Five porches
John describes the place exactly:
"Now there is at Jerusalem a pond, called Probatica, which in Hebrew is named Bethsaida, having five porches. In these lay a great multitude of sick, of blind, of lame, of withered, waiting for the moving of the water."
John 5:2 to 3
Probatica means the sheep pool. It sat by the Sheep Gate on the north side of the city. Most Bibles call it Bethesda.
There, Jesus met a man "that had been eight and thirty years under his infirmity." He said to him, "Arise, take up thy bed, and walk. And immediately the man was made whole" (John 5:5 to 9).
A pool nobody could find
A pool is normally a rectangle, with four sides. Five porches made no sense. For centuries, nobody could find a pool in Jerusalem that fitted John's description, and it was treated as something he had made up.
"For centuries, the existence of a pool with five porches in Jerusalem was deemed fictional."
Two pools, one wall
In the nineteenth century, the German archaeologist Conrad Schick, an expert on Jerusalem's ancient water systems, dug near the Church of St Anne, by the old Sheep Gate. He found a large tank.
Later digs, in 1964, uncovered the rest. It wasn't one pool. It was two, side by side, divided by a stone dam.
Four sides around the outside. One wall down the middle. Put a covered porch along each, and there are five.
The pool of Siloam
John names a second pool. Jesus met a man who had been blind from birth:
"He spat on the ground, and made clay of the spittle, and spread the clay upon his eyes; and said to him: Go, wash in the pool of Siloe, (which is interpreted, Sent). He went, therefore, and washed, and he came seeing."
John 9:6 to 7
For centuries, visitors were shown a pool by a church that the empress Eudocia built in the fifth century. Where the pool of Jesus' day lay, nobody knew.
Found by a broken pipe
In June 2004, workers were repairing a large water pipe at the south end of the City of David, below the Temple Mount. During the work, archaeologists Ronny Reich and Eli Shukron spotted two ancient stone steps.
The steps belonged to a huge pool from the time of Jesus, about 70 metres long. It was fed by water from the Gihon Spring, carried through Hezekiah's tunnel.
The pool of Siloam, found in 2004, right where the old city of Jerusalem met its spring.
Why this is a big deal
John wasn't writing symbols. He was writing about real places he had walked past, down to the number of porches.
The pool dismissed as fiction turned out to have five sides. And the pool where the blind man washed was waiting under the street, until a broken pipe brought it back up.