Lecture 5 -- Biblical Jerusalem’s Ancient Water Systems

Summary and Overview

One of the most exciting things about archaeology in Jerusalem
is that ongoing discoveries are constantly causing us to revise our
understanding of what the original city looked like.

In this lecture, we will talk about the water systems that supplied the City
of David. The main water supply was the Gihon Spring, which comes
out of the ground at the eastern foot of the hill of the City of David.
Unfortunately, because this spring is located at the foot of the hill inside a
valley, putting a fortification wall around it wouldn’t work because people
on the Mount of Olives, which is higher, could shoot over the wall. Thus, the
Jebusites placed their fortification wall halfway up the slope of the hill. This
leaves the water supply outside the walls, a serious problem during times
of siege.

During the Bronze and Iron Ages, three different water systems were built in
order to cope with this problem: Warren’s Shaft (named for the explorer who
discovered it), the Siloam Channel, and Hezekiah’s Tunnel. Warren’s Shait,
which seems to date from Jebusite times, led toma gigantic rock-cut pool
surrounded by massive towers. The description in the Hebrew Bible of
David’s conquest of Jerusalem may refer to this water system: The account
indicates that David’s men climbed up through the tsinnor to take the
city. In modem Hebrew, the word tsinnor means a pipe, such as a water
pipe, but in the Hebrew Bible, it’s not clear what this term means.

The second water system is the Siloam Channel. The Siloam Channel was
meant to provide a place for water to go when the massive pool associated
with Warren’s Shaft was full. It channeled the excess water through the
base of the Kidron Valley, where water could flow out and irrigate plots of
land. Another large pool for storing excess water was located at the very
southern tip of the City of David. Because this second system worked
together with the first, it also was probably Jebusite.

The most famous and latest of the three water systems is Hezekiah’s Tunnel,
built by this king of Judah in preparation for the Assyrian invasion and siege
of Jerusalem. The Hebrew Bible tells us that Hezekiah wished to prevent the
Assyrians from having access to the water from the spring that was flowing
through the Siloam Channel; thus, a new tunnel was built, one that was
completely underground and led to a pool inside the city Walls. (Hezekiah
also built a new fortification wall, more than 20 feet thick, to surround the
Western Hill, where people were living by his time.)

Hezekiah’s Tunnel winds its way in a very irregular, snaky manner for 500
meters underneath the City of David. What is so amazing is that the gradient,
the slope, of the bottom of this water tunnel, is only 0.6 percent-a difference
of only 30 cm from beginning to end. Furthermore, the tunnel was cut by
two teams of men, one starting at the Gihon Spring and the other at the outlet
end; both of those teams cut through solid bedrock underneath the City of
David and somehow met in the middle.

In the next lecture, we will look at the history and archaeology of the northern
kingdom of Israel.

Important Terms
Jebusites: The original (Bronze Age) population of Jerusalem.
Kidron Valley: Separates the Mount of Olives from the Temple Mormt and
the City of David.
tsinnor: Biblical Hebrew word perhaps referring to the Warren’s Shaft
system in the City of David.
Warren’s Shaft (along with the Siloam Channel and Hezekiah’s Tunnel):
Ancient water systems of Jerusalem.

Questions to Consider:
1. How did Jerusalem’s ancient inhabitants deal with the critical problem
of water supply and access?
2. How does archaeology complement or supplement our knowledge of
Jerusalem in the time of Hezekiah, as reported in the biblical account?

Lecture 5-Transcript
Biblical Jerusalem’s Ancient Water Systems

In our last lecture, we talked about the biblical city of Jerusalem, focusing on
the archaeological remains of the settlement in the City of David. What I’d
like to do now is continue talking about the archaeology ofthe City of David
focusing especially on the water systems which supplied the inhabitants of
the city.

The main water supply in biblical Jerusalem was the Gihon Spring, which
comes out of the ground at the eastern foot of the City of David just below
the area where Area g with the glacis and the Israelite houses that Yigal
Shiloh found are located. The problem is access to the water supply in the
Gihon Spring. All of our discussion is going to focus on the water in the
Gihon Spring.

What is the problem with the access to the water supply? This is actually
connected with the location of the city wall, the fortification wall of the City
of David. If we were to take a section looking through the City of David
from south to north it would look something like this, a ridge with the Kidron
Valley on the east and the Tyropoeon Valley on the west and cresting at the
top of the hill.

The Gihon Spring comes out of the ground at the foot of the eastern slope of
the City of David, so here is the problem. If you are building a fortification
wall around the settlement on this little hill, where are you going to put
that line of wall relative to the water in the spring? Ideally what you would
want to do is include the spring inside the fortification wall. The problem is
since the spring is located at the foot of the hill inside a valley, putting your
fortification wall around the spring isn’t really going to work well because
what it’s going to do is leave you vunerable to attack. People sitting a little
bit up on the slope of the Mount of Olives across from you for example are
going to be able to shoot easily over that line of fortification wall.

Therefore, the line of the fortification wall should be further up the slope.
Macalister, as we saw, thought that he found the line of the fortification wall
all the way at the crest of the hill, but that wasn’t the original fortification
wall of the Jebusite city. In fact, the fortification wall of the Jebusite city,
the original City of David, was found originally in excavations by Kathleen
Kenyon and later more of it in excavations by Yigal Shiloh in the 1970s
halfway down the slope of the hill. This actually makes very good sense
because strategically then the wall was located enough above the valley floor
so that people outside the wall can’t easily shoot over it.

Yet you are leaving enough space for settlement inside the line of that city
wall because that already is a very small hill. The farther up the hill you put
the wall the smaller area you have within the space of that wall. But this still
leaves a problem. The problem is your water supply is outside the line of the
city wall.

In times of peace that’s not a problem. You simply go out a gate in the wall
and down to the spring and collect your water and go back into the city.
The problem is in times of war, in times of siege. Because in times of siege
you will then have to go outside the fortification wall to get water exposing
yourself then to danger, to being killed by the enemy. So in biblical Jerusalem
then there was a major problem, a major concern with protecting the access
to the water supply in times of siege.

Over the course of the biblical period, that is over the course of the Bronze
Age and the Iron Age, three different water systems were built in order to
cope with this problem. These three systems are called as follows: the first
and earliest system is called Warren’s Shaft named after the early explorer
who discovered it; the next system is called the Siloam Chamiel; and the
third and latest of the three systems is called Hezekiah’s Tunnel. We are
going to start by talking about Warren Shaft, then the Siloam Channel, and
then Hezekiah’s Tunnel.

Let’s begin first with Warren’s Shaft. Warren’s Shaft is named after Charles
Warren, the explorer who discovered it. When we look at a cross-section
of Warren’s Shaft, what we see are a series of underground tunnels that go
underneath the city wall which is located about halfway up the slope of the
hill. The idea of Warren’s Shaft was to provide access to the water in the
spring without going outside the walls of the city, and therefore we have this
intricate series of underground tunnels.

