Text as Landscape: Imagining and Reifying Christian Sacred Landscape of the Galilee Nimrod Luz and Jacob Ashkenazi Kinneret College Introduction William Blake’s poem, “And Did Those Feet in Ancient Times” (commonly known as “Jerusalem”) – which may be interpreted as a blatant attack on the industrial revolution in England and some of its horrific outcomes in the green landscape of Albion – was inspired by the apocryphal story of Jesus, accompanied by Joseph of Arimathea, spending his unknown years in Glastonbury (www. erdman.blakearchive.org/#95). Blake seemed to question the idea of establishing a New Jerusalem in England’s green pastures of his times, which he describes as “the dark satanic mills.” Blake’s reservations notwithstanding, it seems rather obvious that locating Jesus in England’s landscape is stretching the myth beyond the pale. However, it also alludes to the power of images to circulate and influence the construction and transmutation of ideas, myth, texts into both imagined and concrete landscapes. In this paper we set out to theorize further the understudied process of text as progenitor of landscape. This is explored through reflections of the emergence of Christian sacred landscape in the Galilee. Della Dora’s study of the transformation of Mount Athos from a mythological landscape into a landscape of myth is indeed a tour de force in this respect. It is an insightful voyage which demonstrates how virtual enactments are used, time and again, by different actants in different settings to construct a spatial meaning of the site with a rather vague connections to the original geographic settings (Della Dora 2008, 109–131; 2011). Mount Athos became a much-desired sacred landscape by a process of signifying a material landscape as a mythological one which, through a long process of imagining and reifying, transformed it into a landscape of myth, which means more of a spatial imagination than physical geography. Landscape is suggested as a medium that prompts mythology and Della Dora’s study follows how this mythological interpretation is circulated, transformed and embodied over time. What is unique about this endeavor is that it transcends the regular landscape as