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.