The pool of Bethesda had two basins, which may explain John's five porches
Did you know excavators in Jerusalem found the pool of Bethesda from John 5, and it was built as two pools side by side?
John 5 sets a healing at a pool beside Jerusalem's sheep gate. Sick people lay around it, "waiting for the moving of the water" (5:3). Some Bibles go on with a verse 4, about an angel stirring the water. That verse is missing from the oldest manuscripts, and most modern translations move it to a footnote.
The text gives the pool one unusual feature: "there is a pool, which is called in Hebrew, 'Bethesda', having five porches" (5:2). A porch here means a roofed colonnade, and colonnades usually run along a pool's sides. Five is an awkward number for that. Early readers looked for a meaning in it, and in the early 400s Augustine read the five porches as the five books of Moses.
Excavation suggests a plainer explanation. From the late 1800s, excavators working beside the Church of St. Anne uncovered two large pools side by side. A thick wall of rock ran between them. Colonnades on the four outer sides, with a fifth along the dividing wall, would make five porches. Many archaeologists reconstruct the site that way. Others are more cautious, since little of any porch survives. The southern pool has broad steps, and some think it was used for ritual bathing.
The identification rests on more than the shape. The pools lie north of the temple, near where the Sheep Gate is thought to have stood. A pilgrim from Bordeaux who visited Jerusalem in 333 CE described twin pools there with five porches. Later a Byzantine church was built over them.
The place kept its reputation for healing. By the second century CE, a shrine stood beside the pools, most likely to Asclepius, the Greek god of medicine. In John's account, the man who had been ill for thirty-eight years never reaches the water: "Immediately, the man was made well, and took up his mat and walked" (5:9).
Where to see it: read John 5:2-3, then the healing that follows through verse 9. The excavated pools lie beside the Church of St. Anne, near the Lions' Gate in Jerusalem's Old City, and are widely photographed.
Sources
- Pool of Bethesda, JerusalemJohn 5:2 (the name varies in manuscripts: Bethesda, Bethzatha, Bethsaida); John 5:3b-4, the stirring of the water by an angel, is absent from the earliest manuscripts, including Papyri 66 and 75, Codex Sinaiticus and Codex Vaticanus; excavations at St. Anne's from the late 19th century, notably by the White Fathers and the École Biblique in the 1950s-60s; the five-portico reconstruction is widely held but not certain, and the southern pool's use for ritual bathing is a proposal; the Bordeaux Pilgrim (Itinerarium Burdigalense, 333 CE) describes twin pools with five porticoes; Augustine, Tractates on the Gospel of John 17.2; a Roman-period healing shrine, usually identified with Asclepius (some say Serapis), and a Byzantine church on the site
The Daily Context
One piece of context, every day.
A verse, a person, a place, or an object — and the world it came from. One email a day. Free.
One email a day. Unsubscribe anytime.
Read the whole story
Uncanon presents the Bible in composition order with scholarly context before every passage — Setting the Scene, What Scholars Say, and Things to Notice. Ask as questions come up. One answer leads to the next question, and you can follow it without losing your place. It’s all saved with your reading.