Bethsaida (Bethesda, Bezatha, Bethzatha)

BETHSAIDA (Bethesda, Bezatha, Bethzatha). - Pool in Jerusalem, near which Jesus healed the paralytic who had been ill for 38 years (Jn. 5:1-9). The Greek text (the Vulgate is inaccurate) says it was near the [gate] probatica (= "of the sheep": cf. Neh. 3:1, 31; 12:38). Its name has been preserved in three forms: the 1st (of the Vulgate): Βηθοατιδά = "house of fishing" (cod. B. W. W., Coptic manuscripts, many Latin ones, Tatian, Tertullian, Jerome); the 2nd: Βηθεοδά = "house of mercy" (the majority of Syro-Antiochene codices), preferred by Knabenbauer, Vogels, Merk; the 3rd: Βηζαθα, Βηθεζαθα or Βεζεθα (cod. θ. s/s 33, manuscripts of the Old Latin, Irenaeus, Eusebius), adopted by Tischendorf, Nestle, Dalman, Lagrange, seems the most probable. Vincent and Ricciotti prefer Βεζεθα. Hence the name would come from the hill Bezeth (v.) in which the pool was dug. Its waters acquired healing value when they bubbled up (cf. Prat, I, p. 401 ff.).

It is probably to be identified with the pool of the Roman period, discovered by C. Schick and brought to light again by M. Mauss (1871) and by the White Fathers (1914). It is dug in the middle zone of the valley that obliquely crosses the Bezeth, 30 m. north of the church of St. Anne, over a rectangle of 120 x 60 m., with a depth of 7-8 m. A transverse wall divided it so as to form two square pools of 48 m. each in a north-south direction, communicating by means of a channel. The porticoes therefore (6.20-6.50 m. wide and adorned with columns 8.47 m. high and with monumental entrances) that stood over it, amounted to five. "Ex voto" offerings found in the excavations testify that the healing virtue of the waters did not cease in later times. Tradition too (cf. D. Baldi, Enchiridion locorum sanctorum, Jerusalem 1935, pp. 573-91) confirms the archaeological data. Under the bishop Juvenal (422-68), on the transverse wall on the west side of the pool the church of the paralytic was erected, with a single nave and an apse, and toward the end of the 5th century the church of St. Mary of the Probatica (about 45 m.), later called St. Anne's, on the east side of the other pool, over the crypt that tradition venerates as the house of the Madonna. Both were destroyed by the Persians in 614.

The assertion of A. Loisy that the Bezeth pool is a feature of Johannine symbolism with reference to the 5 books of the Pentateuch, in whose shadow the Jewish people lived, is therefore refuted by the archaeological data.

Bonaventura Mariani