Haifa, Jan. 6, 1885.—If, as I stated in my last letter, students of
Biblical topography have been much exercised in their minds as to the
identification of the ruins on the northwest shore of the Sea of
Galilee, which indicate the site of the once famous city of Capernaum,
and have applied not only a great amount of antiquarian research and of
time in the way of minute local examination and literary labor in the
hope of definitely settling this knotty point, there is another upon
which they have no less anxiously expended their ingenuity. This is to
solve the vexed question as to whether there were, in the time of
Christ, two Bethsaidas or one. This question would never have arisen but
for the confusion introduced into the scriptural narrative by the
puzzling accounts given in all the four gospels of the miracle of the
feeding of the multitude with five loaves and two fishes, the scene of
which the four evangelists are unanimous in describing as having been in
a desert spot which must have been on the eastern side of the lake, for
immediately afterwards “they crossed over to the other side,” arriving
at Capernaum, which was on the western side. But according to one (Luke)
this desert place (on the eastern side) belonged to a city called
Bethsaida; and according to another (Mark) Christ, after the miracle,
“constrained his disciples to get into the ship and go to the other (or
western) side before, unto Bethsaida, while he sent away the people.”
Hence the confusion; starting from the western side, they take ship,
cross over to a desert place belonging to Bethsaida; the miracle is
performed there, and the disciples are constrained by their Master to
take ship and cross the lake back again to what must be another
Bethsaida. Then the storm arises, he comes to them on the waters, and
they finally reach Capernaum in safety.
Reland, the learned geographer of the last century, was the first to
invent the second Bethsaida on the western side, which is not mentioned
by either Josephus or Pliny, the latter of whom distinctly puts it on
the eastern side; and I have not been able exactly to discover upon what
authority Reland hit upon this easy solution of the problem. The only
historical Bethsaida of which we have any certain record was a place at
the northeastern extremity, originally a village, but rebuilt and
adorned by Philip the Tetrarch, and raised to the dignity of a town
under the name of Julias, after the daughter of the emperor. Here, in a
magnificent tomb, Philip was himself buried. On the other hand, we have
indications of the existence of another Bethsaida in the mention of a
Bethsaida which was the birthplace of Peter and Andrew and Philip, which
Mark tells us was “in the land of Genesareth,” and therefore on the west
shore of the lake. Supposing Tell Hum to be Capernaum, and the western
Bethsaida to be on the site usually assigned to it, this hypothesis
would give us two Bethsaidas only six miles apart, not a very probable
supposition; or else we have to suppose that the land of Genesareth
extended across the Jordan to the east side, which we know to have had
another name, and to have been in another province; or to suppose, as
Dr. Thomson—who resolutely refuses to have two Bethsaidas—does, that
half the town was on one side of the Jordan and half on the other, and
that the half on the west side was called Bethsaida in the land of
Genesareth, though the plain of that name is five miles distant.
Moreover, there are no ruins conveniently placed to support the
presumption, which is very strained. Altogether the subject is one which
has puzzled every Biblical geographer hitherto, and, after a careful
examination of all their arguments, I find myself just as much in the
dark about it as when I entered upon the investigation. As, therefore,
after visiting all the disputed localities, I do not feel any the more
competent to enlighten your readers, I will confine myself to describing
the different places which have been suggested as the sites of these
cities, as well as of others which I visited in the section of country
to the east of the Jordan, some of which I was the first to discover,
and none of which have been positively identified.
Meantime, the scene, which the tradition of many centuries located
erroneously as the spot upon which the miracle took place, is exactly
above us as we wind along a rocky path cut in the precipice which
overhangs the Sea of Galilee. This huge impending crag is crowned by an
artificial plateau, which is two hundred feet long by one hundred broad,
and in the northwest angle are the remains of a wall and the ruins of a
building, probably a fortress of some sort. This spot was known in the
middle ages as the Mensa Christi, or Table of Christ. In olden time the
great Damascus high-road ran just below, and the fort above doubtless
commanded this pass; but it has become impassable, and the path now
follows the channel of an aqueduct hewn out of the living rock. For
about two hundred yards we find ourselves riding along the narrow floor
of this ancient watercourse. On our left the smooth rock rises
precipitously, and on our right it forms a wall from three to four feet
high, over which we could drop a stone perpendicularly into the waters
of the lake. The aqueduct which thus forms our singular roadway is about
three feet wide; emerging from it, after we turn the angle of the rock,
we find ourselves overlooking a little bay, into which rushes a brawling
torrent, the largest which enters the lake excepting the Jordan, and
which here turns a mill. It is, however, only a few yards long, as it
bursts from the ground in great force, in what is by far the most
powerful spring in Galilee, and is, without doubt, the celebrated
Fountain of Capernaum mentioned by Josephus as watering the plain of
Genesareth. This it did by means of the aqueduct which we had already
traversed, the distance from the fountain to the plain not being above a
mile. Besides the principal fountain, which is estimated as being more
than half the size of the celebrated source of the Jordan at Banias,
there are four smaller fountains, all more or less brackish, and varying
in temperature from 73° to 86°.
