This morning about 10 of us went in to Jerusalem. Some went to church. Peter and I plan to go to church tomorrow, so we went to visit Paul Wright (you can find his books on Amazon), a friend of mine from student days at Hebrew Union College, and to take a short tour of Jerusalem. Paul is the Director of Jerusalem University College (JUC, formerly the Institute of Holy Land Studies), and he found a couple of graduate students who were willing to take us around.
Our guides were Aubrey and Vernon Alexander. They are just finishing their masters degrees from JUC and will return to the US later this month. They were very knowledgeable. I will not take time to write about all the places we saw, but I will show you just a few pictures of the numerous ones I took.
Excavation in the Old City is very difficult because it's all inhabited, of course. They took us to a place in the Old City, however, where Hezekiah's walls were discovered. The picture looks westward from outside the city wall and shows some remains of that wall. On the building next door is a sign with a map of Jerusalem and the walls at various times. The shaded area represents the walls in his day. Perhaps you can make out the short, bold, red line on the western side of the shaded area to show the section of the wall that has been exposed. This was the most vulnerable part of the city wall and where invading armies, including the Babylonians and Romans, always attacked first.
Hezekiah, you recall, greatly expanded the city walls in the 8th century BC to include the pool of Siloam, which received spring water from outside the city. At one point Scripture records that he had to tear down some houses in order to build the walls. This photo is at the same sight as the last paragraph, but looks eastward from inside the wall. Just on the outside of the wall you can see some smaller walls for small rooms. These are in fact remains of some of the houses that had to be torn down to build Hezekiah's wall.
We worked our way southward along the Western Wall of Herod's Temple. Here is a photo viewing the area called the City of David. David's city was shaped sort of like a tear drop with the point facing southward. The northern rounded edge was mountainous and served as a defensible area. This photo looks south eastward toward the very steep Kidron Valley. The city was on the eastern slope of the valley. The western slope was also inhabited. Ancient burial sites carved into the western slope are clearly visible from this vantage point, but not in this photo.
As we worked our way down, we came to an archaeological site that dates to the 10th century BC. Dr. Eilat Mazar, a renowned expert on Jerusalem archaeology, excavated this area and proved that it does indeed date back to the time of David and Solomon. This debunks, in my humble opinion, the radical scholars who for decades have been arguing that the whole biblical story of a king David and a united kingdom was a myth. This photo shows the ruins of a very important building. Some think it was a monument, but Mazar thinks it to be the palace of David. For a nice article, see here.
The next photo is just below the palace of David. Note the very steep wall. This seems to have been a retaining wall used in part to support the palace structure. This wall was severely destroyed by the Babylonians in 587/6 BC. They entered from the west, as I mentioned above; this was the last stronghold. Evidence of the destruction remains in the abundant rubble. Another interesting thing to note is the more yellowish stone in the top center - sort of v-shaped. These stones were put there when Nehemiah rebuilt the wall in the 5th century BC.
One last item in two photos. The photo on the left looks westward towards the retaining wall. The ruins of a house have been somewhat restored. The floor level is known from what survives around it. In fact, we know that the owner was named Ahiel, because artifacts recovered from the Babylonian destruction had his name on them. Stairs on the left, some still intact, show that it was a two-story house. The photo on the right is of a drawing (taken from the journal Qedem 19 [1984], plate 25, page 61) in a JUC brochure illustrating what the house might have looked like before its destruction by the Babylonians.
We are very grateful to Vernon and Aubrey for giving us the excellent tour. They are very dedicated Christians, and I pray God's blessing on them as they seek to serve him in the US.
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