Category: News

Joe Lauer alerted me to two recent reports, one that announces that “King Herod has lost his claim to being the original contractor of certain ancient structures in the area” and another that reports about “Revelations of an ever-changing past”.

From these reports I understand that archaeologists found an underground wall and intersecting aqueduct, both built by the Roman 10th Legion a little east of the Jaffa Gate, and drew the conclusion that the Tower of David was not the Hippicus Tower built by Herod the Great:

“The archaeologists’ discoveries had major implications. For one thing, they determined that the current Tower of David was not an extension of Hippicus, but rather of the Phasael tower.”

According to Josephus, these towers were built in the First Wall and not in the Second Wall. They stood at the northwest corner of Jerusalem and protected the city and Herod’s Palace that was built to the immediate south. Hillel Geva has shown conclusively that the Herodian Tower in the Citadel Museum is the Hippicus Tower.

“You have to understand that a 150-year mistake has finally been corrected,” explains Sion, referring to the Hippicus hypothesis. Second, it seems that countless maps and drawings of the so-called second wall suddenly became irrelevant.”

The Second Wall, according to Josephus, began at the Gennath Gate, which had been excavated by Avigad some 400 meters to the east of the Jaffa Gate, and ended at the Antonia Fortress at the northwest corner of the Temple Mount. Some maps still show the Second Wall going north from somewhere near the Citadel (David’s Tower) and then turning east to keep Golgotha outside the city and then going north again in the direction of the Damascus Gate. It will be good to get this “kink” out of the line of the Second Wall, but I am not too optimistic about this as it takes a long time for publishers to catch up with the latest archaeological discoveries. This plan of Jerusalem published in Dan Bahat’s Atlas of Jerusalem still has the kink in it (see red arrow):

The “conceptual revolution about life in the city at the end of the Second Temple and Roman period (63 B.C.E.-324 C.E.)”, which the excavators claim to have made suddenly, however, had already been made by Avigad in the 1980’s, when he discovered the Gennath Gate and the beginning of the Second Wall in the area of the Cardo in the Jewish Quarter. The maps I have drawn for him and all subsequent maps of Jerusalem always showed that the Second Wall began at the Gennath Gate, which is located halfway between the presentday Jaffa Gate and the Temple Mount. The Second wall has been shown correctly, for example, in the New Encyclopedia of Archaeological Excavations in the Holy Land (1993):

I don’t quite understand their claim about the Hippicus Tower, which is a solid tower built on the bedrock. The masonry is Herodian and the 10th Legion’s aqueduct and wall in question does not come near the base of this tower. The fact that they acknowledge that an Herodian aqueduct may be located below the Roman aqueduct they found, proves that their claim about the Hippicus Tower still needs to be substantiated.

Archaeologists are up in arms against the planning of a new Museum at the western side of the plaza area. See this report in Haaretz.
Some, like Yoram Tsafrir, are dead against it, while others, such as Uzi Dahari and Guy Stiebel are in favour.
Yoram’s comments sound a little dramatic:

The construction will cause generations of weeping over the serious damage to the site, Tsafrir said at the conference on archaeological findings in the Jerusalem area sponsored by the Hebrew University’s Institute of Archaeology and the Antiquities Authority.

As we have seen with the reconstruction and integration of the Byzantine Cardo in the Jewish Quarter, it is possible for preserved remains to be incorporated into modern buildings.

Source: Joe Lauer

It was reported this morning by the Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Arutz 7 that “a section of an ancient city wall of Jerusalem from the 10th century bce—possibly built by King Solomon—has been revealed in archaeological excavations directed by Dr. Eilat Mazar and conducted under the auspices of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. The wall, 70 meters long and 6 meters high, is located in the area known as the Ophel, between the City of David and the southern wall of the Temple Mount.” Todd Bolen, in two reports, gives a good site map and overview of the wall remains that have been found in the Ophel area and the problems of their identification.

