Searching for Bethsaida: The Case for El-Araj
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Footnotes
1. See Rami Arav, “Searching for Bethsaida: The Case for Et-Tell.”
2. Our initial season in 2016 was aided by the Biblical Archaeology Society’s gift of $20,000 toward “a new excavation that answers a question,” in the words of Editor Emeritus Hershel Shanks. As it happens, Hershel called me (Notley) on Christmas Day 2015 to inform me of his decision to assist. That certainly was a highlight of my Christmas! See Hershel Shanks, First Person: “What Should We Do with $25,000?” BAR, May/June 2015; Hershel Shanks, First Person: “BAR Gives Away $50,000,” BAR, September/October 2016.
3. Marcela Zapata-Meza and Rosaura Sanz-Rincón, “Excavating Mary Magdalene’s Hometown,” BAR, May/June 2017.
Endnotes
1.
This second point is particularly important in light of Rami Arav’s recent claim that the remains of a Roman period bathhouse unearthed in 2017 at el-Araj belonged to the camp of Agrippa’s army. If Sulla and his men had indeed encamped at el-Araj, then Julias could not have been on the lakeshore as Josephus describes it elsewhere (Antiquities 18:26), and the Jewish reinforcements could not have arrived there, since they would have been intercepted by Agrippa’s troops. No such problem exists, however, if Julias was instead located at el-Araj, which in the first century was on the lakeshore, just as Josephus describes it near the estuary of the Jordan River. Contrary to Arav’s claim that the bathhouse unearthed in 2017 at el-Araj belonged to the camp of Agrippa’s army, this urban feature is indicative of Herod Philip’s transformation of the Jewish fishing village of Bethsaida into a small Roman polis.
2.
Richard A. Freund, “The Search for Bethsaida in Rabbinic Literature,” in Rami Arav and Richard A. Freund, eds., Bethsaida: A City by the North Shore of the Sea of Galilee (Kirksville, MO: Thomas Jefferson University Press, 1995), pp. 267-311.
3.
See Paul Geyer, Itinera Hierosolymitana saeculi IV-VIII, recensuit et commentario critico instruxit, CSEL XXXIX (Vienna: 1898), p. 138.
4.
English translation by Thomas Wright, Early Travels in Palestine (New York: AMS Press, 1848), pp. 16-17; cf. Donato Baldi, Enchiridion Locorum Sanctorum (Jerusalem: Franciscan Press, 1982), p. 266.
5.
Yoram Tsafrir, Leah Di Segni, and Judith A. Green, Tabula Imperii Romani: IUDAEA PALAESTINA (Jerusalem: The Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities, 1994), p. 104; Zeev Safrai, “Gergesa, Gerasa, or Gadara? Where Did Jesus’ Miracle Occur?” Jerusalem Perspective (1996), pp. 16-19.
6.
These inconsistencies were gathered and published: R. Steven Notley, “Et-Tell Is Not Bethsaida,” Near Eastern Archaeology 70.4 (2007), pp. 220-230. The article was followed by a spirited forum on the pages of the same journal: Rami Arav, “Bethsaida—A Response to Steven Notley,” Near Eastern Archaeology 74 (2011), pp. 92-100.