Tabor

AI summary: Tabor matters because of both its shape and its associations. Judges ties it to Barak and the conflict with Sisera, giving it military significance in one of Israel's great deliverance stories. Psalms, Jeremiah, and Hosea then use the mountain's prominence to evoke majesty, conspicuousness, or indictment. The cross references present Tabor as a landmark mountain where geography, battle memory, and poetic force all combine.¹

Now Jebel et-Tur, a cone-like prominent mountain, 11 miles west of the Sea of Galilee. It is about 1,843 feet high. The view from the summit of it is said to be singularly extensive and grand. This is alluded to in Ps. 89:12; Jer. 46:18. It was here that Barak encamped before the battle with Sisera (q.v.) Judg. 4:6-14. There is an old tradition, which, however, is unfounded, that it was the scene of the transfiguration of our Lord. (See HERMON.) “The prominence and isolation of Tabor, standing, as it does, on the border-land between the northern and southern tribes, between the mountains and the central plain, made it a place of note in all ages, and evidently led the psalmist to associate it with Hermon, the one emblematic of the south, the other of the north.” There are some who still hold that this was the scene of the transfiguration (q.v.). ³