Genesis 35:21 names it as a village near Beit Lechem (Bethlehem), though some scholars claim it was actually an alterative name for Beit Lechem itself, as well as for the House of David, and cite Micah 4:8 in defense of this; I can see nothing in that text to corroborate the claim. The only argument I can think of is that Beit Lechem was not originally a town at all, but a shrine (Beit Lechem Ephratah: the temple of the Corn God of the Euphrates; i.e Tammuz) around which a town grew up; and perhaps the shrine was called Migdal Eder, or even, perhaps, the shrine had a tower, and the tower (Migdal - מגדל - is generally understood to mean a "tower") was called Migdal Eder.
The name is usually taken to mean "Tower of the Flock", which like so many of our English renderings is actually quite meaningless. Migdal (מגדל) in fact comes from the root Magad (מגד) = "nobility, honour, glory" and, as has been pointed out in the notes to Magdi-El (מגדיאל), the link to "tower" is erroneous. A Migdal was simply any royal city of the Beney Kena'an, and having a tower denoted its royalty, because the tower functioned both as a protectie watchtower and the place from which the observations of the heavens could take place; given that the Kena'ani (Canaanite) royal family also served as its priesthood, we can evince the title and duties of this particular local dynasty from its proximity to Beit Lechem.
Eder (עדר) does indeed mean "a flock", here not in the sense of sheep but in the sense of a congregation of worshippers.
Mary Magdalene in Aramaic was probably Mor-Yah or Mir-Yam of Magdala, the feminine equivalent of Migdal being, in her case, a small village in the north-west corner of the Sea of Galilee, about half a mile from the shore, and the same distance from Genaseret (which is probably where Jesus' family lived, not Nazareth), Kfar Nachum (Capernaum), where he was based at the start of his ministry (Matthew 4:13), and a short walk further to Tabgha, where he fed the five thousand (Mark 6:30-46).
Exodus 14:2 names a MIGDOL in the earliest part of the Mosaic journey across the wilderness: "Speak to the Beney Yisra-El. Tell them to turn back and make camp outside Piy Ha Chiyrot, between Migdol and the sea, before Ba'al Tsephon. Make your camp right up against it, on the sea side." Clearly a very different location from the above.
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