The "Via Maris"
"Via Maris" was not a
Roman term denoting a road somewhere. It is
the Latin translation of Isaiah 9:1 (in the Hebrew Bible, 8:23) – "the
way of the sea." The prophet was
probably referring to the road from Dan to the sea at Tyre, which marked the northern border of
Israel at the time of the Assyrian conquest. See Anson
Rainey, "Toponomic Problems (cont.)" in Tel
Aviv 8 (1981).
For seventy years or so, scholars and
guides have applied the term Via Maris to the Great
Trunk Road that ran from Damascus
via Hazor and Megiddo down the coast to
Egypt. It is hard to
undo this habit. Therefore, we shall summarize Rainey's argument.
The entire verse and its sequel go as
follows:
"But
there will be no more gloom for her who was in anguish; in earlier times
He treated the land of Zebulun and the land of Naphtali with contempt, but later on He shall make it
glorious, by the way of the sea, on the other side of Jordan, Galilee of the
Gentiles.
"The people who
walk in darkness
Will see a great light;
Those who live in a dark land,
The light will shine on them."
Matthew
quotes this
verse in
4:15-16, in
connection with Jesus' move to
Capernaum. In the Middle Ages, therefore, scholars assumed that the "way of the
sea" was a road from
Damascus
through
the lower
Galilee
to the (then
important)
harbor of
Acco. "It was
a logical extension," writes Rainey, to apply the term Via Maris to the entire route from
Damascus to
Egypt. On the
assumption that Isaiah's geographical terms referred to the Assyrian provinces
of his time, the "way of the sea" was then taken to denote a province
headed by the city of Dor. Yet
Assyria had placed Dor into the
province of
Tyre. Dor did not become a provincial capital until 659 BC: after
the time of Isaiah.
In sum: there
is no reason to connect the Via Maris of Isaiah with
the Great Trunk Road from Damascus through Megiddo down the coast to Egypt.
What then did
Isaiah mean when he said, "the way of the sea"? When we look at the
biblical account of the first Assyrian conquest, we find this (2 Kings
15:29):
In
the days of Pekah king of
Israel,
Tiglath-pileser king of
Assyria
came and captured Ijon and Abel-beth-maacah
and Janoah and Kedesh and
Hazor and
Gilead
and
Galilee, all the
land
of
Naphtali;
and he carried them captive to
Assyria.
Of these
cities, only the identification of Janoah is
uncertain. Rainey identifies it with Yanuh, 10
kilometers east of
Tyre:
Others have
thought that Yanuh is too far from the area that
could have belonged to
Israel at the time of
the first Assyrian conquest (735 BC). Rainey points out, however, that Jeroboam
II had recently expanded
Israel's borders to
include this stretch (2 Kings
14:25). The logic of
the Assyrian campaign would have been to secure the
Upper Galilee (including Ijon, Dan, Abel-beth-maacah, Janoah and Kedesh) before moving south
to concentrate on the major Israelite fortress at Hazor.
Isaiah, in 9:1,
was indeed denoting the territories that
Israel had lost to Tiglath Pileser III in that first
Assyrian campaign: the
Upper Galilee ("the way
of the sea" and the rest of Naphtali),
Gilead ("on the
other side of
Jordan") and the
lower
Galilee ("Galilee of the
Gentiles," including Zebulon). In the following verse, he offers the
Israelites of these regions hope
for restoration.
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