Mount Hermon is a ski resort. Right now, today, you can book a lift ticket. It's up on the border where Israel, Syria, and Lebanon all meet, and it's been a live military flashpoint for decades — there's an actual UN buffer zone up there.
And also, according to a text almost as old as Genesis, this is the exact mountain where a group of divine beings came down from heaven, swore an oath together, and set off one of the darkest chapters in the whole Old Testament.
Same mountain.
That's the thing that got me about this whole thing. Not "here's a scary Bible mountain," but the fact that this reputation just never escaped it. Over four thousand years, four completely different religions that had no reason to be talking to each other, and every single one of them independently decided something was wrong with this specific mountain.
I'll back up for a second on the Bible part, because it's the part most people have never heard. Genesis 6 has this tiny, four-verse passage about "sons of God" marrying human women, and then it just moves on.
There's another ancient text, 1 Enoch, that fills the whole thing in — and I want to be clear, it's not in most Bibles, but Jude quotes it directly in the New Testament as well as Peter references the events of it, so whatever it was to the people who wrote our Bible, it wasn't nothing.
1 Enoch says two hundred of these beings made a pact on a mountain, cursing themselves and each other so nobody could back out. And the mountain was Hermon.
The Hebrew underneath "Hermon" is cherem, a sworn oath, a thing devoted to destruction. They named the mountain after what they did on it.
Normally that's where I'd say "and it's just a story," and move on. Except there's an actual ruin at the actual summit. 9,232 feet up, documented since the 1800s, the highest known temple anywhere in the ancient world.
Someone hauled materials up that mountain on purpose to build something up there.
There's an inscription on one of the stones that a major Enoch scholar has translated as referencing people taking an oath. But the object is sitting there, at the exact elevation, mentioning oaths, on the mountain the ancient story says the oath happened on.
And it keeps going. Down at the base there's a spring that gushes out of a cave so deep that Josephus — a first-century historian— wrote about trying to measure it and never hitting bottom, no matter how much rope they lowered.
So ancient people threw sacrifices in, because a hole that swallows rope and never gives anything back looks exactly like a door to the underworld. There was even a shrine to the greek god Pan built right into that cliff — which is where our word "panic" comes from, since Pan was the god of sudden irrational fear… little nugget for you.
Then Rome shows up, and instead of tearing any of it down, Herod builds a marble temple to Caesar directly in front of the same cave. Right in front of it. Canaanite, then Greek, then Roman — three religions, three centuries, all building something shrines, altars, and pagan worship centers at the exact same hole in the ground.
That's the city Jesus is standing in — on purpose — when he asks his disciples who people say he is, and Peter answers "you are the Christ." Jesus's response is the line everyone's heard a thousand times without knowing where he's standing when he says it: "on this rock I will build my church, and the gates of Hades shall not prevail against it." Say that anywhere else in the world and it's a nice general statement. Say it standing in front of an actual cave that three civilizations in a row have treated as a literal doorway to the underworld, on a mountain whose own name means curse… you get my point.
And then — this is the part I really wanted to get to you directly, because it's my favorite piece of this whole thing — six days later, Matthew gives you the exact count, Jesus takes Peter, James and John up "a high mountain" and gets transfigured in front of them.
Tradition says that mountain is Tabor. But Tabor's barely two thousand feet and it's days away from where they'd just been, which doesn't fit "six days" cleanly at all. Scholars have made the cas that if they're already standing at the base of Hermon, and the text just says "a high mountain," the obvious candidate is the one they're already next to. Hermon's over nine thousand feet.
If they’re right, you get this reversal that I genuinely think is one of the best pieces of symmetry in the whole Gospel: corrupted divine beings once descended onto this exact mountain to ruin the world.
And now the true Son ascends the same mountain and gets revealed in glory, in front of the same three witnesses who'd watched him name the gates of hell six days earlier.
And the reputation never clocked out, by the way. Israel and Syria were fighting over Hermon's slopes in '67 and in '73, and there are still active military positions up there right now, this week, while you're reading this.
Four ancient religions all independently decided this ground was cursed. But modern militaries still treat it like it's worth killing over. Maybe that's just strategic high ground doing what strategic high ground does. Or maybe some places just keep earning the reputation they started with.
I did a full video on this topic… you can see it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=psBC1GAZK3s&t=34s
Talk soon,
Nils
P.S.
Oh, I almost forgot to mention… I put together a Skool community if you’re interested in learning about these weirds parts of the Bible. All the things I can’t fit into my videos, my research notes, all future bible study guides, all future free/paid content I am throwing in there to give back. If you want to support what I am doing, and also get access to all of that + live bible studies & hours more content… Join here: https://www.skool.com/the-strange-bible/about