From the Jordan River to the Golan Heights: Exploring Northern Israel

Tel Dan Nature Reserve

The third day started with a river crossing — the Jordan, mentioned more than 180 times across both testaments, the same water Joshua led the Israelites through into the Promised Land (Joshua 3:15-17) and the same water John the Baptist used to baptize his cousin Jesus (Matthew 3:13-17).

Jordan River

It runs 156 miles from Mount Hermon down to the Dead Sea, fed by three sources, the largest and most important being the Dan River, snowmelt off Mount Hermon itself. The name "Jordan" actually means "came down from Dan" — which makes the river, in the most literal sense, named for exactly where it begins. We hiked alongside its rushing water for a while, past thickets and Syrian ash trees, before reaching the reserve that gave the river its name.

Dan River

Tel Dan holds the remains of the ancient city of Dan, first settled in the fifth millennium BCE, at the tail end of the Neolithic Age. Egyptian kings ruled it in the 20th and 19th centuries BCE; Canaanites held it after that, under the name Leshem, or Laish, until the tribe of Dan conquered it and renamed it for themselves (Judges 18). It surfaces again in 1 Kings 12, as one of two sites where King Jeroboam erected golden calves — an attempt to keep his people worshipping locally rather than making the pilgrimage south to Jerusalem, where their loyalty might drift toward his rival, King Rehoboam. The echo is deliberate and uncomfortable: the same idol, the same sin, that once drove God to threaten Israel with destruction in the wilderness (Exodus 32), rebuilt here generations later by a king who knew exactly what he was recreating.

From a lookout point in the reserve, you can see clear into a small village across the border in Lebanon — a reminder, before the day had even gotten started, of exactly how close together this region's history and its present tension actually sit.

Abraham's Gate

The most striking find at Tel Dan is a Canaanite-era gate, more than 4,000 years old, built from mud brick over a basalt foundation and remarkably intact at 23 feet — its three arches the oldest of their kind ever discovered. The gate was already standing in the fifteenth century BCE, when Abraham himself passed through Dan under Canaanite rule (Genesis 14:14), which is why it carries two names today: the Canaanite Gate, and, just as often, Abraham's Gate.

Caesarea Philippi

From Tel Dan, we drove to Caesarea Philippi — named by Herod Philip, son of Herod the Great, in a single stroke of flattery aimed at both Emperor Augustus and himself. Its modern name, Banias, comes from the Arabic rendering of Pan, the Greek god this entire site was built to honor. What remains here are the ruins of a temple complex that once stood at the center of pagan worship in the region — and a cave mouth, still visible, that the ancient world believed was a literal entrance to the underworld.

An earthquake in 1033 collapsed much of that cave and sealed the spring that once flowed from it; what's left today is a cavity 65 feet wide and 50 feet high, hollow enough to still feel like exactly what people once believed it was. Worshippers held that Pan wintered inside it alongside other gods — Pan himself half-man, half-goat, a deity associated above all with unchecked appetite, known for startling nymphs out of hiding in the woods and fields until fear itself took on his name: this is where the word "panic" comes from.

The niches and altars still visible throughout the site were built to court his favor and the favor of the gods who sheltered with him, through rites the ancient world considered necessary and history has largely chosen not to dwell on in detail.

Court of Nemesis (Goddess of Vengeance)

It was to this exact place — a site devout Jews would have gone out of their way to avoid — that Jesus deliberately brought his disciples. Standing in front of altars built to a god of appetite and fear, in a spot the ancient world itself called the Gates of Hades, he asked them a single question: "Who do you say that I am?" Peter answered, "You are the Christ, the Son of the living God." Jesus replied, "And I tell you that you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church, and the gates of Hades will not overcome it" (Matthew 16:18).

I don't think the location was incidental. The most important confession in the New Testament was spoken directly in front of the thing it was answering.

Hermon River Springs

Afterward, I walked down to the Hermon River Springs, also part of Caesarea Philippi and, like the Dan River, another of the three sources feeding the Jordan, and sat with what I'd just heard for a while before we moved on.

We drove past green pastures and grazing cattle, toward Mount Bental and the Valley of Tears.

Al Sultan Restaurant

Lunch was in Mas'ade, a Druze village in the Northern Golan Heights, at a restaurant called Al Sultan. The Druze make up just under 2% of Israel's population, and this particular village — nearly 4,000 people, mostly Syrian nationals with permanent Israeli residency — carries a full slate of Israeli citizenship benefits without full citizenship itself: healthcare, education, municipal services, extended to a community that speaks Arabic, identifies as Arab, and practices a faith that is neither Islam nor anything else on a conventional list. The Druze religion broke away from Islam in Egypt in the tenth century and built something genuinely its own from there — a blend of Judaic, Christian, and Islamic monotheism folded together with threads of Hindu and Greek philosophical thought, closed to outside converts ever since.

Druze cooking draws close to its Jewish, Arab, and Israeli neighbors in most respects, but its signature is meze — small plates meant for sharing, which is exactly how lunch arrived:

... home-brined green olives, pickles, ...

... a bright salad, ...

... baba ganoush finished with olive oil and parsley, ...

... hummus the same way, ...