One of the most exciting things about archaeology and especially working
in Jerusalem is the fact that ongoing discoveries are constantly causing us
to revise our understanding of what the original city looked like. This is
the case with Warren’s Shaft because for a very long time, from the time
of Warren’s original discovery until very recently, we thought that Warren’s
Shaft operated in the following way.

We thought that you entered the shaft partway up the slope inside the wall of
the city through an underground tunnel which led you down into a stepped
passage and then to a horizontal tunnel. When you reached the end of that
horizontal tunnel, there was a tall vertical shaft that went straight down to
yet another horizontal tunnel that would’ve brought water from the spring
to the base of the vertical shaft. The idea being that you would’ve walked
through the horizontal tunnel to the top of the vertical shaft, reached some
sort of wooden platform there, and then be able to drop down your bucket
down that vertical shaft to the water that flowed to the base of it, and pull
the water up and draw the water and go back into the city.

In other words, for a long time we thought that’s how Warren’s Shaft
worked. But excavations ongoing in Jerusalem in the last 10 to 15 years
have literally revolutionized our understanding of the way this water system
originally worked.

What we are looking at here is a plan that shows the old way we thought
Warren’s Shaft used to work.

That vertical shaft that used to be thought to be such an integral part of
Warren’s Shaft system is now known not to be part of the system at all. It
apparently is a natural shaft in the bedrock that was eaten away by the water
at some point that has nothing to do with the water system at all. So how did
Warren’s Shaft originally work? How did this system originally work?

Originally you entered Warren’s Shaft in the same way as we thought before.
That is you came in through the tunnel within the wall of the city, partway up
the slope of the hill through a sort of a stepped tunnel that led down to that
horizontal tunnel or passage. Instead of then reaching the top of that vertical
shaft, which is not part of the water system at all, you continued along and
reached the edge of a gigantic rock cut pool.

This gigantic rock cut pool stored water Hom the Gihon Spring, and when
you reached the edge of that pool you would then drop down your bucket
from some sort of a platform, iill it up, and then go back in through the
wall of the city. The ongoing excavations have brought to light not just this
gigantic rock cut pool, but also a series of massive towers that protected the
pool and also enclosed the spring. The size of the pool and the size of the
towers is hard to describe.

We are looking at a picture of a small corner of this rock cut pool. This water
system then is a massive water system, much bigger and more monumental
then we ever suspected. So that is how the system worked. We know now
how the water system worked.

Next question is: What is the date of this water system? One possibility is
that it dates to the time of David and Solomon. Yigal Shiloh, who conducted
excavations in the City of David, thought that the system must date to the
time of David and Solomon on the basis of parallels with water systems at
other Israelite sites. I think that most scholars probably agree that this system
dates to the middle Bronze Age; that is to about 1800 B.C., which means
that it was part of the Jebusite system of Jerusalem. So this was a water
system that was functioning under the Jebusites and which then continued to
function after David comes in with the Israelites and they take over the city
and settle in it.

In addition there is a controversy about the identification of this water system
relative to a passage or an episode that’s described in the Hebrew Bible and
specifically that is the conquest of Jerusalem by David. Remember that it
was David who took Jerusalem from the Jebusites. Before the time of David,
the Israelites had not been able to take Jerusalem because, according to the
biblical account, it was such a strongly fortified city.

So the biblical account describes David’s conquest of Jebusite Jerusalem, and
the passage is very interesting because it might actually include a reference
to this water system. “And the king and his men went to Jerusalem against
the Jebusites, the inhabitants of the land, who said to David, ‘You will not
come in here, but the blind and the lame will ward you oft",-thinking,
‘David cannot come in here.’ ” So in other words the Jebusites are mocking
David and his army; our city is so strongly fortified that even blind men and
lame men can keep you from conquering it.

Nevertheless David took the stronghold of Zion, that is, the City
of David. And David said on that day, “Whoever would smite the
Jebusites, let him get up the [and now we get a Hebrew word]
tsinnor to attack the lame and the blind, who are hated by David’s
soul.”   And David dwelt in the stronghold and called it the City
of David.

In another passage we are told that it was David’s general Joab son of Sirah
who managed to climb up through this tsinnor.

In other words the biblical account suggests that David’s army was able
to take Jerusalem by climbing up through something called a tsinnor. The
problem is what is a tsinnor? This is the only place in the Hebrew Bible
where this word occurs. In modem Hebrew the word “tsinnor” means a pipe
like a water pipe. But in the Hebrew Bible it’s not clear what this term means.
Some scholars have suggested that maybe tsinnor is Warren’s Shaft system
and that maybe what happened is that the Israelites were able to take the city
by climbing up through this water system, entering the city and then opening
the gates to the Israelite army.

If this is the case, then the tsinnor that is referred to in this passage is Warren’s
Shaft system. Remember, by the way, that the system apparently was built in
the time of the Jebusites, so it actually would’ve already existed and been
functioning when David took the city.

The second water system is the Siloam Channel. The Siloam Channel is
very different from Warren’s Shaft. It is a channel that starts again at the
Gihon Spring and runs outside the wall of the city at the foot of the Kidron
Valley to a big pool at the southern tip of the City of David. Here’s the
question: Why do you need a second water system; that is why is the Siloam
Channel necessary?

The Gihon Spring is a kind of a spring that gushes and abates, water gushes
and abates. What happens is that the water gushes and as it starts to flow,
some of it was stored in that gigantic rock cut pool that has recently been
discovered. But what happens when that pool is full and the spring continues
to gush forth; that is, what do you do with the excess water from the spring?
You must provide an outlet for the excess water. That’s exactly what the
Siloam Channel was.

The Siloam Channel was the access for the excess water from the Gihon
Spring. When that gigantic pool, rock cut pool, next to the Gihon Spring
was filled up, the extra water then was channeled into the Siloam Charmel
through the base of the Kidron Valley where there were openings in the
charmels so that water could flow out and irrigate plots of land in the valley.
Then linally at the very southern tip of the City of David there was another
very large pool for storing all of that excess water, and that pool is called the
Siloam Pool or Pool of Siloam, and we will come back and talk about that
as well.

The remains of the Siloam Charmel are known and can actually be seen
today running along the eastern foot of the City of David through the Kidron
Valley, and in some places you can see it cut into bedrock with massive stone
slabs still covering the top of the Charmel. There’s a question then: What is
the date of the Siloam Channel‘? Actually the date of the Siloam Channel
must be the same as the date of Warren’s Shaft because the two worked
together. Because the whole idea, the whole point of the Siloam Charmel is
to carry off the excess water from the Gihon Spring; so whatever the date is
of Warren’s Shaft must also be the date of the Siloam Channel.

If Warren’s Shaft is from the time of David and Solomon, then so is the
Siloam Channel. But again most likely Warren’s Shaft is from the middle
Bronze Age, and therefore the Siloam Channel should also be dated to the
middle Bronze Age.