One of the special subjects of interest connected with these fountains
is the presence in them of the remarkable fish called the coracinus. The
only known habitats of this fish in the world are in the Nile, in a
fountain which I have also visited in the plain of Genesareth, called
Mudawara, and in this spring. Josephus accounts for its existence here,
as well as in the Nile, by a hypothetical subterranean water
communication with the great river of Egypt. Modern geologists point to
it as an evidence of the fact that in some long bygone period Palestine
might have been included in a great Ethiopian basin. However the
circumstance is to be accounted for, it is most remarkable, and was
doubted until Canon Tristram verified it twenty years ago by a somewhat
singular experience. Crossing the little stream which issues from the
fountain of Mudawara and flows into the lake, and which happened to be
very low at the time, he was surprised to observe a quantity of fish
wriggling along in single file, and so close together that the mouth of
one touched the tail of the one before it. In places there was so little
water that they had to flop across intervals of almost dry land; here he
caught them easily with his hand, and, as many averaged three feet in
length, he was not long in making a good bag. What surprised him most,
however, was to find that as soon as he laid hold of one it began
hissing and screaming like a cat. Making a bag of his cloak, he carried
them off in triumph to his camp, which was three hours distant, and
could hear them hissing and caterwauling in it all the way. He describes
them as being a most delicious fish to eat, something like an eel in
flavor, and possessed of extraordinary vitality, as some of them were
still living after they had been two days out of the water. The last
volume just issued by the Palestine Exploration Fund contains a print of
this extraordinary creature, which has a long, slender body, apparently
not much thicker than that of a good-sized eel, with two long fins, one
on the back and one on the belly. The mouth, with its long,
cartilaginous streamers (I do not know the ichthyological term for
them), somewhat resembles that of a catfish. I unfortunately had no
means of fishing for them on the occasion of my visit, and they did not
happen to be migrating to their spawning grounds, which they were
evidently doing when Tristram caught them; but my late experiences on
the shores of the lake have been so full of interest that I propose to
make another visit in the spring, when I hope to go supplied with
tackle, and to give you my own piscatory experiences.
There is a small tract of fertile land in the rear of the mill, but no
ruins except those connected with mills or water-works. Nevertheless, it
is impossible almost to conceive that a position so favored by nature
should not have been the site of a town, and it is on this spot that
many geographers place the western Bethsaida. There are no apparent
grounds for their doing so beyond the necessity of finding a spot
somewhere which should support their hypothesis. If, however, they must
have a second Bethsaida, I should rather put it a mile farther off, at
Khan Minieh, instead of so very close to Capernaum as this would be,
always supposing Tell Hum to be Capernaum, which is only two miles
distant from this spot. Dr. Thomson's theory that El-Tabghah, the modern
name of this place, was the grand manufacturing suburb of that large
city, from which its fountain took its name, seems to me rational. Here
were the mills, not only for it, but for all the neighbourhood; so also
the potteries, tanneries, and other operations of this sort would be
clustered around these great fountains, a theory somewhat borne out by
the name, Tabghah, which resembles the Arabic word Dabbaga, meaning
tannery.
There is no doubt that in this neighbourhood somewhere, probably on the
plain of Genesareth, was the location of a town far older than any of
those whose sites we are now discussing, and this is the Chinneroth
mentioned in the Old Testament, from which the lake, in days long
anterior to those of Christ, took its name, and which the Talmud renders
Ginizer, which is therefore doubtless identical with Genesareth. Indeed,
it may be noted as a curious fact, which has been forced upon me by
these investigations, that the towns noticed in the Gospels, excluding
the large cities, such as Jerusalem, Tyre, and Sidon, are almost all
places not mentioned in the Old Testament. Nazareth and Capernaum,
Bethsaida, and Chorazin and Tiberias are names never occurring in the
Hebrew Scriptures; and the scenery of the life of Christ lies, as a
rule, apart from the centres, religious or political, which reappear
again and again in the earlier episodes of Jewish history.