Jezreel

• Jezreel

124:6.1Je­sus, hav­ing now reached the thresh­old of young man­hood and hav­ing been for­mally grad­u­ated from the syn­a­gogue schools, was qual­i­fied to pro­ceed to Je­ru­sa­lem with his par­ents to par­tic­i­pate with them in the cel­e­bra­tion of his first Pass­over. The Pass­over feast of this year fell on Sat­ur­day, April 9, A.D. 7. A con­sid­er­able com­pany (103) made ready to de­part from Naz­a­reth early Mon­day morn­ing, April 4, for Je­ru­sa­lem. They jour­neyed south to­ward Samaria, but on reach­ing Jezreel, they turned east, go­ing around Mount Gil­boa into the Jor­dan val­ley in or­der to avoid pass­ing through Samaria. Joseph and his fam­ily would have en­joyed go­ing down through Samaria by way of Ja­cob’s well and Bethel, but since the Jews dis­liked to deal with the Samar­i­tans, they de­cided to go with their neigh­bors by way of the Jor­dan val­ley.

• Jezreel

124:6.3Be­fore reach­ing the Jezreel junc­tion, and as they jour­neyed on, very soon, on the left, they passed the an­cient vil­lage of Shunem, and Je­sus heard again about the most beau­ti­ful maiden of all Is­rael who once lived there and also about the won­der­ful works El­isha per­formed there. In pass­ing by Jezreel, Je­sus’ par­ents re­counted the do­ings of Ahab and Jezebel and the ex­ploits of Jehu. In pass­ing around Mount Gil­boa, they talked much about Saul, who took his life on the slopes of this moun­tain, King David, and the as­so­ci­a­tions of this his­toric spot.

• Jezreel

149:0.1The sec­ond pub­lic preach­ing tour of Gal­i­lee be­gan on Sun­day, Oc­to­ber 3, A.D. 28, and con­tin­ued for al­most three months, end­ing on De­cem­ber 30. Par­tic­i­pat­ing in this ef­fort were Je­sus and his twelve apos­tles, as­sisted by the newly re­cruited corps of 117 evan­ge­lists and by nu­mer­ous other in­ter­ested per­sons. On this tour they vis­ited Gadara, Ptole­mais, Japhia, Dabaritta, Megiddo, Jezreel, Scythopo­lis, Ta­ri­chea, Hip­pos, Gamala, Beth­saida-Ju­lias, and many other cities and vil­lages.