Lost in Tiberius
Tiberius, Israel
Ibn Battuta is again quite out of sequence with his itinerary here, but as I was too, we will ignore it.
“....I continued my journey to the town of Tiberias. It was in time past a large and important city but nothing now remains of that save vestiges that bear witness to its former greatness and magnificence. In the town there are wonderful baths.....here too is the famous lake.....”
We spent much longer in Acre than anticipated, so by the time we arrived in Tiberius it was pitch dark and pouring rain. According to my ancient guidebook there was a Scottish Guesthouse, formerly a hospital, mission and hospice which had been run by the Church of Scotland for over a century. However what I found was a substantial stone-built hotel exuding a faint old-world glamour, called The Scots Hotel and which was, on appearances alone, clearly quite beyond my budget. The very accommodating receptionist told me to look for the guesthouse next door. It should have been perfectly simple. It was not - we could not find it and when, on our fifth attempt, we did, it was as lively as a morgue. Located in a residential area on a dark sidestreet with nobody about to ask directions - on the fourth try I suddenly saw a taxi that a young girl was getting into. I shouted to get the driver's attention before they drove off, running towards him. When I reached the car, the driver was in Shakespearian mode, one hand poised rather melodramatically over his heart. It is as well that I do not understand a word of Hebrew because on recovering his delicate equilibrium, he bawled at me. On reflection, given the part of the world we were in, his reaction may have been quite understandable, but it may also have had something to do with the fact that said young girl wearing a skirt that would not decently have covered a pelmet, was sitting beside him in the front seat. Perhaps he had other things on his mind, perhaps he thought I was her mother........either way I was still lost. When we did finally find it, we could not find anyone to let us in even though the main doors were open. We gave up. Earlier, on several inadvertent drives through town I had seen the Panorama hotel which is where we ended up.
The following day under slate gray skies and a driving rain, we set out for the Tourist Information office to find out where Joseph’s well was, as well as the Mosque of the Prophets. Nobody knew anything. Everyone in Tiberius is from somewhere else, and unlike Acre or Nazareth there is no Arab population, so there was nobody to ask who had any collective memory of Muslim sites. However the Tourist Information staff were very kind and did their best to help us and when I told them the location was said to be 12 miles north on the ‘Damascus Road’ they gave us the number of the Tourist Information office in Safad, the nearest town.
“At Tabariya there is a mosque known as the ‘Mosque of the Prophets’ which contains the tomb of Shu’aib (peace be upon him), and his daughter, the wife of Moses......”
This is very unclear. When Ibn B. visited Tiberius (or Tabariya as it is called in Arabic), it would still have been in ruins as he says, after the Muslim re-conquest. It is difficult to know which mosque he refers to as there is no trace of it now. The original Great Mosque fell in an earthquake in the 11th century, and with the city changing hands every so often until the mid-13th century, where is this mosque he refers to? Furthermore we visited the tomb of Shu'aib which is not especially near Tiberius. The closest we could get to a possibility was an area south of town where there are some neglected Muslim shrines and graves including one to Sukaina, the Prophet’s great-granddaughter, (you will remember she already has three graves - two in Damascus and one in Medina), and Abu Hurairah, a companion of the Prophet. This area is a stone’s throw from the Jordan Valley and the mouth of the Yarmuk where the Arabs defeated the Byzantines in 636AD. As mentioned in a previous Jordan post, there are many graves here of Arabs who died in this battle. We did not visit because the weather by now had taken a turn for the worse. (The tomb of the venerated Jewish scholar Maimonides, is also in the hinterland of Tiberius.)
En route to the tomb of Shu'aib, now a pilgrimage site, we passed the Horns of Hattin, where Saladin decisively routed the Crusaders in 1187. When we found the tomb not only did it not answer any questions - it posed more. 
The building housing the Tomb of Shu'aib
According to the Druze caretaker, the tomb of Shu'aib, a Koranic prophet, has always been where it is now. The Druze hold Shu'aib, who is generally accepted as being associated with Jethro, the father-in-law of Moses, in great esteem - but in a mixture of Arabic and English, I understood him to be telling me that Shu'aib had never married - i.e he did not have a daughter, married to Moses or otherwise...... According to the English translation notes of the Travels of Ibn Battuta, there is confusion regards the site of the grave of Shuhaib with the general acceptance for it being near Irbid in Jordan. Are there two Shu'aibs? The Druze are in no doubt about the validity of his gravesite and it is not Irbid, and why did Ibn B think it was in Tiberius?
“We made an excursion ...to visit the well into which Joseph (peace be upon him) was cast. It is in the courtyard of a small mosque and the well is large and deep.”
En route to Safad, I called their Tourist Informaton office about Joseph’s well. The person I spoke to suggested we drive to Amiad Kibbutz north of Tiberius and ask there. Our timing was for once impeccable and a few minutes later we saw a signpost for the kibbutz. We turned off the highway onto a small sideroad and into the entrance of the kibbutz, to be greeted by a sign welcoming us to "Joseph’s Well Country Inn". We stopped at the restaurant next to the entrance to find out where exactly Joseph’s well was. Ran, the young guy behind the counter, knew exactly where it was and gave us explicit directions. We got lost. We went back and took his cell number this time, and he drew a map. We got lost again. On the third try we found it along a muddy dirt track past fields of avocado and lychee trees, and a dairy farm. There it was, an old abandoned stone building which presumably is the mosque Ibn B referred to. I couldn’t see any sign of a well in the courtyard but on the hill behind it was a well, and on that well there was a plaque, and on that plaque......... was an inscription dated 1315 affirming that this was the Well of Joseph. Of course this does not mean that it is. (Nablus argues for Joseph's well too.) It does however confirm that the Mamluks and the Ottomans in their turn, decided shrines were good for business - it gave their often restive subjects something to do, somewhere to visit..... another reason why some saints and prophets have more than one shrine, tomb and cenotaph.
Joseph's Well
Abed was visibly moved. He even clambered up the muddy hill with me to get a look at it himself. One of the nicest aspects of this trip is that my guides who make their living doing rather more mundane and repetitive tours, are inevitably very happy to be visiting sites far off the tourist circuit. Often we are both visting places for the first time.
After a quick espresso at Ran's restaurant, we set off in the direction of Nazareth and the south as I had to meet my group in Jenin, which required passing back through the checkpoints into the West Bank and making arrangements to be picked up there. Nazareth in the rain with dreadful traffic jams is not a particularly attractive place so after a quick lunch there, we drove to the checkpoint at Al Jalama where I paid Abed an extortionate amount of money and said good-bye - he cannot cross into the West Bank with his Israeli plates, Palestinian or not. 
A typical checkpoint scene.
I began to make my way through the maze of corridors, chainlink-flanked passageways, CCTV cameras and barred revolving gates, back into the prison that is the West Bank - there is no other way to describe it. Watchtowers with sentries armed with automatic weapons, camouflage netting, slabs of concrete barriers.....on the other side about four taxi drivers dashed towards me all vying for business. Just steps away on the other side of the fence I had no phone coverage, so I had no idea who was supposed to be meeting me. But we sorted it out and as I drove off to Jenin, Abed, who had waited on the other side to make sure I was OK, disappeared over the horizon in the other direction.