The most famous and latest of these three water systems is Hezekiah’s
Tunnel. This tunnel was made in the time of King Hezekiah. Hezekiah was
the King of Judah at the end of the 8th century B.C. In preparation for the
Assyrian invasion and siege of Jerusalem in 701, Hezekiah built this water
system. The water system still functions today, still has water flowing through
it, and in fact visitors to Jerusalem often walk through Hezekiah’s Tunnel as
part of their visit.

The tunnel is very interesting because it winds its way in a very irregular,
snaky manner underneath the City of David beginning at the Gihon Spring,
on the northeast side of the City of David, and ending on the southwest side
of the City of David, all of it cut through solid bedrock underground. In fact
the tunnel winds for a distance of about 500 meters, although the distance
between the beginning point and the end point are only 300 meters, a meter
is about a yard. So the crow flies, as the crow flies, it’s only about 300 meters
from beginning to end, but the actual length because it winds around so much
is over 500 meters.

What is so amazing is that the gradient, the slope, of the bottom of the tunnel,
this water tunnel, the gradient is only 0.6 percent from beginning to end.
That’s a difference of only 30 cm from the beginning till the end. This is
really an engineering feat.

Today you can walk through Hezekiah’s Tunnel, and when you do you’re
walking through with the water usually up to about the level of your hips.
One of the interesting things as you walk through the tunnel is that you can
see how it was made, and we actually know and we’re going to see that
the tunnel was cut by two teams of men; one team starting at the Gihon
Spring and the other team starting at the outlet end, and both of those teams
cut through solid bedrock underneath the City of David winding their way
around and somehow met joined up in the middle.

How they met, how they joined up, we don’t know. Some scholars have
suggested that maybe they were following a natural crack in the bedrock
through which water was already flowing. I actually don’t believe that, and
the reason is as you walk through Hezekiah’s Tunnel today you can see
places where there are false starts, cuttings in the bedrock where they started
to go off in a different direction. If they were following already an existing
crack with water flowing in it, then why would you have false starts.

So we really don’t know exactly how these two teams of men managed to
wind their way cutting through solid bedrock and meet up somehow in the
middle. It’s an engineering feat that we actually don’t understand. One of the
interesting things too, as you walk through the tunnel, is that you notice that
the ceiling is higher in some points, lower in some points, sometimes it’s so
low that you have to stoop a bit as you walk through it. Sometimes it gets
very high and yet the gradient of the floor is that very, very gentle gradient.
They managed to keep that floor level a very gentle gradient from beginning
to end.

One of the questions about Hezekiah’s Tunnel is: Why did he make this
new water system? When Hezekiah became King on the eve of the Assyrian
invasion, there already were two perfectly good functioning water systems
in Jerusalem; Warren’s Shaft and the Siloam Channel were still working. So
why did Hezekiah make a new water system when the other two were still
functioning perfectly well?

The Hebrew Bible actually tells us why. Let us now see what the Hebrew
Bible says and try and Understand it.

When Hezekiah saw that Sennacherib [that’s the Assyrian king]
intended to attack Jerusalem, he planned with his civil and military
officers to stop up the water of the springs outside the city; and they
helped him. They gathered together a large number of people and
stopped up the springs and the stream which flowed through the
land. “Why should the kings of Assyria come here and find much
water?” they asked.   Hezekiah closed the upper outlet of the
waters of Gihon and directed them down to the west side of the City
of David.

This passage explains exactly the problem. The problem was not that the two
water systems weren’t working. The problem was the Siloam Channel. The
Siloam Channel was a non-defensive system located outside the walls of the
city. When the Assyrians came and besieged the city then, they would’ve had
access to water from the spring, the water from the spring that was flowing
through the Siloam Channel. Hezekiah didn’t want the Assyrians to have
access to that water, so they stopped up the Siloam Channel. But if you stop
up the Siloam Channel, you still have the problem that you have to provide
an outlet for the excess water from the spring.

So they built a new tunnel, one that was completely underground, and
one that led to a pool that was inside the walls of the city so that when the
Assyrians came and besieged the city, they would not have access to the
water from the spring. The story actually continues, because in 1880 a little
Arab boy from the local village was playing at the outlet end of Hezekiah’s
Tunnel that is the end where the tunnel ends up with a pool which is today
called the Pool of Siloam. There’s still a pool there. It’s a different Pool of
Siloam than the original one, than the one that was at the outlet of the Siloam
Channel, but there’s a pool now at the end of Hezekiah’s Tunnel called the
Pool of Siloam.

A little Arab villager was playing, a little boy was playing in the outlet in
there, in the area of the Pool of Siloam, and just inside looked up and saw
an inscription on the wall. That inscription then was removed and eventually
was taken to Istanbul, because in 1880 Palestine was part of the Ottoman
Empire. This inscription was taken to Istanbul, the capital of the Ottoman
Empire, and was put on display in the archaeological museum in Istanbul
where it remains on display until today.

This inscription is an inscription that dates to the time of Hezekiah, to the late
8th century B.C. It is written in Biblical Hebrew script and Biblical Hebrew
language and it describes the completion of Hezekiah’s Tunnel and here is
what it says.

This is the story of the boring through. While [the tunnelers lifted]
the pick-axe each toward his fellow and while 3 cubits [remained
yet] to be bored [through, there was heard] the voice of a man
calling his fellow-for there was a split [or overlap] in the rock on
the right hand and on [the left hand].

In other words this is describing that moment when the two teams of men are
so close together that they can hear each other’s voices through the bedrock,
but they haven’t yet actually reached each other.

“When the tunnel was driven through, the tunnelers hewed the rock, each
man against his fellow, pick-axe against pick-axe. And the water flowed from
the spring toward the reservoir for 1,200 cubits. The height of the rock above
the head of the tunnelers was a 100 cubits.” So this is a very important and
very interesting inscription that dedicates the completion of this monumental
water tunnel.

Ongoing excavations in the area of the City of David are bringing to light
another part of ancient Jerusalem’s water system, because the outlet today
of Hezekiah’s Tunnel is called the Pool of Siloam. But that pool as you see
it today, and which many visitors to Jerusalem see and visit, dates to the
Byzantine period, that is to the 5th and 6“‘ centuries A.D. It’s centuries later
than the time of Hezekiah.

What did the original Pool of Siloam look like‘? Excavations in the area of
the City of David for the last, let’s say, five to ten years have been bringing
to light a monumental pool that is an earlier version of the Pool of Siloam,
not from the Byzantine period, but from the late Second Temple period.
Specifically what we have here is a gigantic pool, much larger than the
Byzantine pool is, that is surrounded by rows of steps. The rows of steps
by the way indicate that this was not just a pool used for storing water, for
drinking, and for general purposes, but that this pool was also used as a
Jewish ritual bath, something that we will be discussing later in this course.

