Mount Carmel

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Mount Carmel Description

(Local Name: Har Karmel) District: Haifa

Altitude: 546m/1,791ft

Situation

The Mount Carmel range is an outlier of the hills of Samaria, extending northwest for 23km/14mi, with a breadth of up to 10km/6mi, and falling steeply down to the sea in Cape Carmel. On the northeast its precipitous slopes descend to the Jezreel plain, and on the southwest it slopes down to the plain of Sharon.

History

Finds (now in the Rockefeller Museum in Jerusalem) in caves on Mount Carmel, for example at Bet Oren, have shown that this area was inhabited in Palaeolithic times, 130,000 years ago. At least as early as Canaanite times Baal of Carmel was worshipped in hilltop shrines as the divine ruler of

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the region. Around 1000 B.C. David incorporated Carmel in his kingdom, but it was only in the ninth century that the prophet Elijah led the worship of Yahweh (Jehovah) to prevail over the cult of Baal which was favored by King Ahab of Israel (1 Kings 18). In an act of great importance to the development of strict monotheism and to Jewish history Elijah confronted 450 priests of Baal and 400 priests of Astarte from Ahab's kingdom on Mount Carmel. There he and his adversaries offered up sacrifices in the sight of the people at one of the old "high places" and then waited for their respective gods to "answer by fire". From Baal there was no response, but the "fire of the Lord" fell on Elijah's altar. Thereupon Elijah took the priests of Baal and Astarte down to the brook Kishon and slew them there.

This event is believed to have taken place on the rocky hill of Muhraka (in Arabic "place of burning"; 482m/1581ft), on the southeast side of the range, where in 1886 a Carmelite monastery was built on the site of an earlier church (see below). Tell el-Kassis ("Priests' Hill"), in the plain below, is supposed to be the grave of the slaughtered priests. According to another version the confrontation took place on Cape Carmel, where there is a Carmelite house near Elijah's Cave.

The form of religious life introduced by Elijah came to an end only a hundred years later with the Assyrian conquest in 732 B.C. Baal of Carmel, whose worship was now restored, was identified by the Greeks under the rule of Alexander's successors with Zeus and was known to the Romans as Deus Carmelus. In the second and third centuries there was a cult here of Jupiter of Heliopolis (Baalbek - a name also associated with Baal), and a citizen of Caesarea erected a statue of this "Heliopolitan Zeus of Carmel". The Carmelite monastery has a fragment of the statue's foot, identified by an inscription. The first Christians settled on Mount Carmel in the Crusader period. The Carmelite order was founded here in 1150; the monastery was several times destroyed and rebuilt, most recently in 1828.

Hobbies & Activities category: Region with significant interests