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.[43] 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 many years were wont to be healed. But these pools have water which, when agitated, is of a kind of red colour.”
There had been a disposition in recent years to identify these twin pools with two souterrains or tunnels existing under the Convent of the Sisters of Sion at the north-west corner of the Haram area, but that fancy is now dissipated. The manner in which most of the previous speculations have been set aside by the actual discovery of the Pool of Bethesda is an instructive testimony to the value of excavation work in Jerusalem.
_A Tablet from Herod’s Temple._--Josephus, in his “Antiquities of the Jews,”[44] after describing the cloisters of the Temple and the Court of the Gentiles, goes on to describe the inner court, and the middle wall of partition which divided Jews from Gentiles. He says, “Thus was the first enclosure; in the midst of which, and not far from it, was the second, to be gone up to by a few steps. This was encompassed by a stone wall for a partition, with an inscription which forbade any foreigner to go in under pain of death.” Again, in his work on the “Wars of the Jews,”[45]--“When you go through these first cloisters, unto the second court of the Temple, there was a partition made of stone all round, whose height was three cubits. Its construction was very elegant; upon it stood pillars, at equal distances from one another, declaring the law of purity, some in Greek, and some in Roman letters, that no foreigner should go within the sanctuary,--for that second court of the Temple was called the Sanctuary, and was ascended to by fourteen steps from the first court.”