What’s so exciting about this is that this Pool of Siloam that is now coming
to light, which is so big and which has steps going all around it, is a pool that
dates to the time of Jesus. In other words, this pool that is coming to light
is the Pool of Siloam that existed when Jesus was in Jerusalem. This is so
important because of course we have a passage in the fourth gospel John that
talks about Jesus performing a miraculous healing at the Pool of Siloam.

And it says,

And he [Jesus] passed along and he saw a man who had been blind
from his birth.   And as he said this, he spat on the ground and
made clay with the saliva, and he put the clay on the man’s eyes,
and said to him, “Go and wash in the Pool of Siloam”--a name
which means One who has been sent in Hebrew Shiloah. So he
went and washed them, and went home able to see.

So if we want to imagine the setting for this story as told in John, then we
should imagine this gigantic Pool of Siloam that is now being brought to
light in archaeological excavations in the City of David.

In advance of the Assyrian attack and siege of Jerusalem, Hezekiah not only
built a new water system, but he also built a new fortification wall, not a
new fortification wall around the City of David, which had perfectly good
existing fortification walls, but a different fortification wall to surround the
western hill, because by the time of Hezekiah people were now living on
the western hill. Originally when David takes Jerusalem, the city consists
only of the City of David and then Solomon expands the city to the
Temple Mount.

By the time of Hezekiah, by the late 8“‘ century B.C., people were now
living on top of the western hill and that part of Jerusalem was not fortified.
Remains of this fortification wall were brought to light in excavations in
Jerusalem in the 197 Os, and this wall is so thick, over 20 feet thick, that the
excavator called it The Broad Wall.

One of the most interesting things about talking about biblical Jerusalem is
talking about the modern exploration of the city of Jerusalem. We are greatly
indebted to l9“‘ century explorers who went through the city under very
difficult conditions and mapped and explored it and documented remains that
in many cases are no longer preserved. One of these early explorers was a
British explorer named Captain Charles Warren. We’ve already talked about
Warren in relation to Warren’s Shaft.

In addition to documenting, to finding and documenting Warren’s Shaft,
Warren also surveyed Hezekiah’s Trmnel in the year 1867. What he did is
to go through the tunnel and make a plan of it, documenting it completely,
and he took in an assistant and they went through this tunnel. Today when
you walk through Hezekiah’s Tunnel, it’s actually a very easy and kind of
fun thing to do. It takes about a half an hour to walk through it now, and you
take your flashlight and you walk through and no problem at all. But in 1867,
walking through Hezekiah’s Tunnel was not nearly so easy.

Charles Warren has left us a description of his exploration of Hezekiah’s
Tunnel, and I would like to read it with you because it is actually funny for
some of the wrong reasons. I’m sure it wasn’t funny to him. But reading
it today, not only shows how difficult this exploration was, but also shows
how determined Warren was to complete his scientific investigation of this
water system.

In the month of December 1867, I [that’s Charles Warren] made a
thorough examination and survey of the passage leading from the
Virgin’s Fount [that’s the Gihon Spring] to Siloam [i.e. the Pool of
Siloam]. We entered from the Siloam end, so as to have as much
clean work as possible. [In other words they started from the end of
the Pool of Siloam, the outlet, the reason being that the ceiling there
is higher than at the beginning end.] For the first 350 feet it was
plain sailing. ...  At 450 feet the height of the passage was reduced
to 3 feet 9 inches. ...  At 600 feet it is only 2 feet 6 inches high.

Our difficulties now commenced. Sergeant Birtles [who was the
assistant] with a Fellah [a local villager] went ahead, measuring with
tape, while I followed with compass and field book. The bottom is
a soft silt, with a calcerous crust at the top, strong enough to bear
human weight, except in a few places, where it let us down with a
flop.   We were now crawling on all fours, and thought we were
getting on very pleasantly, the water being only 4 inches deep, and
we were not yet wet higher than our hips. Presently bits of cabbage-
stalks came floating by, and we suddenly awoke to the fact that the
waters were rising.  ...

The rising of the waters had not been anticipated, as they had risen
only two hours previous to our entrance. At 850 feet the height of
the channel was reduced to 1 foot 10 inches, and here our troubles
began. The water was running with great violence, l foot in height,
and we, crawling full length, were up to our necks in it. I was
particularly embarrassed: one hand necessarily wet and dirty, the
other holding a pencil, compass, and field-book; the candle for the
most part in my mouth. Another 50 feet brought us to a place where
we had regularly to run the gauntlet of the waters. [They had to go
completely under water.] The passage being only 1 foot 4 inches
high, we had just 4 inches breathing space, and had some difficulty
in twisting our necks around properly. When observing, my mouth
was underwater.  ...

We were now going in a zigzag direction towards the northwest,
and the height increased to 4 feet 6 inches, and at 1100 feet we were
again crawling with a height of only 1 foot 10 inches. We should
probably have suffered more from the cold than we did, had not
our risible faculties been excited by the sight of our Fellah in front
plunging and puffing through the water like a young grampus. [So
they are trying to keep up with their villager there.]

At 1150 feet the passage again averaged in height 2 feet to 2 feet
6 inches; at 1400 feet we heard the sound of water dripping.
At 1450 feet we commenced turning to the east, and the passage
attained a height of 6 feet; at 1658 feet we came upon our old friend,
the passage leading to the Ophel Shaft, [that is Warren’s Shaft] and,
after a further advance of 50 feet, to the Virgin’s Fount [that is to
the Gihon Spring].

We conclude this lecture then by talking about the difficulties of the early
explorers in finding these water systems, documenting these water systems,
and it’s to them that we owe much of our information about the early history
and archaeology of Jerusalem. We’ve now spent quite a bit of time looking
in detail at the history and archaeology of Jerusalem in the biblical period.
What l’d like to do next time is turn outside of Jerusalem and look at the
northern kingdom of Israel at what everyday life was like in the northen
kingdom and what we know about the history and archaeology of the
northen kingdom of Israel.

Lecture 4 -- The Jerusalem of David and Solomon

Summary Overview

In 1993 at Tel Dan, in the very northern part of the country, excavators
found part of a stele, a big inscribed stone, which actually mentions the
House of David and dates to the middle of the 9th century B.C.

In this lecture, we will look at the archaeology of Jerusalem in the biblical
period, focusing especially on the time from David and Solomon to 586
B.C. When we talk about biblical Jerusalem, people often ask about the
remains of Solomon’s Temple-the First Temple-which originally stood on
top of the Temple Mount. Unfortunately, we don’t have any archaeological
remains at all of this building, though we have descriptions of it in the
Hebrew Bible.

We do, however, have archaeological remains in the City of David that go
back to the time of David and Solomon and even earlier. Those remains are
concentrated on that little spur to the south of the Temple Mount that was the
original Jebusite city of Jerusalem. There have been excavations during the
last century focusing on the northern part of this site, which was higher in
elevation than the rest of the City of David. Here, a massive step-stone glacis
(slope or incline) has been discovered, which would have supported some large
structure further up the steep slope. Recently, remains of a monumental
building have been found above the glacis. Probably this structure was part of
the original acropolis of the city before Solomon extended the city to the
north to include the Temple Mount.

