Sea of Galilee

• 1. Introduction

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  The Sea of Galilee is the lowest freshwater lake on Earth. Only the Dead Sea, a salt lake, sits lower among the world's lakes. In October 2025, Israel began pumping desalinated water into this lake, a step no country had taken with a freshwater lake before. A lake that needs topping up with processed seawater raises some odd questions. Why does one small body of water carry so many names, from Kinneret to Tiberias to Minya? What forces opened the valley where it sits, and what older lakes came before it? Who has lived, fished, worshipped and fought along its shores? And how did a lake in a rift valley become a matter of national water policy and border disputes?

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• 2. A Lake of Many Names

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  The lake has taken its names from whichever settlement dominated its shores. When the fortunes of the towns changed, the lake's name changed with them. The modern Hebrew name, Kineret, comes from the Bible, where the sea of Kineret appears in Numbers 34:11 and Joshua 13:27. The name also turns up in the scripts of Ugarit, in the Aqhat Epic. Joshua 19:35 lists a city called Kinneret among the fenced cities.

  A persistent popular story ties the name to the Hebrew word kinnor, meaning harp or lyre, because of the lake's shape. Scholars consider that explanation likely wrong. They trace the name to the important Bronze and Iron Age city of Kinneret, excavated at Tell el-'Oreimeh. Even that city may have been named after the water, and nothing explains where the town's own name came from.

  The word Galilee comes from the Hebrew Haggalil, meaning the District. It is a shortened form of Gelil Haggoyim, the District of Nations, found in Isaiah 8:23. The city of Tiberias was founded on the western shore in 16 CE, in honour of the Roman emperor Tiberius. Afterwards the lake began to be called the Sea of Tiberias. John's Gospel joins the two names, calling it the sea of Galilee, which is the sea of Tiberias. Roman texts and the Jerusalem Talmud use the Tiberias form, and Arabic adopted it as Lake Tiberias.

  From the Umayyad through the Mamluk period, Arabic speakers called it Bahr al-Minya, the Sea of Minya. The name came from an Umayyad qasr complex whose ruins are still visible at Khirbat al-Minya. Medieval Persian and Arab scholars Al-Baladhuri, Al-Tabari and Ibn Kathir all used it.

  The Babylonian Talmud and the historian Josephus preferred another name, the Sea of Ginosar, after the small fertile plain of Ginosar on the western side. That name also derives from Kinneret. Among the Old and New Testament writers, all call the water a sea except Luke, who writes of the Lake of Gennesaret in Luke 5:1.

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• 3. Born of a Rift

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  About 20 million years ago, the ground along the northern part of the Syrian-African rift began to shift north to south. The lake lies in the center of the Jordan Valley, in northeast Israel, between the Golan Heights and the Galilee region. The valley was formed by the relative motion of the African and Arabian plates. That is why the area suffers earthquakes and, in the past, had volcanic activity. Abundant basalt and other igneous rocks still define the geology of Galilee.

  A second kind of movement came later. At the beginning of the Pleistocene, about 1.8 million years ago, stretching in the east-west direction caused the lake area to subside. The result was a basin with an asymmetrical bottom, steeper in the east and gentler in the west. In the southern part, an underwater cliff lies buried under the lake's sediments. It is distinct in the west and less so in the east.

  The present lake had two predecessors. Lake Ovadia was a much smaller freshwater lake. After it came Lake Lisan, which stretched from the northern Sea of Galilee to Hatzeva, more than 200 km south of the lake's present southern end. The Sea of Galilee took its current form less than 20,000 years ago, as Lake Lisan shrank and the land sank.

  Today the lake is about 53 km around, roughly 21 km long and 13 km wide. At its fullest it covers 166.7 square kilometres, and its deepest point is about 43 m. Underground springs feed it in part. Its main source is the Jordan River, which flows through it from north to south, with the outflow controlled by the Degania Dam.

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• 4. Shores of Faith and Trade

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  The cities of the Early Iron Age around the lake are tied to the kingdoms of the Bible. According to Sugimoto in 2015, the Iron Age IB cities of 1150-1000 BCE in the northeast likely reflect the activities of the Kingdom of Geshur. The later Iron Age IIA-B cities there are linked with the southern expansion of the Aram-Damascus kingdom. Among them were Tel Dover, Tel 'En Gev, Tel Hadar, Tel Bethsaida and Tel Kinrot.