Although it is not entirely clear from the report where the excavated wall is located, it can only be a continuation of the city wall (or a deepening of the previously excavated area next to it) that was earlier discovered, first in the 1970’s and continued in 1985-7 under the auspices of the late Prof. Benjamin Mazar and his granddaughter Eilat. This city wall is attached to a monumental building and a possible gateway and large tower, which was already explored by Charles Warren in the 1860’s.

The possibility of having found an Iron Age gateway was proposed confidentially to Eilat Mazar by myself, but it was reported to the press before I was given a chance to explore this hypothesis (Jerusalem Post, April 22, 1986). The difficulty of identifying the building that was excavated by the late Prof. Benjamin Mazar with a gateway is that the chambers are constructed very differently from gate chambers of that period.

Whether this “newly” found wall belongs to the Solomonic or a later period in the Iron Age remains to be seen. What is interesting, however, is the construction of the wall. Most of the stones have roughly hewn bosses and irregular margins. The ashlars in the stone courses are laid in a header-and-stretcher construction. The masonry looks, in fact, identical to that of the “Extra Tower” or “Projecting Tower”, as Warren referred to this construction. This area was excavated by the late Dame Kathleen Kenyon (Area SII) in the 1960’s, who dated this tower, based on the archaeological finds, to the eighth century B.C. (Digging Up Jerusalem, p. 115). It appears therefore to be a strengthening of the fortifications in this area during that time. The masonry in the newly reported wall looks identical and therefore may date to the eighth century B.C. as well and may be a reconstruction of an earlier wall section.

Additionally, as I plan to explain in an upcoming article on the Golden Gate, this masonry is identical to the lower courses on either side of this gate in the Eastern Wall of the Temple Mount. I have argued before that the monolithic gate posts inside the Golden Gate belong to the original Shushan Gate, the gate in the Eastern Wall of the Temple Mount of the First Temple period, which was constructed by King Hezekiah in the eighth century B.C.

Despite the lack of clarity in the reporting on the excavation results of this wall, it is nevertheless exciting to have more evidence of the city of Jerusalem during the First Temple period.

UPDATE: “Everything speaks for itself” … is the remark made repeatedly by Eilat Mazar in this video on the Arutz 7 website.
However, all it speaks to me of is … that she dug deeper in previously excavated areas and did not discover anything major that wasn’t known before.
The picture of the wall with the header-and-stretcher construction belongs to the “Projecting or Corner Tower” and not to the “new” city wall, as the first reports appeared to indicate. This tower was already dated by Kenyon to the 8th century B.C., as noted above. More pictures can be seen on the Hebrew University’s Facebook.

It has been reported that “Professor Gershon Galil of the department of biblical studies at the University of Haifa has deciphered an inscription dating from the 10th century BCE (the period of King David’s reign), and has shown that this is a Hebrew inscription. The discovery makes this the earliest known Hebrew writing. The significance of this breakthrough relates to the fact that at least some of the biblical scriptures were composed hundreds of years before the dates presented today in research.”

Prof. Galil also notes that the inscription was discovered in a provincial town in Judea. He explains that if there were scribes in the periphery, it can be assumed that those inhabiting the central region and Jerusalem were even more proficient writers. “It can now be maintained that it was highly reasonable that during the 10th century BCE, during the reign of King David, there were scribes in Israel who were able to write literary texts and complex historiographies such as the books of Judges and Samuel.” He adds that the complexity of the text discovered in Khirbet Qeiyafa, along with the impressive fortifications revealed at the site, refute the claims denying the existence of the Kingdom of Israel at that time.

This conformation of the authenticity of the Bible and the existence of David’s kingdom with Jerusalem as its capital does not come as a surprise to Bible students. Some archaeologists have tried to rewrite the history of Israel from the ground up, i.e. based on archaeological evidence only. They now have to rethink their flawed theories, thanks to a humble potsherd.

Source: Joe Lauer