Excavations have also revealed in the City of David the remains of Israelite
houses dating to as early as the 8th and 7th centuries B.C. In some of these
houses have been found clay figurines that almost always depict a woman naked to the
waist and cupping her breasts under her hands. Thus, we have some physical
evidence for the very kinds of pagan practices that the prophets warned the
Israelites about. And we know these houses could have been Israelite because
in at least one of them was found more than 50 bullae with Hebrew names
written on them. Bullae are clay seals for scrolled documents.

At least one bulla seems to refer clearly to a person mentioned in the Hebrew
Bible, Gemaryahu, son of Shaphan. This name is unusual, and a passage
in Jeremiah refers to a scribe with this very name. Further, a scribe is the
sort of person we would expect to use a personal seal on documents. This
Gemaryahu was active in the court of the king of Judah roughly around 600
B.C., and the excavated house was destroyed in 586 B.C., so the dates fits
very nicely together. We can say, therefore, with about as much certainty as
possible, that this seal was affixed by the same figure who is mentioned in
the book of Jeremiah.

We have talked in this lecture about Jerusalem in the biblical period, focusing
especially on the remains in the City of David. In our next lecture, we’ll look
at the water systems that supplied the biblical city of Jerusalem.

Important Terms
bullae: A clay sealing.
glacis: In general, a plastered mound of earth piled around a town, with a
fortification wall on top; a rampart.

Questions to Consider
1. What does archaeology tell us about Davidic and Solomonic Jerusalem-
and, by way of extension, about David and Solomon?

2. What do the finds from houses of the 8th-7th centuries B.C. in the City of
David tell us about the Israelite population of Jerusalem?

Lecture 4-Transcript
The Jerusalem of David and Solomon

In our last lecture, we surveyed the history of biblical Jerusalem focusing
especially on the period from the reigns of David and Solomon and ending
with the Babylonian destruction in 586 B.C. This sets the stage for looking
at the archaeology of Jerusalem in the biblical period, focusing especially on
this very same time from David and Solomon to 586 B.C.

What I’d like to do in our first lecture on biblical Jerusalem is look at the
archaeological remains of the settlement in the city and then in the next
lecture look at the water systems that supplied biblical Jerusalem. The first
thing that people want to know when we talk about biblical Jerusalem is
what remains do we have of Solomon’s Temple, the First Temple, which
originally stood on top of the Temple Mount. Unfortunately we don’t have
any archaeological remains at all of this building.

We do however have literary references to Solomon’s Temple, specifically
descriptions in the Hebrew Bible, and we can also get a sense of what the
temple looked like or might’ve looked like by comparing it with contemporary
ancient temples, something that we will be doing in some of our lectures.
When we look at the biblical city of Jerusalem we see the Temple Mount
physically dominating the City of David and we have to imagine Solomon’s
Temple originally sitting on top of that high place overlooking the city and
next to it and just a little to the south of it originally his palace.

So what do we have in the way of literary sources? We have the biblical
account. Although we have quite a detailed description in the Hebrew Bible,
it is nevertheless difficult for us to put together the elements as they would’ve
originally existed. One of the interesting things about Solomon’s Temple is
who it was constructed by.

The Hebrew Bible actually tells us that Solomon’s Temple was built using
workmen from Phoenicia. Specifically the biblical passage reads, “Now
King Hiram of Tyre sent his servants to Solomon, when he heard that they
had anointed him king in place of his father; for Hiram had always been a
friend of David.” One of the interesting things parenthetically to note about
this passage is that what we have here is a Phoenician king ruling over the
city of Tyre. Remember that Phoenicia was just to the north of the Israelite
kingdom and that Solomon. in fact. had intermarried with princesses of the
neighboring kingdoms including Phoenician princesses in order to form
political alliances.

So the biblical passage continues, “Solomon sent word to Hiram, saying, …  
‘I intend to build a house for the name of the Lord my God. … Therefore
command that cedars from the Lebanon be cut for me … for you know that
there is no one among us who knows how to cut timber like the Sidonians.' ”
Well this is again very interesting for the following reason. First of all not
only is Solomon forming an alliance with the Phoenician king, but also
importing raw materials, cedars of Lebanon, which of course were desirable
because they were the longest pieces of wood in the area that you could
obtain and also the expertise to cut and shape those wooden timbers by
bringing workmen from Phoenicia as well.

It’s clear that Solomon’s Temple, even though we don’t have physical
remains of it, would’ve incorporated both Phoenician materials and also
some Phoenician elements, for example, in the style of architecture and in
the decoration. If we can’t say much archaeologically about the remains of
Solomon’s Temple, the situation is actually different when it comes to the
biblical city of Jerusalem and specifically the City of David because we do
have archaeological remains in the City of David that go back to the time of
David and Solomon and even earlier.

Those remains are concentrated on that little spur to the south of the Temple
Mount, which was the original Jebusite city of Jerusalem. There have been
some excavations conducted around the area of the City of David over the
course of let’s say a century or so. Most of those excavations however have
focused on the northern part of the City of David; that is the area just to the
south of the Temple Mount. Remember what the configuration of bedrock is
in this area; that the bedrock rises up as you go north and slopes down as you
go south to the southern tip of the City of David.

In other words, excavations in the City of David have focused not only at the
northern end of the area of this hill, but at the end that was physically higher
in elevation than the rest of the City of David. The reason this is important
is because likely this is the same area where the original acropolis of the city
was located before Solomon extended the city to the north to include the
Temple Mount. This is something we will be returning to in a little while.

The area that has been so intensively investigated is located specifically
on the northeastern side of the city, the area around the Gihon Spring and
the area above the Gihon Spring; that is the slope of the hill going up to
the crest above the Gihon Spring. This area has been explored by various
archaeological expeditions over the course of a number of decades. In fact,
the first archaeologist to come and investigate this area at the crest of the hill
on the northern side was a British archaeologist named Robert Macalister
who came here in the 1920s.

In the 1960s, another archaeologist, British archaeologist named Kathleen
Kenyon, conducted excavations here as well. In the 1970s, an Israeli
archaeologist named Yigal Shiloh investigated this very same area.

What did Robert Macalister find back in the 1920s, the very first archaeologist
who excavated at the crest of the northern end of the City of David? Robert
Macalister came to the City of David looking for the Jebusite fortifications.
Macalister literally came to the City of David with a spade in one hand and
with the Bible in the other hand. He knew from reading the biblical account
that the City of David under the Jebusites was strongly fortified, so strongly
fortified that the Israelites were not able to take the city until the time
of David.

Macalister, knowing that there were Jebusite fortifications, came and looked
for those Jebusite fortifications. He started to dig on top of the crest of the hill
or very close to the top of the crest of the hill and ahnost immediately came
down on the remains of a city wall, a fortification wall with two towers. On
the basis of no good archaeological evidence really, Macalister automatically
ass-tuned that this must be the Jebusite fortification wall, and so he dated it to
the Jebusite period, the biblical period.

