Magdala — Aramaic Migdal Nunaya, "tower of the fish" — sits on the western shore of the Sea of Galilee, four miles north of Tiberias and seven miles south of Capernaum, on the narrow coastal strip beneath the Arbel cliff. It is named in all four Gospels as the home of Mary Magdalene, the disciple from whom seven demons had been cast out and the first witness to the risen Christ. Josephus (Jewish War 2.21.4) calls the city Tarichaeae — Greek for "salted-fish" — and reports a population of forty thousand at the outbreak of the First Jewish Revolt in AD 66. Marcela Zapata-Meza of Anáhuac University in Mexico and Dina Avshalom-Gorni of the Israel Antiquities Authority have co-directed the excavations since 2009, when construction work for a Catholic guesthouse uncovered the first-century synagogue. The recovered settlement is the most fully exposed first-century AD Jewish town on the Galilean shore. The synagogue at the center of the site is one of only seven pre-AD-70 synagogues yet identified anywhere — a small rectangular hall with frescoed walls, mosaic floors, and stone benches lining all four sides. The building is securely dated by a coin hoard sealed beneath the mosaic to the years immediately preceding the Revolt. Hellenistic-Roman housing blocks fan out to the north; four ritual baths have been excavated, fed by groundwater rather than by cistern collection — unusual for the region. Along the lakefront, a complex of stone-lined basins and salting tanks confirms the fish-processing industry that gave Magdala its Greek name. A pillared courtyard at the heart of the synagogue housed the carved limestone block now known as the Magdala Stone — recovered in 2009 and treated separately in this archive. The dig continues; the settlement is open to the public as the Magdala archaeological park. Sources: Marcela Zapata-Meza, "Magdala Archaeological Project Final Report" (Israel Antiquities Authority Reports, 2018); Dina Avshalom-Gorni and Arfan Najar, "Migdal: Preliminary Report" (Hadashot Arkheologiyot 124, 2013); R. Steven Notley, In the Master's Steps: The Gospels in the Land (Carta, 2014); Luke 8:2; John 20:1–18; Josephus, Jewish War 2.21.4.
Magdala provides rare material context for first-century AD Galilean Jewish life directly tied to Gospel narratives. Its pre-AD-70 synagogue — one of only seven identified — its ritual baths, and its fish-processing installations together illuminate the economic and religious environment in which the earliest Jesus movement emerged.