CAVES IN THE GALILEE were used in antiquity by Jewish rebels:

Discovering ancient Galilee's hidden shelters
By Eli Ashkenazi (Haaretz)

A pleasant coolness greeted Yinon Shivtiel when he crawled into the cave at Mt. Berenice, as did a poisonous snake. Shivtiel, a doctoral candidate in Land of Israel Studies at Bar-Ilan University, who teaches at Safed College, is used to being surprised on his crawling expeditions into caves in the Galilee. He took the snake's presence in stride, preferring to save his excitement for the man-made "loft" dug out of the cave.

For several years now Shivtiel has been researching the "cliff dwellings and refuge caves throughout the Galilee," which, unlike the caves in the Judean foothills that are associated with the Bar-Kochba Revolt, have not been studied in depth. Shivtiel is attempting to understand the circumstances of their excavation and to date them, collecting what he calls the slips of the pen of the Jewish historian and leader Yosef Ben-Mattitiyahu (Josephus). "For example, in referring to Akbara [in the Safed region - E.A.] he writes,'rock-dwellers.' There is no such thing, unless you go to the hanging caves on the cliffs... When I read his theories I believe one must see as the model the Galilee caves, which were 'invented' not by the Bar-Kochba rebels, but before them."

According to Shivtiel, there were 11 Jewish communities in the Galilee during the Roman era (from 37 B.C.E. to 324 A.D.) that used the nearby high cliffs as hiding places. "What they had in common were caves on the tops of high cliffs. They used ropes to descend into the natural caves in the cliffs, which they enlarged and made fit for habitation in time of need, in contrast to the underground caves used as hiding places inside Jewish communities located in the Galilee," Shivtiel said.

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He is also studying caves at Mt. Bernice on the border of Tiberias.