Israel Travel Guide: Tel Aviv, Caesarea and the Road to Armageddon
- The Anonymous Hungry Hippopotamus
- Oct 1, 2023
- 7 min read
Updated: Jul 10
Israel is smaller than most people imagine before they've actually stood inside it — 290 miles from top to bottom, 85 miles across at its widest point, a country you could tuck entirely inside the state of New Jersey with room left over. Nine million people live inside that small a space: Jews, Muslims, and Christians, three faiths that have spent thousands of years disagreeing about almost everything except the fact that this particular ground is sacred.
I had wanted to come here for decades before I actually did. Ten days, a tour built specifically around the Judeo-Christian history layered into this land, and more history than any single blog post, or any single trip, could actually hold. I won't pretend to be a historian or an expert on this country. What follows is only what I saw, what I learned, and what stayed with me.
Tel Aviv
Daybreak in Tel Aviv
My first stop was Tel Aviv, a city the New York Times once dubbed the Mediterranean Capital of Cool — and one that backs up the title with real numbers. It ranks among the five most expensive cities on Earth, ahead of both Los Angeles and San Francisco, and fifth in the world for startup ecosystems according to Startup Genome's annual rankings, one small data point in a country that shows up, again and again, near the top of every list ranking the world's most technologically advanced nations.
None of that surprised me as much as the beach itself did — mile after mile of Mediterranean coastline, doing the same unbothered work it's always done, long before anyone thought to build a tech hub beside it.
Beyond The Limits
Just before I reached the sand, I passed a sculpture: a monkey balanced upside down on its head, perched on a branch protruding from something shaped like a cacao pod — an odd, playful landmark for a city that otherwise takes its own importance rather seriously.
Caesarea
From Tel Aviv, the bus carried us north along the coast to Caesarea, where Herod the Great built an entire city out of nothing around 10 BCE, on a stretch of shoreline that had previously held only a small settlement called Strato's Tower.
Caesar Augustus had given Herod the land as a gift, and Herod, never one to undersell a debt of gratitude, named the resulting city after him.
What remains of it now, preserved inside Caesarea National Park, ranks among the most significant archaeological sites on Israel's entire Mediterranean coast — artifacts dating back two thousand years, to the earliest decades of the first century.
This was also, for a time, the seat of Roman government in the region — which means this ground is where Pontius Pilate governed, and where he ultimately sentenced Jesus to crucifixion (Matthew 27:11-26).
Decades later, the apostle Paul was held prisoner here too, by a procurator named Marcus Antonius Felix, in a stone pit not unlike the one we stood beside. Felix, according to the historians of his own era, was cruel, licentious, and base — a man who had been a slave before Claudius Caesar promoted him to governor, and who would go on to marry two different women named Drusilla, the first a granddaughter of Marc Antony and Cleopatra, the second the daughter of Herod Agrippa.
It was this second Drusilla who accompanied Felix to hear Paul speak, more than once, over the course of his imprisonment (Acts 24:24-26) — and it was Felix's own indecision, his repeated insistence that the timing was never quite convenient, that kept Paul in that pit for more than two years before any judgment was ever rendered (Acts 24:27). Two thousand years later, procrastination remains a remarkably human failure to witness in the ruins of an empire.
The Roman Theater
The largest structure still standing at Caesarea is its 4,000-seat theater, built to face directly out toward the Mediterranean.
It is the oldest amphitheater of its kind anywhere in the eastern Mediterranean, its semicircular stone seating restored, and restored again, closely enough to its original form that I could stand on the same stage where Eric Clapton and Bryan Adams have both performed in the modern era, and still picture the Greek and Roman actors, the gladiators, the athletes who stood there first, performing for an audience gazing out at the exact same sea.
I was still turning that thought over when the singing started — a handful of voices in one corner of the theater, joined within moments by hundreds more, until the whole amphitheater was filled with something that had nothing to do with any tour itinerary. The moment, the song, and the spirit transcended every barrier in the room and united a theater full of strangers in a single act of praise.
There was something fitting about that happening here specifically — a stage built by an empire that crucified the very faith now filling it with song, thousands of years later, uncoerced.
Tulum, Mexico came to mind unexpectedly as I stood there afterward, watching the light on the water — another set of ancient ruins holding its own quiet conversation with a coastline, on the other side of the world entirely.
I walked the seashell-littered shore in the quiet that followed, before we reboarded the bus and watched the Mediterranean disappear behind us as the road climbed into the hills.
