TIBERIAS tī bĭr’ ĭ əs (Τιβεριας). Tiberias lay, and still lies, on the western shore of Galilee, halfway down the coast of the lake. Herod Antipas founded Tiberias between the years a.d. 18 and 22. Sir G. A. Smith (Historical Geography of the Holy Land) rests his dating conjectures on coinage. A coin of Tiberias, issued in the principate of Claudius, is dated in the thirty-third year of the town. Claudius died in a.d. 54, and this would take the foundation back to a.d. 21. Two coins of Tiberias, issued under Trajan, are dated in the eightieth and eighty-first year from the foundation. Trajan acceded in a.d. 98, and on this basis dating can hardly precede a.d. 18. On a third coin of Trajan, also dated in the eighty-first year, the emperor is called Germanicus only, and not Germanicus Dacicus. He won the second title only after the Dacian war in a.d. 103. This gives a.d. 22 for the upper limit. The argument appears conclusive.

Herod named the town after the reigning emperor, Augustus’ successor, Tiberius. The name was subsequently extended to the lake, esp. in Gentile nomenclature. John’s gospel, for example, written for an international audience, employs the term (John 6:1; 21:1). An old town of Naphtali, named Rakkath, which means “strip,” or “coast,” once occupied the site, and Jewish legend said that this place had become a graveyard before Herod appropriated it for a town and for a site of royal residence (Jos., Antiq. XVIII. ii. 3). This may be supposed a propaganda tale aimed at the fact that Herod peopled the new town with Gentiles. Macalister (HDB, rev. p. 999) is of the opinion that the story of a burial ground proves that there was no earlier city on the site, but it is not at all impossible that Rakkath had a burial ground in its vicinity, and that this area was included by Herod in his appropriation for the new foundation. He was planning on ambitious lines. The wall was three m. long, and the civic amenities included a forum and a large synagogue, Roman and Jewish features curiously illustrative of the dual policy of the Herodian house. The synagogue, however, appears never to have been used, for a Jewish boycott compelled Herod to populate Tiberias with aliens. Herod himself found security there. He built a lakeside palace, and the eminence behind the town was an admirable acropolis, a fact illustrated by Saladin’s failure to reduce it after his complete success in the battle of Hattin made the defenders’ position hopeless. This took place in a.d. 1187.

Tiberias was also a famous spa. Hot springs lay S of its walls, a feature noticed by Pliny the Elder, who remarked on their health-giving quality, and commemorated it in coinage. A coin of Tiberias exists showing Hygeia, the goddess of health on one side and the Emperor Trajan on the other. The goddess, feeding a serpent, the totem of Aesculapius, god of healing, sits on a rock above a spring. In the Rift Valley, and Galilee is part of its long depression, salt beds lie deep down, the site of ancient seas. Underwater springs at Tiberias, part of the thermal system that gave the hot water, add appreciably to the salinity of Galilee and of course, the Dead Sea, the ultimate terminus of the Galilee water. This fact was an element in the abortive Jordanian measure in 1966 to divert some of the fresh water sources of the Jordan at Banias and deflect the water into the Lebanese Litani. This would have left the springs at Tiberias free to increase the salinity of Galilee to a danger point.

Christ seems to have avoided Tiberias in the course of His Galilean ministry. There were crowded Jewish centers all along that shore of the lake, esp. to the N, and this abstention was in accordance with his declared program—to minister first to Israel. After the subjugation of Pal. in the Great Rebellion, Tiberias remained intact, and became by the irony of history the main center of surviving Jewish scholarship. The Mishnah and the Palestinian Talmud were both put together in Tiberias in the 3rd and 5th centuries.

Of the nine towns that once occupied the lake shore, none of them under 15,000 inhabitants, Tiberias alone has survived in spite of the fact that in ancient and medieval times the site was unhealthy. A freak formation of the coast kept the prevailing wind that blows down the lake offshore, and Tiberias “the strip,” as its predecessor was called, lacked the healthy movement of air. It was, no doubt, its acropolis and the prestige of the royal abode that insured survival. Today it remains the chief center on that shore of the lake.