In the 1960s, Kathleen Kenyon came to the same area and conducted
excavations just underneath the wall that Macalister found. While excavating
the wall she found that it dates not to the Jebusite period, that is not to the
biblical period, but instead much later. It dates to the Second Temple period.
It dates to after 586 B.C.

Kathleen Kenyon then re-dated the wall. Not only did she re-date the wall
though, but she found that the wall sits on top of a massive step-stone
structure which archaeologists sometimes describe as a glacis. It looked to
Kathleen Kenyon as though this step-stone structure or glacis had been built
to buttress the city wall above and so she dated the glacis also to the Second
Temple period to after 586 B.C.

In the 1970s another archaeologist, Yigal Shiloh, an Israeli, came and
continued to investigate this area. As Yigal Shiloh pulled down the slope of
the hill he exposed more of this massive step-stone structure, more of this
glacis, and he found sitting on top of the lower part of the glacis ancient
Israelite houses dating to the 8th and 7th centuries B.C. If the houses sitting
on top of the glacis date to the 8th and 7th centuries B.C. then the glacis itself
must be earlier than that, which means that Kathleen Kenyon was wrong.

How does this all work out? At the very top we can see, very close to the crest
of the hill, the original wall with the towers that Macalister found, which he
dated to the Jebusite period, but in fact dates to the Second Temple period.
Then below that we can see this massive step-stone structure, or glacis, and
down below sitting on top of the glacis we can see Israelite houses that Yigal
Shiloh found.

How do we put this all together then? What is the correct sequence of
remains in this excavated area, an area by the way which in Yigal Shiloh’s
excavations was called Area G? The step-stone glacis must be the earliest
thing that existed here. What is the date of this massive step-stone glacis?
Apparently it’s either Jebusite or Davidic; that is from the time of King David.
The Israelite houses which sit on top of the glacis then were built a few
centuries later in the 8th and 7th centuries B.C. All of this was wiped out,
destroyed, when the Babylonians destroyed Jerusalem in the year 586 B.C.
Then after 586 B.C. when the city was rebuilt, the fortification wall and
towers were built at the crest of the hill without any direct connection with
the glacis or the early Israelite houses. That then is the correct sequence.

I it still leaves one big problem unsolved. If the glacis was not built in order
to buttress that wall at the top that Macalister found and thought was Jebusite,
but is much later, then what was it built to buttress? It’s clear that it was built
to buttress something. It is a massive structure and it must’ve been built as a
buttress because it strengthens and supports the very steep slope of the hill.
So what originally stood above it?

Remember the configuration of bedrock here in this area in the City of David.
The bedrock rises up as you go north and drops off as you go south; where
the natural high point here in the City of David what would’ve been the area
of the original acropolis of the city before Solomon expanded the city to the
north to include the Temple Mount. In other words we should expect that the
original royal citadel of the City of David was located in this area.

You may have actually caught some of this in recent news reports because
excavations in the City of David are still ongoing. These ongoing excavations
have brought to light ancient remains in the area above the glacis, remains
of a large and monumental building which the excavator Eilat Mazar claims
is the palace of King David. This identification has been the subject of lot of
controversy because the dating evidence for the building is not secure, it’s
not that good. It’s not clear that the date of this building really is from the
time of David or could it be that some or all of the building is later than the
time of David.

Archeologists have been going back and forth on this. But whether or not
this is in fact the palace of David, we can actually assume that the area where
this monumental building is located was the original acropolis of the biblical
city of Jerusalem before the time of Solomon.

In his excavations in the 1970s, Yigal Shiloh found the remains of early
Israelite houses dating to the 8th and 7th centuries B.C. sitting on top of the
lower part of the glacis. By the 8th and 7th centuries B.C. the acropolis, of
course, had moved further to the north and so houses were built then on the
lower part of the glacis. Shiloh excavated a series of these early Israelite
houses which are very interesting because they’re very typical examples of
Israelite houses, typical of Israelite houses not only in the area of Jerusalem
but actually all throughout the country.

The best preserved example of one of these houses is a house that Yigal
Shiloh called the House of Ahiel because inside this house he found an
inscribe potsherd with the name Ahiel, a Hebrew name, on it. Whether or not
this house really belonged to somebody named Ahiel or somebody named
Ahiel lived there we don’t know. But anyway that’s what we call it now.

The house has been partially reconstructed and what we can see is a house
that consists of three long, narrow, side by side rooms in the front and one
room running along the back along its width. Furthermore outside the main
entrance to the house and in front of the house we can see a stone staircase
or part of a stone staircase that originally led up to a second story level. This
very typical kind of Israelite house is the kind of a house that archaeologists
call a four-room house because the ground floor of the building had four
rooms, three long, narrow, side by side rooms in the front and one room
running along the width of the back. But originally actually there were more
than four rooms because there was a second story level.

In the City of David Yigal Shiloh found remains of very typical Israelite
houses. Inside these Israelite houses Shiloh found something surprising.
Pillar figurines, a kind of figurine that is kind of schematic, made out of
clay, fairly small, and which almost always depicts a woman naked to the
waist and cupping her breasts under her hands. Well it’s kind of surprising
actually to see figurines like this coming from an Israelite context. What’s
so interesting about it of course is that this is the very same kind of practice,
the adoption of sort of pagan practices that the biblical prophets warned the
Israelites about.

For example Isaiah, “Whoever, then, fashions a god or casts an image that
is good for nothing, all who hold it will be put to shame, since the workmen
are all human beings.” How do we then explain the discovery of these sorts
of figurines in an Israelite context and not only in Israelite context, but in
Jerusalem within viewing distance of the temple on the Temple Mount?
Obviously the prophets would not have been cautioning the Israelites against
adopting these sorts of practices unless some people were actually doing
that. So we see here some physical evidence for the very kinds of practices
that the prophets warned the Israelites about.

You may be wondering well gee are these really Israelite houses? But we do
have evidence that they are, because in one of the houses that Yigal Shiloh
excavated he found a cache of over 50 bullae. What are bullae? Bullae
are little lumps of clay that were used as sealings. Let me explain this. In
antiquity when you had a document and you wanted to seal it, what did you
do? They didn’t have envelopes back then so you didn’t have the option of
folding up your letter, putting it in an envelope and licking the envelope shut
in order to seal it.

What you had back then of course were scrolls. How do you seal a scroll?
You roll it up; you take a piece of string, wrap it around it, and then take
a lump of raw clay and put it over the string. A lot of times then what you
would do is take your personal seal; that is a piece of jewelry that you would
wear around your wrist or as a ring or maybe around your neck, which had
either your name or your personal symbol on it, and you would impress it
into that lump of raw clay. Whoever wanted to open the document then had
to peel that lump of raw clay off of the string, thereby breaking the seal.

