Hebrew Ha-galil
Northernmost region of biblical and modern Israel.
It contains two of the four holy cities of Judaism, Tiberias and Zefat. It was the boyhood home of Jesus Christ and the setting for much of his ministry. It became the centre of Jewish scholarship after the destruction of Jerusalem (AD 70). In the modern era, the first wave of Jewish immigrants settled there (1882). The first kibbutz , Deganya, was established in 1909 on the shore of Lake Tiberias , through which flows the Jordan River .