All this appears to agree very well with what Eusebius says in his
“Onomasticon,” concerning a pool which he calls Bezatha--“a pool at
Jerusalem, which is the _Piscina Probatica_, and had formerly five
porches, and now is pointed out at the twin pools there, of which one
is filled by the rains of the year, but the other exhibits its water
tinged in an extraordinary manner with red, retaining a trace, they
say, of the victims that were formerly cleansed in it.” Here we have
a sheep pool, in which the sacrificial victims used to be washed, and
close by it (so that they constituted twin pools) a second, which must
have been intermittent, the very character attributed to those waters
which, at a certain season, were troubled.[43] Eusebius gives no clue
to the situation of the twin pools, but the Bordeaux pilgrim, who
visited Jerusalem in A.D. 333, after speaking of two great
pools at the side of the Temple, one on either hand as he entered
Jerusalem from the east side (apparently at St Stephen’s Gate), refers
to the twin pools as being more within the city. They “have five
porches” (he says), “and are called Bethsaida. Here the sick of many
years were wont to be healed. But these pools have water which, when
agitated, is of a kind of red colour.”
There had been a disposition in recent years to identify these twin
pools with two souterrains or tunnels existing under the Convent of
the Sisters of Sion at the north-west corner of the Haram area, but
that fancy is now dissipated. The manner in which most of the previous
speculations have been set aside by the actual discovery of the Pool of
Bethesda is an instructive testimony to the value of excavation work in
Jerusalem.
_A Tablet from Herod’s Temple._--Josephus, in his “Antiquities of the
Jews,”[44] after describing the cloisters of the Temple and the Court
of the Gentiles, goes on to describe the inner court, and the middle
wall of partition which divided Jews from Gentiles. He says, “Thus was
the first enclosure; in the midst of which, and not far from it, was
the second, to be gone up to by a few steps. This was encompassed by
a stone wall for a partition, with an inscription which forbade any
foreigner to go in under pain of death.” Again, in his work on the
“Wars of the Jews,”[45]--“When you go through these first cloisters,
unto the second court of the Temple, there was a partition made of
stone all round, whose height was three cubits. Its construction was
very elegant; upon it stood pillars, at equal distances from one
another, declaring the law of purity, some in Greek, and some in Roman
letters, that no foreigner should go within the sanctuary,--for that
second court of the Temple was called the Sanctuary, and was ascended
to by fourteen steps from the first court.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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