A wildfire in late July swept through the Betiha Nature Reserve on the northern shore of the Sea of Galilee, laying bare hundreds of soot-covered mounds that may mark the long-lost village of Bethsaida.
The flames raged for 17 hours, forced beachgoers at nearby Amnun to flee, and closed Israel’s Highway 87. Vegetation that had hidden the terrain burned to ash, revealing rock fragments, pottery shards, and part of a column—evidence of public buildings in what had been viewed as a modest fishing settlement.
“Each of these hills could be an ancient room,” said Mordechai Aviam, head of the Kinneret College excavation. Walking the charred ground a week later, Aviam pointed to blocks and a pillar drum that had been invisible before the fire.
Excavations at el-Araj, widely considered the leading candidate for biblical Bethsaida, began in 2016 and entered their ninth season this summer. Aviam directed the archaeology while R. Steven Notley oversaw historical research. Volunteers arrived from around the world, including a Hong Kong family whose 12-year-old son first visited the site at age two.
The blaze stopped just short of a tarp covering the apse of a 5th-century Byzantine church-monastery, leaving the fabric unscorched. The church stands above a Roman-period settlement, and between them lies a Crusader-era sugar factory that reused Byzantine walls.
Lower layers yielded fishing gear, Roman ceramics, and the remains of a bath complex. “We are looking at a prosperous lakeside community during the time of Jesus,” said Aviam, adding that the steady flow of Roman pottery suggested an intact 1st-century layer below.
Findings at el-Araj have undermined the traditional identification of nearby e-Tell as Bethsaida; Aviam and Notley argued that e-Tell’s elevation and distance from the water do not match the lakeside village described by the Gospels and by Josephus. El-Araj, situated on the shore, has produced limestone vessel fragments typical of Jewish households from the Second Temple period.
Links to the apostolic era continued to appear. Volunteers recovered Greek letters referring to Peter, and a mosaic inside the Byzantine church hailed him as “the prince of the apostles”. Historians commonly list Bethsaida as the birthplace of Peter, Andrew, and Philip.
With vegetation cleared, the team marked new trenches aimed at exposing additional Roman-period houses and public buildings that Herod Philip planned to incorporate into the city of Julias.
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