The Bethesda Pool, Site of One of Jesus’ Miracles
Where Jesus heals the paralytic
Among the most famous of Jesus’ miracles is recounted in the Gospel of John, where Jesus heals the paralytic at the Bethesda Pool (John 5:2-9). It is not the only one of Jesus’ miracles of healing to take place at a pool in Jerusalem, however. In addition to the Bethesda Pool, the Gospel of John also says that Jesus healed the blind man at the Siloam Pool.
The Siloam Pool was discovered in 2005 and was quickly identified with the pool mentioned in John. The Bethesda Pool, on the other hand, was excavated in the late 19th century, but it has taken more than 100 years for archaeologists to accurately identify and interpret the site.
The Siloam Pool has been identified as a mikveh. Is it possible that the Bethesda Pool was also a mikveh, meaning that both of Jesus’ miracles were performed at Jewish ritual baths? This is what author Urban C. von Wahlde proposes in “The Puzzling Pool of Bethesda.”
The Bethesda Pool, where Jesus heals the paralytic man in the Gospel of John, is a complex site. It appears to have been a mikveh, or ritual bath. As the spot of one of Jesus’ miracles, the Bethesda Pool was built over in subsequent periods with chapels and churches that are still visible today.
When Jesus heals the paralytic in the Gospel of John, the Bethesda Pool is described as having five porticoes—a puzzling feature suggesting an unusual five-sided pool, which most scholars dismissed as an unhistorical literary creation. Yet when this site was excavated, it revealed a rectangular pool with two basins separated by a wall—thus a five-sided pool—and each side had a portico.
The Jesus miracle story also tells how many people sought the Bethesda Pool’s healing powers. The first person to enter the pool when the waters were stirred up would supposedly be cured of his or her ailment. But, the paralytic tells Jesus, he can never get into the water quickly enough. So Jesus immediately cures him, and he is able to get up and walk.
This story about Jesus’ miracle suggests a long history of healing at the site. Roman medicinal baths constructed at the Bethesda Pool only a century or two later reflect this continued tradition. When Christians controlled Jerusalem in the Byzantine and Crusader periods, they liked to mark the sites of Jesus’ miracles and other important events in his life, so they added a chapel and churches that now cover the Bethesda Pool complex.
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So why a pool with two basins? The archaeological evidence shows that the southern basin had broad steps with landings, indicating that it was indeed a mikveh. The northern basin provided a reservoir, or otzer, to continually replenish and repurify the mikveh with fresh water flowing south through the dam between them. Jerusalem’s pilgrims would flock to the Bethesda Pool and Siloam Pool to purify themselves in these public mikva’ot and, at times, to seek healing.
Subscribers: Read more about the site of one of Jesus’ miracles in Urban C. von Wahlde’s “The Puzzling Pool of Bethesda,” Biblical Archaeology Review, September/October 2011.
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This Bible History Daily feature was originally published in June 2013.
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It is all about Faith…. I wish that I could walk into the pool.
When John describes the pool of Bethesda, he uses the present tense, as if when he was writing it still existed. But I understand it with its 5 porticoes was effectively demolished during the destruction of Jerusalem and the Temple in AD 70. Could that imply John wrote his Gospel pre-AD 70?
This site really needs to do some historical home work. It wasnt a Jewish Mikveh at all. It was a Roman scam to glen money from the poor.It is the site of the temple of the Greek God of healing serapis, If you go there today there is a big sign detailing all about it. Yeshua (Jesus) was sarcastic when he asked the man if the waters weren’t doing it for him lol, this is a story of standing up to people oppressing others. There was no angel and the one that was rumored to be there was an angel of serapis, the swirling was when the water overflowed from the main pool(That is 40 feet deep) into the small pool on the other side, the first person to get healed was a Roman plant!
The Pool of Bethesda was not a mikveh. It was an asclepion, as stated by several other comments above. The Jewish man should never have been there if he trusted in Adonai, hence the rebuttal by Yeshua to not sin again.