Tiberias #62

Tiberias is a city on the western shore of the Sea of Galilee in northern Israel. It appears in the New Testament only indirectly: the Gospel of John calls the lake “the Sea of Galilee, which is the Sea of Tiberias” (John 6:1) and uses the same name again when Jesus appears to his disciples after the resurrection (John 21:1). Although the city itself is never the scene of a Gospel story, its history says a great deal about the world in which Jesus lived and about Judaism after the New Testament era.

Biblical Significance

Herod Antipas, the son of Herod the Great and ruler of Galilee during the lifetime of Jesus (Luke 3:1), founded Tiberias around AD 18 to 20 and named it in honor of the emperor Tiberius. He made it his capital, moving the center of Galilean government away from Sepphoris. The Jewish historian Josephus reports that the city was built over a burial ground, which many observant Jews regarded as ritually defiling, and that Antipas had to populate it with a mixed group of settlers. That may help explain why the Gospels never record Jesus teaching there, since his ministry is centered on villages such as Capernaum and around the lake rather than on Antipas’s showpiece city.

Even so, the name of the city had entered everyday speech by the time John wrote, which is why he uses it for the lake. It appears again when boats from Tiberias land near the place where Jesus had fed the crowd, and the people who ate the loaves go looking for him (John 6:23). John’s readers, many of them outside Palestine, would have known the lake by its Roman name.

Today

Modern Tiberias is a lively resort city with hot mineral springs, a promenade along the water, and the ruins of its Roman and Byzantine past. Excavations have uncovered a main colonnaded street, a Roman bathhouse, and a large synagogue at the nearby site of Hammat Tiberias, where a well-preserved mosaic floor is a major attraction.

After the Romans destroyed Jerusalem in AD 70 and again crushed the Bar Kokhba revolt in the AD 130s, Jewish life in the land gradually shifted north to Galilee, and Tiberias became a leading center of Jewish learning. Tradition holds that the Mishnah reached its final form in Galilee around AD 200 and that the Jerusalem Talmud was compiled in the region in the following centuries. In the early Middle Ages scholars known as the Masoretes worked in Tiberias to preserve the pronunciation and text of the Hebrew Bible, adding the vowel and accent marks used in most printed Hebrew Bibles today. The city is considered one of the four holy cities of Judaism in Israel, alongside Jerusalem, Hebron, and Safed.