  The Via Maris, an ancient road linking Egypt with the northern empires, ran past the lake. Greeks, Hasmoneans and Romans founded flourishing towns on its shores, including Hippos and Tiberias. The Roman-Jewish historian Flavius Josephus was so struck by the district that he wrote, "One may call this place the ambition of Nature." He also reported a thriving fishing industry, with 230 boats regularly working the water.

  In the New Testament, much of the ministry of Jesus takes place on these shores. Settlements and villages formed a continuous ribbon around the lake, with plenty of trade and ferrying by boat. Mark 1:14-20, Matthew 4:18-22 and Luke 5:1-11 describe how Jesus recruited four apostles here. They were the fishermen Simon and his brother Andrew, and the brothers John and James.

  Tradition places the Sermon on the Mount on a hill overlooking the lake. Many miracles are said to have happened here too: walking on water, calming the storm, the miraculous catch of fish, and the feeding of five thousand people at Tabgha. In John's Gospel, the sea is also the setting for Jesus' third post-resurrection appearance to his disciples, in John 21.

  In 135 CE, the Romans put down Bar Kokhba's revolt, part of the Jewish-Roman wars, and banned all Jews from Jerusalem. The center of Jewish culture and learning shifted to Galilee and the Kinneret, particularly Tiberias. In that region, the Jerusalem Talmud was compiled.

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• 5. Under the Surface

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  In 1986, a drought pulled the water back from the northwest shore and exposed an ancient fishing boat. It is known as the Ancient Galilee Boat, or the Jesus Boat, and dates to the 1st century AD. No evidence links it directly to Jesus or his disciples. Still, it shows the kind of vessel that fishermen among them may have used.

  Three years later, in 1989, remains of a hunter-gatherer site turned up under the water at the southern end, including mud huts at a place called Ohalo. About 3 km east of the lake, Nahal Ein Gev holds a village from the late Natufian period. It counts among the first permanent human settlements in the world, from a time before the Neolithic Revolution.

  A routine sonar scan in 2003 found something far larger, though the finding was published only in 2013. It is an enormous conical structure of boulders and stones, around 230 ft across, lying about 10 m underwater. Its estimated weight exceeds 60,000 tons. Estimates of its age range from 2,000 to 12,000 years, and researchers note that it resembles early burial sites in Europe. They think it was likely built in the early Bronze Age.

  In February 2018, archaeologists announced seven intact mosaics with Greek inscriptions. One inscription runs five meters, among the longest found to date in western Galilee. It names donors and church officials, including Irenaeus, bishop of Tyre in 445. Another mosaic names a woman as a donor to the church's construction, the first inscription in the region to mention a female donor.

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• 6. Empires and Borders

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  The palace of Minya rose beside the lake during the reign of al-Walid I, from 705 to 715 CE. By then the Byzantine Empire had lost control, and the area belonged to the Umayyad Caliphate and the Islamic empires after it. Apart from Tiberias, the major towns around the lake were gradually abandoned. In 1187, Sultan Saladin defeated the armies of the Crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem at the Battle of Hattin. He won largely by cutting the Crusaders off from the lake's valuable fresh water.

  The early Ottoman Empire gave the lake little importance. Tiberias saw a significant revival of its Jewish community in the 16th century, but declined until the city was destroyed in 1660. In the early 18th century, Daher al-Umar rebuilt it as the center of his rule over Galilee.

  In 1908, Jewish pioneers established the Kinneret Farm beside Moshavat Kinneret, close to the lake, to train immigrants in modern farming. Youth from the farm founded Kvutzat Degania in 1909-1910, popularly considered the first kibbutz. Kvutzat Kinneret followed in 1913, and Ein Harod, the first proper kibbutz, in 1921. That same year a group trained at the farm established Nahalal, the first moshav. Kvutzat Kinneret is the birthplace of Naomi Shemer, who is buried at the Kinneret Cemetery next to Rachel, two prominent national poets.

  In 1917, the British defeated Ottoman forces and took control of Palestine, while France took Syria. The allies then had to fix the border between Mandatory Palestine and the French Mandate of Syria. The Franco-British Boundary Agreement of December 1920 drew it across the middle of the lake. A commission redrew it. The High Commissioner of Palestine, Herbert Samuel, had sought full control of the lake. The final border, approved in 1923, gave Palestine the whole lake and both sides of the River Jordan. A 10-meter strip along the northeastern shore cut Syria off from the water.

  The geographer Gideon Biger names three factors behind the line: biblical-historical considerations, Zionist pressure to include water resources, and the human and physical landscape. The agreement kept existing Syrian water rights on the Jordan. Syria could build a pier at Semakh, and people from Syria and Lebanon kept fishing and navigation rights on the lake.

