Israel Vacations - Armageddon

Megiddo - Traveling down the road to apocalyptic doom.

Humble green fields, rolling hills holding back the horizon, clumps of trees and a quiet desolation, punctuated only the distant drone of the occasional car speeding along the weathered asphalt. The world’s final battleground is surprisingly peaceful.

Yet as I walk through the valley in the shadow of death, I know that every step I take treads over millennia of spilled blood and crushed bones. In this Israeli valley stands one hill, a sentinel between “good and evil,” life and death.

Welcome to Megiddo.

Others know it as Armageddon - the future battleground for Earth’s greatest apocalyptic war. The place where, if you read your Bible, the armies of the world clash in one horrific melee that ends with the eternal destruction of evil.

The end of the world as we know it, so to speak.

But it’s quiet here. Nothing betrays such a foreboding future or this area’s gruesome past. Even approaching the entrance of these once fortified ruins - now an “interpretive centre” for tourists who venture from Jerusalem and Tel Aviv - all is quiet.

A man who drives up in a car is my only interruption.

He’s lost.

“Do you know where the military base is?” he questions.

I point down the road where I’ve been; it’s not far. The irony strikes me: through modern history, this place still remains a strategic point with military value. The name Armageddon is a corruption of the Hebrew words Har Megiddo - literally meaning Mount Megiddo.

But perhaps Armageddon is an appropriate name: Hidden underneath this pastoral setting and otherwise inconspicuous bump in the Jezreel Valley lies untold deaths from 10,000 years of epic battles. This hill was a battleground for thousands of years - from before 1500 BC, when Egyptian Pharaoh Thutmoses III raided Canaan, until its capture by Israeli forces in 1948.

Today, the only invading forces at Megiddo are tour groups and school children, eager to learn what lays under the soil and rubble. Little remains to show us the true grandeur of this fortress - a pile of round stones, worn blocks, a secret underground passageway, and scattered foundation stones are all that survives. But even that’s a treasure for some.

Archaeologists have uncovered 20 layers of settlements here, including ruins of fortifications, great temples, palaces and stables. Megiddo had been occupied continuously for thousand of years - from 3500 BC to 500 BC - serving as crossroads to an ancient trade route that linked Egypt with Syria and Mesopotamia.

Megiddo’s glory was recorded in six letters sent by its king to Egyptian pharaoh Akhenaten in the 14th century BC, indicating that this settlement was one of the mightiest city-states in Canaan.

Today, visitors to Megiddo’s ruins can still see remains of a 4,000 year old Canaanite temple, walled foundations of a great palace from King Solomon’s time, and the remains of a public grain silo. There’s also a hidden water system, dating back 3,000 years, visitors can explore. A set of stairs snakes down a shaft that plunges 40 meters until it meets a secret passageway. This passage, hewn through 70 m of rock, leads to a hidden spring outside Megiddo - the secret route allowed inhabitants to draw water unnoticed under times of siege.

Megiddo’s location has always been strategic: the hill allowed control of a chokepoint along the ancient roads that emerge from the narrow Aruna pass into the surrounding fertile Jezreel Valley. Such importance led to conquests by neighboring enemies: Egyptians, Caananites and Assyrians.

Megiddo became an Egyptian outpost for Canaan in the second millennium. When Canaan’s city-states revolted against the pharaohs, Megiddo became the battleground. Inscriptions in Egypt’s Temple of Amun at Karnak highlight the risky strategy of Thutmoses III, who drove his armies through a narrow pass and laid siege to Megiddo for seven months before victory came.

Archaeology shows that Megiddo was destroyed in 1130 BC, but it would soon rise again to splendor under the biblical King Solomon. Solomon made his mark on Megiddo around 1000 BC, when he fortified this ancient settlement and made it into an administrative centre for his northern province and one of his “chariot cities”. Egyptian Pharaoh Shishak later took Megiddo, as did Assyrian King Tiglath-Pileser, who annexed the region and made this hill his capital in the mid-8th century. Megiddo also marks the spot where King Josiah of Judah fell in battle as the Assyrian empire began to crumble.>

Not all Megiddo’s history is so ancient. Near the end of World War I, British Gen. Edmund Allenby and his infantry forces dislodged from Megiddo 100 Turkish fighters who were defending the last vestiges of the Ottoman Empire.

And in 1948, Israelis overcame invading Arab forces at the nearby Mishmar Haemek during the War of Independence. Biblical prophecies predict the bloodshed will continue. Revelation says: “And He gathered them together into a place called in the Hebrew tongue Armageddon.”

Israel itself seems to have taken a tongue-in-cheek view on such prophesies, perhaps even tempting fate: On the dawn of the new millennium, they held a spectacular light and sound show, complete with lasers, presented to exploit Megiddo’s dark side.

But here’s a sobering thought: Megiddo stands as a sentinel in the Jezreel Valley, a deep geographic scar that cuts into Lebanon and Israel. The valley can make tracking low flying aircraft - or missiles - difficult as they fly beneath radar. Should any military attack come into Israel from the north, it’ll likely be down this valley.

And sooner or later they’ll hit Megiddo - Israel’s last stand.

How to get there:

Organized tours provide excursions to Megiddo from Tel Aviv, Jerusalem and Tiberias. Alternatively, public buses can provide transportation to a crossroad about a half kilometer from the ruins. Megiddo’s museum is open Saturday to Thursday, 8 am to 4 pm, Friday till 3 pm.

For more information, call (06) 652-21-05).

Author: Doug Alexander and Alan Gove