May 2021 & August 2022
Yonatan and I made a trip near the Lebanon border in May 2021, visiting the ancient synagogues at Sasa and Kadesh, before travelling further east to the Tegart fort at the abandoned Arab village of Al-Nabi Yusha' (נבי יושע, النبي يوشع), overlooking the Hula valley. This former British police station is now known as Metzudat Koach (מצודת כ"ח). Although we took a look, from a distance, at the remains of the village itself, the light was by then failing, and I made a solo return visit fifteen months later.
Al-Nabi Yusha' was a small Arab village, situated on the Naftali mountain ridge, along the ancient mountain road that led from Tzfat (Safed) to Lebanon, overlooking the Hula Valley. It was one of the seven mutawālin villages—Lebanese Shia Muslim of Metawali creed—which included Tarbikha, Saliha, Malkiyeh, Nabi Yusha, Qadas, Hunin, and Abil al-Qamh. These villages were transferred from the French to the British sphere of influence, as a result of the border agreement of 1923. In Al-Nabi Yusha' there was an annual festival on the 15th of the month of Sha'ban , similar to the festival that was customary in al-Nabi Rubin, near Ramla.
During the late eighteenth century, the al-Ghul clan built the Maqam (shrine) for Nabi Yusha' (the prophet Joshua), as an act of devotion, on the site, and apparently established the village with some fifty members of the clan, and cultivated the surrounding land. In 2002, Mohammed Elghoul, a descendant of the clan, claimed that they came originally from Mais al-Jabil, a small village in South Lebanon, and reiterated the tradition that “they built they upon the land where legend has it that Joshua was buried.”
Maqam al-Nabi Yusha' in the 1930s (left) [public domain] and 2022 (right). As can be seen, the once-malarial Lake Hula has been almost entirely drained in the intervening period.
Without doubt, this shrine is not the actual grave of Joshua ben Nun. According to the book of Joshua 24:30, Joshua died at the age of 110 “And they buried him in the border of his inheritance in Timnath-serah, which is in Mount Ephraim, on the north side of the hill of Gaash.” Mount Ephraim is in fact the central mountainous district of Israel once occupied by the Tribe of Ephraim, extending from Bethel to the plain of Jezreel, in the Shomron, and Timnath-serah is likely the Arab village of Kifl Hares, where there is a tomb long known to Jews and Samaritans as the tomb of Joshua ben Nun, and similarly to the Muslims as the Maqam of Yusha' ibn Nun.
וַיִּקְבְּר֚וּ אֹתוֹ֙ בִּגְב֣וּל נַֽחֲלָת֔וֹ בְּתִמְנַת־סֶ֖רַח אֲשֶׁ֣ר בְּהַר־אֶפְרָ֑יִם מִצְּפ֖וֹן לְהַר־גָּֽעַשׁ:
Charles William Meredith van de Velde—a Dutch naval officer, painter, cartographer, honorary member of the Red Cross, and missionary, who in 1851 visited Palestine, where he carried out various surveys and made drawings, paintings and around one hundred watercolours for postcards—noted the “shrine of a saint” at the place, writing:
We rested for a short while under the shadow of an old terebinth, the clusters of which, for many centuries, may have covered the monument. The shade, indeed, was welcome, after having been exposed the whole day to the scorching rays of the sun, as we rode through the plain and along the borders of the lake.
In 1875 Victor Guérin arrived at the shrine at Nabi Yusha, after ascending the steep and difficult path from the east. He described the shrine— “un oualy dédié par les Musulmans à Neby Yechoua’”—as a building surmounted with two small cupolas. Guérin refers to a tomb inside, which the Muslims venerated, mentioning that the tomb is obviously apocryphal, since the Bible teaches that Joshua was buried at Timnath-serah, which he himself had visited. His explanation—for the siting of the shrine and the possible subsequent tradition locally that this marked the actual tomb of Joshua—was that, at the foot of the heights, at the Waters of Merom in the Hula valley, Joshua had won one a famous victory against king Jabin, who had led a Canaanite confederation against him (Joshua 11).