... labneh dusted with za'atar, ...

roasted cauliflower, and falafel.

I need to admit something here: I don't like falafel, as a rule. I've tried it many times, in many countries, and found it dense and dry often enough that I'd more or less written off the dish entirely. Al Sultan's falafel undid that assumption in one bite — light, moist, genuinely flavorful, stuffed into warm pita with lettuce, tomato, and tahini, the first version of this dish I've ever actually looked forward to finishing.

After lunch, we climbed toward Mount Hermon, the tallest peak in the Middle East, to reach Mount Bental and the site known as the Valley of Tears — a memorial in the Golan Heights to the Israeli tank crews who died defending this ground during the Yom Kippur War.

Valley of Tears

We stepped off the bus under a clear sky and a sharp wind, and walked up to a site that has been, in order, a Syrian bunker, an Israeli bunker, and now, a place for people like me to stand quietly and try to understand what happened here.

On October 6, 1973, Egypt and Syria launched coordinated surprise attacks on Israel, hoping to reclaim ground lost six years earlier in the Six-Day War — Egypt from the Sinai, Syria from the Golan Heights, the exact ground beneath our feet. They chose Yom Kippur deliberately: the holiest day in the Jewish calendar, a day of fasting, prayer, and rest, when Israel's own army was least prepared to fight. Syria sent somewhere between 1,400 and 1,500 tanks across the Golan. Israel had a few hundred to meet them with. By every reasonable measure, the outcome should not have been close. Israel held the line anyway, and Syria and Egypt withdrew.

An Abandoned Tank at the Valley of Tears

What surrounds the memorial today makes the stakes hard to abstract away: an active minefield, a rusted, abandoned tank left exactly where it stopped, and UN peacekeepers still patrolling the demilitarized zone visible from where we stood. From nearly 5,600 feet at Mount Bental, the view stretches to snow-capped Mount Hermon, across the Golan Heights, to Damascus, roughly forty miles away, and further still to glimpses of Lebanon and Jordan. A map at the site marks exactly where we were standing — at the edge of the Golan Heights, near Mas'ade, beside the narrow grey band of the UN-patrolled DMZ separating Israel from Syria.

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Mount Bental Lookout

At almost 5,600 feet above sea level, the view from Mount Bental was spectacular. From this height, you can clearly see snow-capped, Mount Hermon to the north, the Golan Heights, and the country of Syria, with its capital of Damascus, only 40 or so miles away. Farther in the distance, Lebanon and Jordan are visible as well.

The map above best illustrates our location. Just south of Lebanon, you will see the city of Mas'adah (or Mas'ade). We were standing at the edge of the Israeli occupied Golan Heights (the entire cream-colored area) near Mas'ade. The grey area is the highly restricted DMZ, patrolled by U.N. forces, that separates Israel and Syria.

I stood in that exact spot fewer than eight months before Hamas attacked Israel on October 7, 2023 — one day after the fiftieth anniversary of the Six-Day War, and a war that has since killed and injured thousands on every side of it. I find it difficult to reconcile the ground I stood on that ordinary, windy afternoon with what that same region has become since. All those affected remain in my prayers, on every side of every line drawn across that valley.

Tiberias

Downtown Tiberias

Mount Bental closed out the day's formal itinerary, and we headed back to Tiberias with enough daylight left that I got off the bus early to wander before dark, hoping for one last authentic taste of the town on our final night there.

What I found instead, in the middle of Tiberias, Israel, was a clothing store called Oakland.

I assumed it was coincidence until I stepped inside and the manager told me otherwise — the store really was named for the city in Northern California where I lived.

The clothes themselves bore no real resemblance to actual Oakland style, but they were giving it an honest effort, and a Too Short song started playing as I walked out, which felt like either a genuine coincidence or the universe having a little fun at my expense. Either way, after a day spent standing in a war memorial, it was exactly the kind of small, absurd moment I needed.

Avi Restaurant

Still chasing something more authentically local, I had dinner at Avi, a strictly kosher restaurant that's been serving Tiberias since 1977.

My waiter steered me toward the kebab seniye, the restaurant's signature dish ...

... — oven-baked lamb kebab under a blanket of tahini sauce, sliced tomato, and toasted pita, simple and completely satisfying after a long day on foot.

St. Urban Wine Cellar and Bar and Torrance Restaurant

After dinner, I made good on the promise from the night before and returned to the Scots Hotel for the wine flight I'd put off. I'd never tasted Israeli wine before this trip, and it turns out I'd been missing something genuinely good — Israel has been making wine for roughly 5,000 years, though international recognition for it is a fairly recent development. The country's drastic range of microclimates, from coastal plains to arid mountain landscapes, produces volcanic, chalk, and limestone soils that over 300 wineries now draw from, turning out about 40 million bottles a year, roughly half of which end up exported to the United States.

I started the flight upstairs in the St. Urban Wine Cellar and Bar, sinking into a leather couch with a view of the Sea of Galilee as the sun began to set, then carried the rest of it down to the Torrance restaurant patio once the light was gone.

 Chardonnay, Sauvignon Blanc, Pinot Noir, Cabernet Sauvignon — every pour was excellent, a genuinely fitting way to close out my last night in Tiberias before whatever the next day would bring.