After 40 years leading the headstrong Israelites in the desert, Moses stood on the windswept summit of Mount Nebo and considered the Promised Land of Canaan – after having been informed through God “you shall now not go over there”.
On a clear day, today’s pilgrims can see the panorama Moses viewed: The Dead Sea, the Jordan River valley, Jericho, Bethlehem and the far away hills of Jerusalem.
As Deuteronomy 34:5-6 recounts, Moses died there in the land of Moab “but no one knows his burial location to this day”. Moses did, however, eventually attain the Promised Land. He and Elijah had been seen with Jesus at the latter’s Transfiguration (Luke9:28-36).
Mount Nebo is now in western Jordan. At 820 meters high, it looks down 1220 meters on the nearby Dead sea (which is about 400 meters below sea level).
Early Christians from Jerusalem made it a location of pilgrimage. In the 3rd or 4th century monks from Egypt constructed a small church on one of its peaks, Siyagha (a identity that means monastery), to commemorate the cease of Moses life. Bye the give up of the 4th century, an empty “tomb of Moses” was being shown to pilagrims on the mountain.
Pilagrim’s journal assisted excavation
The monks church used to be expanded in the 5th and 6th centuries into a large basilica with a amazing collection of Byzantine mosaics and an complex baptistery. Though little remains of the early buildings, the mosaics can be viewed internal the present-day shrine.
The fundamental mosaic, about 9 meters by using 3 meters, depicts monastic wine-making, hunters and a range of animals.
In the 1930s the Mount Nebo web page was once excavated, thanks largely to a description of it in the journal of an early female pilfrim, Egeria, in AD 394. Six tombs were also found, hollowed into the rock below the basilica’s mosaic floor.
Outside the present-day shrine stands an enigmatic serpentine cross, the Brazen Sepent Monument. Created via Italian artist Giovanni Fantoni, it imaginatively merges the life-saving bronze serpent set up through Moses into the barren region (Numbers 21:4-9) and the cross upon which Jesus was crucified.
Village with anumber of churches
A much less well-known website online is at Khirbet al-Mukhayyat, a small town to the east, between Mount Nebo and Madaba. Here are the stays of the village of Nebo, mentioned twice in the Bible, the place villagers in the 6th and 7th centuries built carious churches.
On the absolute best factor of the acropolis was once the 6th century church of St.George. the best preserved ground mosaics are in the Church of Sts Lot and Procopius, who were honored as martyrs.
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