That’s what a bulla is. In one of these houses in the City of David, in Area G,
Yigal Shiloh found over 50 bullae. The fact that he found over 50 bullae in
this house indicates that once upon a time there was an archive of documents
in this house. Let’s think about this for a minute. Why did Shiloh find bullae,
but Why did he not find documents? Very simple! Because in 586 B.C. all
of these houses were destroyed by the Babylonians, set on fire and burned
down. The lire that destroyed these houses burned the documents, but also
fired the little lumps of raw clay and preserved them, because ordinarily
lumps of raw clay would not be preserved after thousands of years, they
would’ve turned back into mud. But the fire that burned the houses fired the
little lumps of clay and preserved them.

If we look at these little clay sealings then, these bullae that Yigal Shiloh
found in the house, they indicate that there was once an archive of documents
stored in this house. They’re also interesting for another reason, because
these bullae are inscribed with names in biblical Hebrew that presumably
indicate the name of the owner, that is the person who made the impression
into the lump of raw clay. These inscriptions in biblical Hebrew are extremely
important for telling us about the population of Jerusalem in the 8“‘ and 7‘*‘
centuries B.C.

One of the first things of course that we want to find out is, is there anybody
mentioned, named, on these bullae who we can match with a figure
mentioned in the Hebrew Bible? The problem here is that most people in
biblical Jerusalem had the same names; that is the same small pool of names
was used over and over again for the majority of the population. In most
cases the names are so generic that we cannot say with certainty that the
person whose name appears on the sealing is the same as a person mentioned
in the Hebrew Bible.

For example, I don’t know Joe Cohen, but actually it’s not Joe Cohen, that’s
not the formula, because the typical formula of these biblical names is Joe
son of Samuel let’s say. So the typical formula is so and so son of or daughter
of so and so and this is where the problem is that people didn’t have last
names. You were simply known as so and so the son of or daughter of so and
so. So the problem is that the names on these sealings tend to be from the
same small pool of names of fathers and sons that sort of repeat and they’re
very generic.

In most of the cases we cannot say for sure whether the person whose name
appears on the bulla is the same person mentioned in a given passage in the
Hebrew Bible. That’s the case for the most part. But there is at least one
bulla that Yigal Shiloh fotmd that we can say almost for a certainty is the
same person mentioned in the biblical account. It is inscribed Gemaryahu
son of Shaphan. That is not a typical name; it’s an unusual name.

Very interesting we have in Jeremiah a reference to somebody who has this
very same name, and here is the passage. It reads, “Baruch in the hearing of
all the people read from the book the words of Jeremiah in the house of the
Lord, from the chamber of Gemaryah the son of Shaphan, the scribe.” Notice
several interesting things about this. First of all Gemaryah in this passage is
described as a scribe, the very sort of person you would expect to be using a
personal seal to seal documents.

This Gemaryah, the scribe, who is mentioned in this passage in Jeremiah
was active in the court of the King of Judah roughly around 600 B.C. These
houses are destroyed in 586 B.C. so the timing fits as well. It all fits very
nicely together and therefore we can say, well with about as much certainty as
we can get, that this sealing was sealed by the same figure who is mentioned
in the book of Jeremiah.

These sealings are inscribed not just with biblical Hebrew names, but the
writing on them is in biblical Hebrew script. If you have ever studied Hebrew
and you look however at the sealing, you will see that you can’t read it, you
can’t make out the letters even if you know Hebrew today. The reason is
that the Hebrew alphabet that is used on these sealings is the ancient biblical
Hebrew alphabet, which is different from the Hebrew alphabet that is
used today.

Let me explain this. First of all we have to distinguish between language
and script, so the script is the alphabet and the language is the language. You
can write the same language in different scripts. In fact, a modern analogy
is that this happened in Turkey in the 20th century when Ataturk changed
the alphabet that was used to write the Turkish language. Up Lmtil then the
Arabic alphabet had been used, and now the Latin alphabet is used. So you
can write the same language in different scripts or in different alphabets.
This is what happened in the case of Hebrew.

Originally Hebrew was written using a script that is called the Paleo-Hebrew
or the ancient Hebrew or the Biblical Hebrew script and later a different
script, a different alphabet, was adopted and that’s the alphabet that’s used
today. How does this all sort of play out? What is this Biblical Hebrew script
or Biblical Hebrew alphabet that we see for example on the sealings that
were found in the City of David?

This Biblical Hebrew script or alphabet is not an alphabet that was
invented by the Israelites. It’s actually an alphabet that they adopted from
the Canaanites. Before the Israelites arrived in Canaan, the Canaanites had
started to write, and in fact the Canaanites had invented a very interesting
alphabet. What the Canaanites did was to modify some of the symbols that
were used in Egyptian hieroglyphs and turned them into their own alphabet
and they made some very significant changes when they did this.

In Egyptian hieroglyphs what you have is a system basically where each
symbol represents an entire word. The great stroke of genius of the Canaanites
was to take some of those symbols and adopt them into their alphabet, and
instead of having each symbol represent an entire word each symbol instead
represents a single syllable. Why is this a great innovation?

If you have an alphabetic system where every symbol depicts an entire word,
you’re going to need lots and lots of symbols for every different word. But
if you have a system where each symbol instead is only one syllable, then
you only need a small number of symbols because you can combine those
symbols together in order to form words. In other words, what we do in our
alphabet today. This was the Canaanite innovation. When the Israelite tribes
come in and settle down and eventually start to write, what they do is to
adopt the Canaanite alphabet; they make a few minor modifications, but they
basically adopt that alphabet, and by the way, the Israelites weren’t the only
ones who did. All of the neighboring peoples in the areas, the Moabites, the
Edomites, the Ammonites, they all adopted this alphabet for writing their
own languages.

All of these languages were actually related. They’re all part of the same
language family. They’re all Semitic languages. They’re all related but
different just in the way, let’s say, French and Spanish and Italian are related
but different languages. So all of these languages that were spoken by the
Israelites and their neighbors including the Phoenicians, who of course are
Canaanites in the Iron Age, these are all related languages and they’re all
basically using some form of what had originally been the Canaanite alphabet
to write their languages.

Biblical Hebrew is basically a form of Canaanite script, the Biblical Hebrew
alphabet is a form of the Canaanite script and is therefore closely related to
the alphabet that was used by the Phoenicians just to the north. This script,
the Biblical Hebrew script or alphabet, was used until 586 B.C. After 586
B.C., after the time of the Babylonian conquest, the Israelites stopped using
the Biblical Hebrew script and instead adopted a different script which is
related but different, called the Aramaic script.

That is the script that, that is the alphabet that is used to write Hebrew
up until today. Modern Hebrew, even though the language is Hebrew, is
written using the Aramaic alphabet or the Aramaic script. This isn’t the end
of the story. It’s even more interesting because our alphabet today actually
originally derives from the Phoenician alphabet; that is from the Canaanite
alphabet, because remember that basically the Phoenicians are Canaanites.
They’re the continuation of the Canaanites in the area of Lebanon after 1200
during the Iron Age.

