Galilee הגליל

Galilee is a large region in northern Israel, mountainous and reasonably fertile. Galilee was the setting for the ministry of Jesus Christ. The Sea of Galilee, the countryside, and the towns— Cana, Capernaum, Tiberias, Nazareth—are mentioned frequently in the Gospels. Jesus himself was called the Galilean, and his disciples were chosen from local fishermen.

The conventional etymology of Galilee suggests that it is derived from the Hebrew and Aramaic galil ‘ring, circle’ hence ‘region’ or ‘surrounding district’ or ‘province.’ The Arabic name is الجليل ‎ al-Jaleel. But it may, in fact, hark back to a much older West Semitic place name known to the ancient Egyptians as Galulu, which may have meant ‘northern part of Canaan.’ For an interesting alternate origin of Galilee:

http://lists.ibiblio.org/pipermail/b-hebrew/2008-April/035677.html

Another derivation of Galilee offers a source in the triliteral Semitic root, G-L-L ‘to roll’ so that a Hebrew noun like galil (Galilee) derived from such a verb might mean ‘rolling land’ or ‘hill country’ or ‘undulant terrain.’

Noted Use of the Word in English

The Victorian poet Algernon Charles Swinburne was perhaps the most eloquent atheist who ever wrote in English. From Swinburne's “Hymn to Proserpine” comes the most familiar of his atheist apostrophes, one of many that rendered Victorian Christians aghast. “Thou hast conquered, O pale Galilean; the world has grown grey from Thy breath.” Swinburne was remembering the apocryphal last words of the Roman emperor, Julian the Apostate, “Vicisti, Galilaee” Latin ‘you won, Galilean.’ Dying during the Battle of Ctesiphon in 363 CE, Julian, an avowed pagan, was distressed to know but nonetheless knew that Christianity would conquer paganism and become the new state religion of the crumbling Roman empire.

The God Pan Dead!

Another eloquent quotation embodying this sad knowledge of the end of the ancient world is: “The great god Pan is dead!” In his Moralia, Plutarch told of a sailor passing by the island of Paxi who heard an unworldly voice call across the waters, three times, this divine command: “When you reach Palodes, proclaim that the great god Pan is dead.” When the sailor obeyed and shouted his message to the island, from shore he heard lamenting and moaning.

Although this mythic messaging was said to have happened during the reign of the Roman emperor Tiberius, many writers of later antiquity took Pan’s death to signal the onset of the end of the ancient world.

Plutarch said that Pan was the only Greek god who ever died. His name Πάν, Πανός stems from a Greek verb paein ‘to pasture.’ Among other godly duties, Pan was an old fertility spirit of sown fields, a god of groves and orchards and deer-haunted glens of Arcady. He was the mystic shepherd of fleecy lambs agambol in summer pastures and the magister ludi of ruttish bucks and ewes futtering in rocky nooks. Each year on goaty hooves, Pan piped spring into greening Hellenic valleys.

The Word Panic

Imagine now a peaceful afternoon lolling sweetly over an ancient pasture in the Peloponese. While a cowherd daydreams, gentle kine browse in a meadow. Suddenly, unaccountably, the cows stampede and moo in terror. The cowherd chases them and brings them back to the meadow. Just as suddenly their terror abates. What got into those cows? Why, a panic, of course. The god Pan chased them, sporting with them briefly. The cowherd remembers another time, following a stray calf into a cave and suddenly being overcome by rapid fear. Pan had darted nearby, causing that panic. The word came into English from French. Rabelais in 1546 had written in medieval French terreur Panice. Panikos πανικός was the Hellenistic Greek adjective that meant ‘pertaining to a groundless fear.’

But Pan never really died. One hundred years after Plutarch wrote, the writer of the one of the first travel guides, the Greek Pausanias, toured all of Greece and found country shrines to Pan beside many a swatch of new-scythed hay, at the mouth of many a holy cave, and Pan altars on the banks of many a rural stream. Pan lived on in Europe where he became The Green Man whose wooden face, set up at the margin of meadows, was kissed by virgins to bring fertile luck to their fathers’ crops. In debased but delightful form he even makes up and is one of the inspirations for Shakespeare’s Puck.

Pan was shown even in antiquity as both a young boy playing reed pipes, breathing creativity to the human soul and delight to his flocks and as the coarser, goat-footed, insistent seed-spreader of fertility.

 

The Pan of Rohallion fountain at New York City’s Metropolitan Museum of Art was sculpted by Frederick William MacMonnies (1863 - 1937).

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