  On the 15th of May 1948, Syria invaded the recently founded state of Israel and captured territory along the lake. Under the 1949 armistice agreement, Syria occupied the northeast shoreline. The agreement stated that its line was "not to be interpreted as having any relation whatsoever to ultimate territorial arrangements."

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• 7. The Water Question

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  For years until the mid-2010s, about 400 million cubic meters of water a year went through the National Water Carrier. Israel formulated the plan in the 1950s, to supply the demand of a growing country, and completed the carrier in 1964. The Arab League opposed it and endorsed its own plan to divert the headwaters of the Jordan River. That clash sparked political and sometimes armed confrontations over the Jordan basin.

  In 1964, Syria attempted a Headwater Diversion Plan that would have blocked flow into the lake. Israel's attempt to block those efforts in 1965 was one of the factors behind the 1967 Six-Day War. In that war, Israel captured the Golan Heights, which hold some of the lake's water sources. Syria had kept the northeast shoreline until then.

  In 2016 the lake still supplied about 10% of Israel's drinking water. Under the Israel-Jordan peace treaty, Israel also sends 50 million cubic meters a year from the lake to Jordan. Heavy investment in conservation, reclamation and desalination later let Israel cut its draw sharply. Only about 25 million cubic meters was expected to be taken for domestic use in 2016.

  The water level is monitored and regulated, with three alarm lines. At 208.9 m below sea level, the upper red line, shore facilities start to flood. At 213.2 m, the lower red line, pumping should stop. At 214.4 m, the black line, irreversible damage occurs. Daily monitoring began in 1969, and the lowest level since then came in November 2001, at 214.87 m below sea level.

  The danger is real because salt springs lie under the lake. The weight of the freshwater above holds them in check. If the level falls too far, the lake risks irreversible salinization.

  After five years of drought up to 2018, the lake was expected to sink near the black line. In February 2018, the city of Tiberias asked for a desalination plant and a new water source. March 2018 saw the lowest water income to the lake since 1927. In September 2018, Israel announced a project to carry desalinated Mediterranean water to the lake through a tunnel, the largest of its kind in Israel. It would move 300 to 500 million cubic meters a year and is said to cost five billion shekels.

  Then the rains returned. During the 2018-19 season the level rose a record 3.47 m. The 2019-20 winter added 2.82 m. By April 2020 the lake stood just 16 cm below the upper red line. The desalinated water now flowing in is expected to add about 0.5 centimeters a month.

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• 8. Fish, Birds and Pilgrims

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  Fishing on these waters has supported a significant commercial fishery for more than two millennia. The Ministry of Water and Agriculture lists 10 families of fish in the lake, with 27 species in total, 19 native and 8 introduced. Local fishermen speak of four types: musht, which is tilapia; sardin, the Kinneret bleak; biny, the Jordan barbel; and the North African sharptooth catfish. The Galilean tilapia is locally called St. Peter's fish.

  In 2005, local fishermen caught 300 tons of tilapia. By 2009 the catch had fallen to 8 tons because of overfishing. One species found only in this lake, Tristramella sacra, used to spawn in the marsh. It has not been seen since the droughts of the 1990s, and conservationists fear it may be extinct. Those droughts, in the early and mid-1990s, dried out the marshy northern margin. Over-extraction of water may have worsened the stress, including supply to Jordan since 1994.

  BirdLife International has recognised the lake and its surroundings as an Important Bird Area. It supports black francolins and non-breeding griffon vultures. Many wintering waterbirds also come, including marbled teals, great crested grebes, grey herons, great white egrets, great cormorants and black-headed gulls.

  The 19th-century American traveler Alonzo Ketcham Parker called a visit to the lake "a 'fifth gospel' which one read devoutly, his heart overflowing with quiet joy." Christian pilgrims still come to see the places where Jesus is said to have performed miracles. In April 2011, Israel unveiled the Jesus Trail, a 40 mi route of footpaths, roads and bicycle paths. It ends at Capernaum on the lakeshore. Thousands of pilgrims also come every year to be baptized where the lake's water flows into the Jordan River.

  Every September, the Kinneret Crossing draws thousands of open water swimmers. On Lavnun Beach, visitors build rafts with their bare hands in an activity called Rafsodia, then sail them across the sea. The fertile belt around the lake grows bananas, dates, mangoes, grapes and olives. Near Kibbutz Ha'on on the lakeshore stands the Turkish Aviators Monument, erected in the Ottoman era. It commemorates pilots whose monoplanes crashed on the way to Jerusalem.

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