this discovery, soon found a sister-pool, lying end to end, 60 feet long, and of the same breadth as the first. The first pool was arched in by five arches, while five corresponding porches ran along the side of the pool. At a later period a church was built over the pool by the Crusaders, and they seem to have been so far impressed by the fact of five arches below, that they shaped their crypt into five arches in imitation. They left an opening for getting down to the water; and further, as the crowning proof that they regarded the pool as Bethesda, they painted on the wall of the crypt a fresco representing the angel troubling the water of the pool.
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.[1] 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
- ↑ It would be legitimate to read "by the sheep-pool" instead of "by the sheep-gate."
