Hamat Tiberias

The parks authority's own account is precise about the water. Seventeen thermo-mineral springs rise inside the park boundary at about 60 degrees Celsius, at a salt concentration of about 36.5 grams per litre, mostly chlorides of sodium and calcium with smaller amounts of potassium, bromide and sulphate. Almost none of it is left to run on the surface. The flow is gathered into underground channels that carry it to the Tiberias hot baths, and those channels were built with chimneys to release the steam pressure, so the visible sign of the springs for most of the park is steam venting out of vertical shafts.

Surplus water, and water returning from the baths after use, is collected in a Mekorot facility inside the site and put into the National Saline Water Carrier, the conduit that keeps saline spring flows out of the Sea of Galilee. The Hebrew Wikipedia entry notes that the carrier crosses the park from north to south, which is a fair summary of what this place is.

One spring is left open on purpose. The parks authority calls it the Roman Spring, a small flow running down an open channel where visitors can put a hand in and taste how hot and how salty the water actually is. It tends to dry up when the level of the Kinneret drops. Elsewhere the water is held in pools; paddling is permitted, and the Hebrew page notes the pools are emptied for routine cleaning an hour before the site closes each day.

The parks authority has also laid a barefoot reflexology path through the site, included in the entrance fee, which is the clearest signal that this park is no longer run purely as an antiquities enclosure. Moshe Gilad, writing in Haaretz in June 2025, described it as somewhere to spend several hours, some of them wet.

• 17 springs, about 60 degrees Celsius, about 36.5 g of salts per litre (parks authority)
• Steam chimneys on the underground channels to the baths
• The Roman Spring: an open channel, dry in low-water years
• Warm pools, paddling permitted, emptied for cleaning an hour before closing
• A barefoot reflexology path, no extra charge

Hammat is the Hebrew and Semitic word for a hot spring, and the settlement here carried the name long before the city beside it existed. Herod Antipas founded Tiberias in 18 CE and named it for the emperor Tiberius; Hammat was already there, separately walled, and the Hebrew Wikipedia entry has the two remaining distinct towns until they merged in the eleventh century. Archaeologists have connected the place to the biblical Hammath of Joshua 19:35, though the excavated finds run only from the first to the eighth centuries CE, so the link is an argument from the name rather than from the ground.

The context for a synagogue this ambitious is that Tiberias had become the centre of Jewish religious authority. The Sanhedrin sat here from 193 CE until the late fourth century, when Theodosius I prohibited its activity, and the patriarchs named in the mosaic's own inscriptions belong to that world.

The site was found by accident. In 1920, while the Tiberias to Samakh road was being cut, labourers turned up ancient remains and asked the Jewish Palestine Exploration Society to look at them properly. Nahum Slouschz arrived in November 1920 and dug what is now called Hammath Tiberias North, on the lakeshore about 500 metres north of the city's south wall, continuing into 1921. It was the first archaeological excavation in the country conducted under Jewish auspices. He found a square basilical hall, a carved stone seat and a 60 cm limestone menorah now in the Israel Museum. Then the trenches were backfilled, and a hotel was later built over the whole thing. That synagogue is not on this site and cannot be visited.

The building the national park exists for came out of the ground forty years later. Moshe Dothan, working for the Department of Antiquities, found it in December 1961 and excavated through 1963; the Hebrew Wikipedia entry, citing contemporary press reports, says the dig was financed by the Hamei Tveria baths company. What he uncovered was a stack of synagogues, one on top of another, running to the early Islamic period.

The mosaic belongs to the second synagogue on the site, and it is the reason people come. The parks authority describes the sequence: a first synagogue built about 230 CE over an earlier public building and apparently destroyed within the same century, of which only a scrap of mosaic survives at the southern edge of the main floor and slightly below it; then the building whose floor you look at, which the authority places in the third and fourth centuries and whose pavement Avraham Negev and Shimon Gibson date to the second half of the fourth century, making it the earliest mosaic pavement found in any synagogue in the country.

The floor is laid in three panels. At the north end two lions flank nine Greek dedications naming donors. One of them records Severus, brought up in the household of the illustrious patriarchs, and it is from him that the building takes the name it is usually known by. Every personal name in the inscriptions is Greek. At the south end, facing Jerusalem, is the Torah shrine with two seven-branched menorahs beside it, a shofar, an incense shovel and two of the four species, the lulav and the etrog.

