“If the Garden of Eden is in Eretz Yisrael then its gate is at Beit Shean.”

This is the Talmudic tribute to the special sweetness of the fruits of this area, which lies about 120 meters below sea level.

It was to the walls of Beit Shean that the Philistines fastened the corpses of King Saul and his sons after vanquishing the Israelite army. When the men of Yavesh Gilead heard of this, they marched all night in order to remove the bodies and bury them. Saul once saved the honor of the men of Yavesh Gilead when the Ammonites had surrounded the city and demanded the right to blind the right eye of every one of its citizens as the price of peace.

Modern Beit Shean was founded soon after the establishment of the State of Israel near a small Arab town called Bissan, a corruption of the city’s biblical name, and rapidly expanded to become a major development town which absorbed many olim from North Africa.