Bethsaida

John’s Gospel calls Bethsaida the town of Andrew, Peter and Philip (John 1:44) (John 12:21). Mark sets there the healing of a blind man (Mark 8:22–26), Luke places the feeding of the five thousand in its neighbourhood (Luke 9:10), and Jesus names it with Chorazin among the towns that did not repent (Matthew 11:21). Josephus says that the tetrarch Philip raised the village of Bethsaida, on the lake of Gennesaret, to the rank of a city and named it Julias (Josephus, Antiquities 18.28). He places Julias in lower Gaulanitis and says that the Jordan passes it just before entering the lake (Josephus, Jewish War 2.168) (Josephus, Jewish War 3.515). In AD 66–67 he fought a skirmish close to Julias and the Jordan, on marshy ground (Josephus, Life 399–406).

These texts fix the town near the mouth of the Jordan on the north shore, but not the exact spot. Two sites are proposed. Et-Tell, a mound about two kilometres from the present shore, has been excavated since 1987 and is defended in Rami Arav and Richard A. Freund (editors), Bethsaida: A City by the North Shore of the Sea of Galilee (4 volumes, 1995–2009). El-Araj, on the shore itself, has been excavated since 2016; the case for it is made by R. Steven Notley, “Et-Tell Is Not Bethsaida”, Near Eastern Archaeology 70 (2007), pp. 220–230. The marker follows the Pleiades gazetteer, which now places the name at el-Araj; et-Tell lies about two kilometres to the north.