Where the Jordan empties into the Kinneret (Sea of Galilee) is a marshy delta area, watered by a number of other streams including the Meshushim. There in 1904―on the eastern bank of the Jordan―a group of Crimean Jews made a valiant but short-lived attempt to engage in agriculture.
The area constituted the farm of a local pasha, Abd al-Rahman Baasha Al-Yusuf, known as the Beck, who was keen that the Jews would cultivate his land and after a year, in 1905, gave the sixteen families a lease until 1914. The families lived in tents and barrack-like buildings, whose ruins remain. They engaged in agriculture and fishing, and planted the eucalyptus trees that remain there today. After several months, various problems began to arise, exacerbated by the malaria that was endemic to the area before the drainage schemes of the later twentieth century. Many fell asleep and some died from the disease. The only way to get supplies and medicines was with the help of Arab boats, whose sailors demanded a high price. About a year after the settlers arrived, they were forced by circumstances to leave.
During the War of Independence Beit HaBeck became a Syrian outpost (there is still a large, uncleared mine field nearby. It was eventually captured in 1955 during Operation Olive Leaves (Operation Kinneret), a reprisal operation against fortified Syrian emplacements near the north-eastern shores of the Kinneret, prompted by repeated Syrian attacks on Israeli fishing, which resulted in the destruction of the Syrian emplacements.
Ariel Sharon (left), overall commander of Operation Olive Leaves, consults with Aharon Davidi (centre), commander of the 771 Reserve Paratroop Battalion and Company Commander Yitzchak Ben Menachem (right), who was killed during the assault [Credit: Israeli GPO photographer, 1955, public domain]
The buildings were partly-demolished at that time, though the main Beit HaBeck building remains inhabited by the Shneider family, which owns a herd of cattle brought in with the encouragement of the Nature and Parks Authority to control vegetation in the marshes, now part of the Majrase – Betiha (Bethsaida Valley) Nature Reserve.
Beit HaBeck remains partly inhabited today
But the site was inhabited long before this modern history took place! The valley shows much evidence of settlement from the early Bronze Age (over 3,500 years ago), and the area was well known during the Second Temple period and Early Christian times, when it was densely populated. We know that Bethsaida (בית צידה)―the hometown of the apostles Peter, Andrew, and Philip according to the gospel of John, the place outside which Jesus restored a blind man's sight according to Mark, and near which Jesus fed the five thousand according to Luke―was somewhere in the vicinity of this area. Pliny the Elder placed Bethsaida on the eastern side of the Kinneret, with Josephus―who knew the area well―placing it at a distance of 120 stadia (about 18 km) from the lake Semechonitis (Lake Hula), not far from the Jordan River as it passes into the Kinneret. According to Josephus, Bethsaida was later upgraded to a polis city by Herod Phillip and renamed Julias. Since the nineteenth century, three places have been considered as the possible location of Biblical Bethsaida, one of which is el-Araj, at Beit HaBeck. The others are the archaeological site of et-Tell, and the Bedouin village of Messadiye. While Messadiye―considered the least likely candidate―and el-Araj are closer to the Kinneret, et-Tell shows significant archaeological remains including fragments of fishing equipment, despite being 2 km from the lake, and has for decades been the favourite., with a number of plausible reasons being offered for its distance from the water, including the known retreat of the shore line.
Excavations at Beit HaBeck/el-Araj
In 2017, archaeologists announced the discovery of a Roman bathhouse at el-Araj, which suggests that the site was a polis in the Roman period. Above the Roman stratum, a Byzantine layer was separated from it by a layer of mud which indicated a break in occupation between 250 and 350 CE. The remains of a Byzantine church building were found in 2019, matching the description of Willibald, the Bavarian bishop of Eichstaett who visited the area around 725 AD and reported that a church at Bethsaida had been built on the site of Peter and Andrew’s home. Together these discoveries led the archaeologists to suggest that el-Araj is now the most likely candidate for the location of Bethsaida. You can see a documentary about their hypothesis below.