Magdala

Building anything on antiquities in Israel means a salvage excavation first, paid for by the developer and run under the Israel Antiquities Authority. In 2009 the developer was the Magdala project of the Legionaries of Christ, the plan was accommodation for pilgrims on the Galilee shore, and the excavation was directed by Dina Avshalom-Gorni with Arfan Najar. In September that year the shape of a rosette came up out of the soil on a limestone block, and the building it sat in turned out to be a synagogue in use during the first century.

That was not the expected outcome. Very few synagogues securely dated to the period when the Second Temple was still functioning have been excavated anywhere, and this one is unusually decorated: a hall of roughly 120 square metres in basalt and limestone, stone benches built against the walls, six columns, coloured frescoes on the plaster and a floor partly laid in mosaic. Coins recovered from it run, on the Magdala Center's own account, from 5 to 63 CE.

The commercial consequence is visible on the ground. Rather than lose the find, the complex was redesigned around it: the archaeological park, the visitor centre, the guest house and the prayer building now sit in a ring, and the excavated streets run between them. Digging has continued since, including seasons directed by Marcela Zapata-Meza of the Universidad Anáhuac México from 2010.

The Magdala Stone stood in the middle of the synagogue floor. It is a carved block roughly 0.6 m long, 0.5 m wide and 0.4 m high, and every face is worked. The front carries a seven-branched menorah on a decorated base, flanked by two-handled jars. The sides carry pillared arcades. The top has a rosette, palmette capitals, and a pair of concentric circles with tapering shapes beneath them.

What any of it means is genuinely open. Mordechai Aviam of Kinneret College reads the circles as the wheels of God's chariot and the shapes beneath as flame, and takes the block as the base of a Torah reading table. Rina Talgam of the Hebrew University agrees that the chariot is there and treats the whole object as a way of visiting the Temple without going to Jerusalem, a democratisation of it. Zeev Weiss, also of the Hebrew University, rejects both readings and thinks the stone was simply a rest for the Torah scroll when it was not being read, the raised corners keeping it from sliding off. The excavators who found it described the circles as rosettes, a royal emblem, and left it there.

None of that is settled, and the site does not pretend it is. What is not in dispute is the date, before the Temple was destroyed in 70 CE, and the fact that a small lakeside town had a building of this quality at all.

The synagogue is the headline, but the town around it is the reason the site holds attention for an hour. Excavations directed by Marcela Zapata-Meza uncovered four mikva'ot, stepped ritual baths built of basalt with mosaic-floored preparation rooms, arranged in two buildings either side of a street. They are unusual in Israel because they were filled from groundwater rather than from collected rainwater, which is what the halakhic requirement normally forces builders to arrange.

South of the synagogue runs a paved market street with shop rooms along one side, and merchants' houses with coloured mosaic floors still in place. Down at the water there is a stone wharf and a warehouse with storage vessels in its cellar. The harbour itself was worked on by the Franciscan Magdala Project under Stefano De Luca between 2007 and 2011, on the Franciscan-owned ground next door; the excavators recorded three phases of use, late Hellenistic, early to middle Roman and Byzantine, with quays and mooring stones surviving.

In December 2021 the University of Haifa announced a second Second Temple synagogue less than 200 metres away, found in advance of work on Highway 90 by the archaeologist Yehuda Govrin under the Zinman Institute's scientific supervision. It is plainer than the first: a square hall in basalt and chalk, a bench, six roof pillars, and a side room with a shelf that may have held scrolls. Adi Erlich, who leads the Zinman Institute, pointed out what two synagogues in one settlement do to the old assumption that Jews had little need of them while the Temple stood. That second building is not part of the visitor park, and the antiquities authority said at the time that opening it to the public would have to be discussed.

Magdala is one of the easier sites in the country to misread, because the excavated town and the devotional buildings interlock rather than sitting apart. The prayer centre, Duc in Altum, is entirely modern: designed by the Nakhla practice of Nazareth, its first stone blessed by Pope Benedict XVI in May 2009, inaugurated with the archaeological park on 28 May 2014. Its octagonal Women's Atrium has eight pillars, seven named for women who followed Jesus and the eighth left for women of faith in general. The main hall holds up to 250 people around an altar built in the shape of a boat, with the lake through the window behind it.

The exception is downstairs. The Encounter Chapel on the lower level is floored with the actual first-century pavement of Magdala's port and market area, excavated in place and left where it was found. The stone benches around it, by contrast, are modern work in an antique manner, and the large painting on the wall is a contemporary commission. A study in the journal Arts describes this deliberate blending of excavation and new build as the site's central device, and notes that the four mosaic chapels illustrate Gospel episodes that happened around the Sea of Galilee, none of which the New Testament actually places at Magdala.

That is not a complaint, and the mosaics are good. It is simply the distinction a visitor needs in order to know what is being looked at.

• Ancient and in place: the synagogue walls and benches, the market street, the merchants' houses and their mosaic floors, the four mikva'ot, the wharf and warehouse, and the Encounter Chapel floor
• Ancient but not here: the Magdala Stone itself, reported in December 2021 to be on show at the Yigal Allon Centre at Ginosar
• A copy: the stone standing in the synagogue
• Modern throughout: Duc in Altum and all its chapels, the boat-shaped altar, the mosaics, the Magdala Mosaic map of first-century Galilee, the visitor centre and the guest house

The Gospels call her Mary the Magdalene, and the standard reading is that the word is a place name meaning 'of Magdala'. The site is sold on that basis, and the whole Magdala project is built around it. It is also the weakest link in the chain, and the argument against it is made by a serious scholar in a mainstream venue.

Joan Taylor, writing in Biblical Archaeology Review in August 2022, argues that the town excavated here is Taricheae, the Greek name meaning a place where fish are salted, and that the early sources put Mary's Magdala elsewhere: a small village called Migdal Nunayya near Tiberias. On her reading the name Magdala attached itself to these ruins only in the Byzantine period, when Christian visitors wanted a location and chose one. Other scholars hold that Taricheae was also known as Magdala in Roman times; Taylor's reply is that there is no evidence for it.

What the ancient sources do put here is a battle. Josephus, who commanded in Galilee before changing sides, describes Vespasian moving on Taricheae in 67 CE with two thousand archers posted on the slopes of Arbel and his son Titus sent against the rebels on the plain. Those who got away by boat were run down on the water. Josephus writes that the lake afterwards was all bloody and full of dead bodies. Whatever the town was called, it was a working port with a fleet in it, and the coins recovered from the site suggest people went on living here long after the revolt was over.