Guérin notes that in the book “Jichus Ha-Tsadikim” (Sépulchres des Justes), which was completed in 1523 but published only in 1561, and quoted in Eliakim Carmoly’s Itineraires de la Terre- Sainte in 1847, a ‘school’ of Joshua was to be found nearby, to the west, at Kedesh, and he avers that the siting of the shrine by the Muslims might have succeeded this ancient synagogue dedicated to Joshua. Conder and Kitchener, in the Galilee volume of the Palestine Exploration Fund's Survey of Western Palestine (1881) noted—in their entry for Kedesh—that the Metawali Muslims there would travel to Nabi Yusha to venerate the name of Joshua.
In the 1931 census of Palestine, the village was home to 52 residents that year (12 households), growing to 70 in the 1945 statistics, and 81 (18 households) by 1948. The village was abandoned after the Palmach conquered the adjacent police fort, during Operation Yiftach in May 1948. There is no record of the village itself being attacked, but its residents fled and ended up mainly in refugee camps in Lebanon and Syria. The village was subsequently flattened, apart from it’s shrine and cemetery. For the next five months, the front lines between Israeli and Arab forces ran just outside the village. During Operation Hiram, Israeli units coming from the west reached the village in October 1948, extending Israeli control over the length of the Lebanese border. The full story is told in a separate post here.
The village cemetery remains, with several legible grave markers (top row and bottom left), along with some cisterns and a grain store (below, bottom centre and right).
An emergency survey conducted in 1966 in the village on behalf of the Department of Antiquities recommended “a meticulous architectural survey” at the site; but this was not instituted. In 1994, an architectural survey was conducted on behalf of the Council for British Research in the Levant, focusing exclusively on the structure of the tomb. A salvage excavation—the first and only excavation of the site—was carried out in 2014, on behalf of the Israel Antiquities Authority, after part of the site of the village sustained damage during the construction of a road track parallel to and south of Road 899. This site is some distance from the shrine, and revealed the village’s perimeter fence, agricultural terraces, terrace walls and remains of a stone building dating to the time of the British Mandate. In addition, rifle cartridges and pieces of shells and shrapnel were discovered, which are evidence of the three fierce battles waged there in April and May 1948.
Pictures inside the shrine, below, left to right:
Top row: the entrance; the dome; the mihrab (niche oriented south towards Mecca).
2nd row: geometric symbols carved around the mihrab.
3rd row: geometric symbols carved around the mihrab; cornice over the mihrab with incised arch motif; Arabic frescoed inscription.
4th row: Arabic frescoed inscription next to mihrab; Arabic frescoed inscription on dome; internal window to mosque.
Pictures inside the adjoining prayer room, below, left to right:
Top row: entrance; panorama of the room; mihrab showing inscriptions.
2nd row: internal window to shrine; window overlooking the Hula valley to the east; Arabic frescoed inscription.
The 1994 architectural survey of the shrine found that the western of the two domed chambers was the oldest structure in the whole complex, which comprises the two largely-intact domed chambers, set with ruined structures around a rectangular courtyard aligned north-south. Though not easily accessible, the shrine is tended and visited by Muslims. There is no evidence that it is claimed as a Jewish grave, although there have been attempts to locate Jewish graves nearby and, when I visited in 2022, a group of orthodox Jews was leaving the shrine; unfortunately I couldn't catch up to them to find out their interest. The only sign of (perhaps) Jewish presence is the rather hopeful graffiti carved on the interior door lintel to the shrine, "שלום בין העמים"; peace among the nations!
Back at the junction above the village, I contemplated all this, having found a shady seat beneath a tree (below). The sign says "Please keep it clean here - thanks." You might like to find out more about Nabi Yusha police fort here.
