The Temple Area of Bethsaida: Polish Excavations on Et-Tell in the Years 1998-2000 Paperback - 2006

From the publisher

The village of Bethsaida and the polls of Julias have both been attested to in the first century AD. The New Testament tells about Bethsaida on multiple occasions. According to Josephus Flavius Bethsaida was refounded as Julias and the territory of this new foundation was certainly enlarged as new settlers were added to the original population of the village of Bethsaida. Thus Julias must have contained both the fishing village of Bethsaida and the new settlement. Of how these two units were spatially related to each other the literary sources do not speak. During the centuries various sites known under their modern names have been proposed as hiding the remains either of Bethsaida, of Bethsaida-Julias or of Julias. The controversy as to the placement of Bethsaida, however, was still unsolved in the twentieth century. Archaeological investigation of the most probable candidate to be named Bethsaida, et-Tell, an artificial hill dominating the area north of the modern shores of the Sea of Galilee, started in 1989. After a few seasons of field work the excavators indicated that the remains of the New Testament Bethsaida were indeed located at et-Tell. This identification was already acknowledged by the international society of scholars before the Polish mission joined the excavation. The year was 1998 and it was the first official Polish archaeological mission in Israel. The present report presents the results of field and library research of the years 1998-2000 relating principally to the squares containing the remains named the "The Temple of the Imperial Cult". It is leaning on the research predating our engagement, comments on them and disputes them, at the end presenting a new conception of the reconstruction of the sacral area...