Between them is the zodiac. Helios stands in the centre, head haloed and turned to his right, a rayed crown on his head, right hand raised, left hand holding a whip and a globe, wearing the red paludamentum of an emperor, with a crescent moon on one side and a star on the other. The twelve signs run anticlockwise around him, which is the reverse of the usual arrangement, and three of them, Cancer, Sagittarius and Gemini, have not survived. Libra and Aquarius are both nude male figures; the fact that the Libra figure is uncircumcised has been used to argue that the mosaicist was not Jewish. The label beside Aquarius is written in mirror script. In the four corners sit women personifying the seasons, with the produce that goes with each: pomegranate, fig, vine and almond for autumn, ears of grain and a sickle for summer, roses for spring, a jar pouring water for winter.

What all of this was doing in a synagogue is still argued about. The parks authority's own reading is that Judaism here felt secure enough not to be threatened by such images, pointing out that the same scheme turns up at Beth Alpha and elsewhere. Walter Zanger, writing for the Biblical Archaeology Society, calls Hammath Tiberias the second most famous and the most technically accomplished of these floors, and rules out astrology, astronomy and, in his view, a calendar. Jodi Magness has argued the sun figure should be understood as the angel Metatron. Researchers still differ, and the site does not settle it.

The mosaic is original and in place, and it is damaged in ways worth being able to read. A band runs straight across the floor, cutting the composition: that is the footing of a wall built on top of the pavement long after the synagogue had gone, which the Hebrew Wikipedia entry assigns to the Fatimid period. It took out most of Helios's chariot. What is left of the quadriga is part of a horse and a few hooves.

The building around the floor is entirely modern. The parks authority states plainly that the synagogue has undergone conservation, restoration and reconstruction, and that the structure is glass-walled so that visitors keep eye contact with the landscape, the remains of the ancient houses and the later synagogue, and that it is air conditioned. It doubles as the park's visitor centre. So the walls are a shelter, not antiquity; the pavement inside them is the antiquity.

Above and around it lies the later synagogue, a bigger hall divided into three by two rows of columns, with a semicircular prayer niche at the southern end. Here the sources disagree, and the disagreement is not trivial. The parks authority says this building went on functioning with slight changes until the eleventh century. Dothan's own account, as summarised in both the Hebrew and English Wikipedia entries, counts four synagogues rather than three and has the last of them destroyed at the start of Abbasid rule in the middle of the eighth century, with houses built over the ruins afterwards.

One more layer of damage is recent. On the morning of 29 May 2012, staff arriving at the park found the mosaic smashed and sprayed with graffiti overnight, including slogans against the then director of the Israel Antiquities Authority and against excavation of Jewish graves. Dina Avshalom-Gorni, the authority's district archaeologist for the eastern Galilee and Golan, told Ynet the damage was irreversible and that the floor had stood for 1,600 years. Conservation work followed.

At the southern end of the park are the remains of Roman-period baths: stone arches that carried an upper structure which has not survived, and a plastered bathing pool. The parks authority says the bath area has not yet been excavated apart from those elements, so most of that corner of the site is still unknown.

The other building worth time is Ottoman. Hamam Suleiman was built in 1780, in basalt, during the rule of Jezzar Pasha over the Damascus district, and it served the people of the region and pilgrims coming to be healed in the water until 1944. Muslim geographers had recorded baths working here even in the eighth century, when the parks authority says there was no real settlement at Hammat but the bathing carried on regardless. The building is named for King Solomon, and Zev Vilnay recorded the folk explanation: Solomon set demons to stoke furnaces underground and made them deaf, so they never heard he had died and are heating the water still.

The hammam has been conserved, is air conditioned, and now works as a museum of how the bathhouse was used, with a separate antiquities display room elsewhere in the park. Haaretz reported in June 2025 that it had received a further and substantial restoration.

Across Route 90 is Hamei Tveria, the commercial spa. It draws on the same seventeen springs; the water arrives at about 60 degrees and is cooled to 37 or 38 degrees for the pools and baths, and it is a paying leisure and treatment complex with indoor and outdoor pools, saunas and a gym. It is not part of the national park, a national parks ticket buys nothing there, and its opening hours have nothing to do with the park's. The two are separated by a road and by about two hundred years of purpose.