of the tenth century BC. After a gap the site was resettled in the ninth and eighth centuries BC and destroyed again, a destruction the excavators associate with the campaign of Tiglath-Pileser III against Israel in 733 or 732 BC (2 Kings 15:29). The identification of Tel Kinrot with biblical Chinnereth is probable; the earlier proposal of el-Mejdel (Magdala) is no longer followed.

Significance

In the Old Testament the Sea of Chinnereth is the northern anchor of the Jordan boundary that divided the tribes east of the river from those west of it, and its district was a northern frontier repeatedly exposed to Damascus and Assyria. Its shores would later become the setting of much of Christ's ministry.