Magdala

Early travelers reaching the shores of Lake Tiberias found a small village in the NW corner of the lake to be named Medjal. George Smith identified the place Medjal as Magdala in 1896. Medjal is like the Semitic work Migdal. Migdal means tower. The remains of the tower in the lower photo was visible at that time. The ruins associated with the site are Roman era ruins. Josephus described this site as Tarichaea, or place of fish processing/pickling. According to Talmudic descriptions a village named Migdal may have existed in this vicinity. This site, Capernaum, and Bethsaida (Et Tell) were three prominent first century Roman era sites on the north shore of the lake.

While the excavations seen in the lower photo were taking place, a floor mosaic with a picture of a sail boat was found and is on display at Capernaum. While doing a salvage excavation at the planned site of a Catholic conference center the Israel Antiquities Authority discovered the remains of a first century synagogue in 2009..

An early description of Magdala by Cunningham Geikie (1887, London):

"Magdala stands on the south corner of the Plain of Gennesaret. Two or three fig-trees grow in or near the houses, and there are a few wretched gardens, with palms in them a few feet high. A small brook sends a trickle of water to the lake over a stony bottom, but it is not irreproachably pure, for it has to run through dunghills. The houses, or huts, of which there are not more than dozen altogether, are built of mud and stone, and are of one storey and flat-roofed, with no light except from the door; a rough pillar of mud and stone in the one room holds up the ceiling of reeds and branches, and two levels in the mud floor mark the respective bounds of man and beast; for fowls, goats, and perhaps an ass, or some other creature, share the premises with the family. Some unspeakably dirty, almost naked, children followed us about. The ground was rank with brambles, wild mustard, coarse grass--which, if drawn smartly through one's fingers, would cut them--and low prickly bushes, with the beds of black basalt fragments of all sizes. An old keep, originally built, it is said, as a "fish tower," rose beside a ruinous pool, once full of fish, but now mostly filled with stones, and leaking so that the soil for some distance round was quaggy with water. Five or six springs, breaking out of the earth some distance up the valley, feed this old reservoir, and then make their way through the stones to the lake. Eight fig-trees and some elder-bushes, fed by the moisture, helped to hide the misery of the spot; and there were here and there a few oleanders, Christ-thorn trees, and other semi-tropical growths. Such is the village of Mary whom we now call the Magdalene..."

Geikie went on to describe the nearby Wadi Hamam (Valley of Pigeons), Irbid, and the cliffs now called the Cliffs of Arbel.

Photos of the synagogue at Magdala

ISRAEL PHOTOS V -- Spring 2011