Mount Carmel
The road to Mount Carmel cut through a landscape still marked by recent fire — scorched hillsides our guide, Hanna pointed out as we passed. Israel, she told us, recycles almost 90 percent of its wastewater, one of the highest rates anywhere in the world, and that reclaimed water had done real work fighting back the flames that scarred the ground we were now driving through.
It was a strange thing to learn in the middle of a pilgrimage — that the same ingenuity keeping this small country's technology sector thriving in Tel Aviv was also, a hundred miles away, the reason this particular hillside hadn't burned worse than it did.
Mount Carmel itself only rises a little over 1,800 feet, nothing dramatic by elevation alone. But the shift from the flat coastal plain we'd been driving through to these slopes was its own kind of arrival — a landscape changing its mind about what it wanted to be.
A field of wildflowers stood in front of the church we visited, as if the mountain had arranged its own welcome.
This is the mountain where the prophet Elijah challenged the priests of Baal and Asherah directly, in front of King Ahab and Queen Jezebel — a public contest against the god the entire kingdom had been taught was supreme. Elijah won. The people who witnessed it renounced Baal on the spot and declared, "The Lord, he is God" (1 Kings 18:17-40).
On the road out, toward Megiddo, we passed a large round stone set near the mouth of a cave — the same design once used to seal a tomb, including, I'd later learn in more detail, the one that mattered most. More on that in a later post.
Tel Megiddo
From Mount Carmel, the bus carried us to Tel Megiddo, a UNESCO World Heritage Site holding the excavated remains of one of the most fought-over cities in human history. It sits in the Jezreel Valley — a name that translates from Hebrew as "God sows" — the most fertile stretch of land in all of Israel, and, by grim coincidence or grim design, also the site of battles stretching from the campaigns of the Egyptian Pharaoh Thutmose III in the fifteenth century BCE all the way to Napoleon in the nineteenth century AD.
The city's original name was Har-Megiddo — "Har" being the Hebrew word for mountain, "Megiddo" the name of the city itself. When the Book of Revelation was later written in Greek, that Hebrew name was transliterated into Ἁρμαγεδών, Harmagedon, which passed into English as a word most people recognize long before they ever learn where it actually came from: Armageddon.
Napoleon, standing on this same plain, is said to have remarked that there was no place in the whole world more suited for war than this one. Revelation names this exact valley as the site of the final battle at the end of the age (Revelation 16:16) — which means I spent an afternoon standing in a fertile, sun-lit valley that two very different sources, separated by two thousand years, both singled out as the place where the world's violence was always destined to end up.
Magdalena Restaurant
After a long day of history layered on history, dinner was at Magdalena, a restaurant that's been called the first Arab-gourmet restaurant in the country, about twenty minutes outside Tiberias, where we were staying that night.
The drive hugged the Sea of Galilee through a string of hairpin turns my taxi driver navigated without apparent effort, and just as I started wondering whether he'd actually stopped for gas at the nondescript strip mall we'd pulled into, he turned around and said, simply, "you're here." I found the restaurant up a staircase tucked beside a supermarket, the kind of entrance that gives no indication of what's waiting at the top of it.
Chef Yosef "Zuzu" Hanna, an Arab Christian, opened Magdalena in 2013 after building three more conventional Arabic restaurants first. His stated philosophy is to take the roots of Galilee cuisine and bring them into a new world of cooking, and the dining room itself, along with a patio looking out over Mount Arbel and the Sea of Galilee, gives that philosophy plenty of room to make its case.
Frena Bread
Dinner started with warm frena bread — a close cousin of pita, but softer, fluffier, and richer, thanks to the amount of olive oil worked into the dough.
I had to physically stop myself from finishing the entire loaf before the next course arrived.
Galilean Lamb Chops with Roasted Vegetables
From the man and woman at my hotel's front desk, to my cab driver, and finally the waiter at From the front desk at my hotel, to the cab driver, to the waiter at Magdalena itself, every single person I'd spoken with that day had told me, unprompted, to order the lamb. One bite into the first chop explained why — perfectly seasoned, expertly grilled, quite possibly the most succulent lamb I've ever eaten.
That was my first day and a half in Israel: a beach in a city obsessed with its own modernity, a Roman ruin where strangers broke into song, a mountain where a prophet won an argument that mattered, a valley that two different centuries agreed was built for war, and a meal that reminded me hospitality tends to look the same no matter which language is offering it. I hadn't expected all of that to fit into a day and a half. I'm not sure Israel expects anything less of itself.
I so loved touring Israel -- which group did you go with?