Ancient Town
Magdala
MAG-duh-luh · Modern Migdal, Israel · 32.8250° N, 35.5156° E
Magdala was a prosperous Jewish fishing town on the western shore of the Sea of Galilee in the 1st century AD, traditionally identified as the hometown of Mary Magdalene, one of Jesus's most prominent followers and the first witness to the resurrection.
Archaeology
The synagogue came to light in 2009 in a salvage excavation ahead of hotel building on the shore, directed for the Israel Antiquities Authority by D. Avshalom-Gorni and A. Najar; later seasons were run by the Kinneret Regional Project and by a Mexican team. It was in use before the destruction of the Second Temple in AD 70, which puts it among the small handful of synagogue buildings that were standing in Galilee during Jesus's own ministry, and it had frescoed walls and a mosaic floor. In September 2009 the same team lifted a stone bench in the main hall and found beneath it a carved limestone block about 60 cm long, now called the Magdala Stone. Its front carries a seven-branched menorah flanked by two-handled jars under an arch on pillars — the earliest known menorah carved by people who could have seen the real one in the temple — and its sides carry arcades and rosettes. What the block was for is genuinely open. Its excavators suggested a prayer table; M. Aviam reads it as the base of a table for reading the Torah; R. Hachlili has proposed an incense altar; R. Talgam and E. Reiner read the whole object as a three-dimensional evocation of Herod's temple, brought into a synagogue a long way from Jerusalem. M. Zapata-Meza has noted the plain difficulty that there is nothing else like it from the first century to compare it with, and D. Gurevich has argued for restraint, pointing out that rosettes and arcades also turn up in ordinary secular Herodian settings and do not automatically carry temple meaning. The town's identification as the Magdala of the Gospels is well supported. The link to Mary Magdalene rests on the place-name she is called by, not on any find here naming her, and readers should hold those two facts apart.
On a modern map
Further reading
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