Tell Bethsaida (e-Tell) is situated 1.5 Km. off the northern shore of the Sea of Galilee. Bethsaida is one of the largest artificial mounds ever discovered on the Sea of Galilee.

Research revealed that Bethsaida was probably a fortified city known as Zer on the Sea of Galilee and mentioned in the Hebrew Bible. The town was located in the territory of Geshur which played a key role in the Kingdom of David. According to the Bible, David married Maachah, the daughter of Talmai, King of Geshur. Absalom, their son, stayed for sometime in the Geshurite city of his grandfather.

In 1839, the American scholar, Edward Robinson, suggested that a mound known as e-Tell, although set back from the Sea of Galilee, was probably the ancient city of Bethsaida. A few decades later, Gottlieb Schumacher, a scholar from the German colony in Haifa, maintained that it was implausible that a fisherman's village could be located so far from the Sea. Excavations and geological surveys began in 1987 and have concluded that Robinson was right. E-Tell is Bethsaida. Evidence now suggests that the Sea of Galilee in antiquity was larger than its present size and may have included a series of estuaries leading off a large lagoon just North of the present day coast (today it is the Bethsaida plain).