Moses and the Monks of Nebo

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Mount Nebo in the Transjordanian highlands of Moab is where Moses saw the Promised Land before he died and was then buried. That biblical tradition inspired early Christian monastic movements and pilgrimage to the region. Discover Mt. Nebo’s beautiful churches and monasteries and what they reveal about the relationship between the region’s monastic and village communities during the Byzantine period.

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Footnotes

1. Yizhar Hirschfeld, “Spirituality in the Desert: Judean Wilderness Monasteries,” BAR, September/October 1995.

2. See Konstantinos Politis, “Where Lot’s Daughters Seduced Their Father,” BAR, January/February 2004; Rami G. Khouri, “Where John Baptized: Bethany Beyond the Jordan,” BAR, January/February 2005; Benyamin Storchan, “A Glorious Church for a Mysterious Martyr,” BAR, Fall 2021.

3. See James Fleming, “Putting the Bible on the Map,” BAR, November/December 1983.

4. See Siegfried H. Horn, “Why the Moabite Stone Was Blown to Pieces,” BAR, May/June 1986.

Endnotes

1.
See Davide Bianchi, A Shrine to Moses: A Reappraisal of the Mount Nebo Monastic Complex between Byzantium and Islam (Vienna: Austrian Academy of Sciences, 2021).

2.
Margaret A. Judd, Lesley Gregoricka, and Debra Foran, “The Monastic Mosaic at Mount Nebo, Jordan: Biogeochemical and Epigraphical Evidence for Diverse Origins,” Antiquity 93 (2019), pp. 450–467; Matthew J. Kesterke and Margaret A. Judd, “A Microscopic Evaluation of Paget’s Disease of the Bone from a Byzantine Monastic Crypt in Jordan,” International Journal of Paleopathology 24 (2019), pp. 293–298; Margaret A. Judd, “Commingled Crypts: Comparative Health among Byzantine Monastics in the Levant,” American Journal of Physical Anthropology 172 (2020), pp. 70–86.