The Phoenicians were writing in an alphabet that was derived from the
original Canaanite alphabet. How does that affect us? How do we get that
to where we are today? During the Iron Age there was no writing in Greece.
Before the Iron Age, in the Bronze Age, there had been writing in Greece,
but after 1200 there is no writing in Greece for several centuries. Greece
enters a Dark Age after 1200 as a result of the collapse of the Mycenaean
kingdoms. For several hundred years there was no writing at all in Greece.

In the course of contacts with the Greeks the Phoenicians apparently made
the Greeks aware of their alphabet; that is through trade, the Greeks became
familiar with the Phoenician alphabet, and in the 8th century B.C. adopted
that alphabet.

When the Greeks adopted the Phoenician alphabet they made some very
important changes. In Semitic languages you don’t write vowels, only
consonants, so there are no letters in the Phoenician alphabet that are the
value of a vowel. One of the changes that the Greeks made was to turn some
of the Phoenician consonants into. The best example of this is the first letter
of the alphabet. The first letter of the alphabet in Phoenician and also in
Hebrew is aleph, which is a silent letter, it’s a consonant, has no value in its
own in terms of being pronounced.

The Greeks took this letter which was useless for their purposes, they didn’t
need it, and they turned it on its side into the form of a letter A and gave it the
value of a vowel and called it alpha. The second letter of the Greek alphabet,
beta, comes from the Semitic bet and so on.

Eventually the Romans picked up the alphabet by way of the Greeks, and
so the Latin alphabet that we use today is ultimately derived from the Greek
alphabet, which originally goes back to the Phoenician alphabet and to
the Canaanites.

Examples of very early Israelite inscriptions are extremely rare. Apparently
there’s not a lot of writing among the Israelites before 1et’s say the 10th, 9th
centuries B.C. When we find inscriptions that date to this period they get a lot
of publicity. In the summer of 2005 for example an early Hebrew abecedary
that dates to the l0th century B.C. was found in excavations at a site called
Tel Zayit in Israel. An abecedary means somebody was practicing writing
the alphabet.

One of the most famous examples of one of these early inscriptions is an
inscription that was found in 1993 at Tel Dan in the very northern part of the
country where part of a stele, a big inscribed stone, was found that actually
mentions the House of David and which dates to the middle of the 9th century
B.C. This is extremely important because this actually suggests that by the
middle of the 9th century B.C. there was an established dynasty that was
referred to as the House of David tracing the ancestry back to the original
founder of this dynasty and presumably kingdom, a man named David
which of course then corresponds with what we know about David in the
biblical accounts.

We have talked here about Jerusalem in the biblical period and we have
focused especially on the remains in the City of David with the settlement
in the City of David. What I’d like to do when we tLu'n to our next lecture is
take a look at the water systems that supplied the biblical city of Jerusalem.

Lecture 3, Jerusalem-An Introduction to the City

Summary Overview

Why did David make Jerusalem the capital of his kingdom? A couple
of good reasons: First of all, Jerusalem was located in the center of
the country, so geographically speaking, it’s a good point to put your
capital. But there is another reason: because Jerusalem   did not
belong to any one of the 12 tribes. In other words, Jerusalem was a
politically neutral city.

In our last lecture, we ended by noting that the death of Saul set the stage
for David to become king, followed by his son Solomon. Perhaps the
most famous events in their reigns are David’s bringing of the Ark of
the Covenant to Jerusalem, his capital, and Solomon’s building of the First
Temple there.

Because Jerusalem is central to this course, we should understand how the
city is laid out. The original settlement in Jerusalem was on a small, low-
lying hill and was known as the City of David. This hill lies outside the
Old City (which dates from Ottoman times) and is dwarfed by both the Old
City and the modern city. However, the only perennial source of fresh water
in Jerusalem, the Gihon Spring, comes out of the ground at the foot of the
eastern slope of this little hill. Furthermore, the site is protected by natural
valleys on two of its three sides.

Solomon expanded the city northward to include the area of the Temple
Mount, which dominated the biblical City of David and became the ancient
acropolis of Jerusalem, where the most important political and religious
institutions were built. Later, the city spread westward onto the Westem Hill,
protected by valleys on three sides.

Having reviewed the topography of Jerusalem, let’s return to its history
during the time of David and Solomon. David made Jerusalem the capital
of his kingdom for two likely reasons: its central location and the fact that
it had never been controlled by any of the Israelite tribes but was politically
neutral. Into this City of David he brought the Ark of the Covenant. His
son Solomon is most famous for building the First Temple on the Temple
Mount north ofthe city. After Solomon died, in about 930 B.C., a quarrel
broke out over the succession to the throne, and the kingdom split into a
northern halt, Israel, with its capital at Samaria, and a southern halt, Judah,
with its capital at Jerusalem.

Each of these kingdoms had its own independent political history. Meanwhile,
to the east, a great empire arose, Assyria, based in northern Mesopotamia.
Assyria expanded westward toward the Mediterranean coast and began
launching invasions into the kingdom of Israel. In the year 722 B.C., the
Assyrians conquered the northem kingdom of Israel, and 20 years later, they
invaded the kingdom of Judah, destroying many of the major Judean cities and
besieging Jerusalem itself.

Jerusalem survived the Assyrian siege but was later taken by the
Babylonians, the next great power, based in southern Mesopotamia. In 586
B.C., the Babylonians conquered the city, burned the temple, and forced the
inhabitants of Judah into exile. This historical review of Jerusalem down to
its destruction by the Babylonians is based largely on biblical accounts. In
the next lecture, we will compare the archaeological remains in Jerusalem
that date to this period with the descriptions in the Hebrew Bible.

Names to Know

David (fl. 10th century B.C.): The eighth and youngest son of Jesse, from the
tribe of Judah, David succeeded Saul as king of Israel and ruled t.he United
Kingdom for 40 years, from c. 1010 to 970 B.C. He conquered Jerusalem
and made it the capital of his kingdom. David also brought the Ark of the
Covenant to Jerusalem. He was succeeded to the throne by his son Solomon.

Solomon (r. c. 970-930 B.C.): Son of David and successor to the throne of
the United Kingdom. Solomon is renowned for his wisdom; his many wives;
his political and commercial alliances with Hiram, king of Tyre, and with the
queen of Sheba; and for having established the First Temple on J erusalem’s
Temple Motmt.

lmportant Terms

Assyria: Ancient empire based in the northem part of Mesopotamia
(modern Iraq).

Babylonia: Ancient empire based in the southern part of Mesopotamia
(modern Iraq).

City of David: Eastern Hill; Lower City.

Mesopotamia: In Greek, literally means “the land between the rivers,”
referring to the Tigris and Euphrates rivers; a territory that corresponds
roughly with modern Iraq.

Questions to Consider

1. What combination of natural features attracted settlement in Jerusalem
5,000 years ago?

2. Why was Jerusalem a good choice to be the capital of David’s kingdom?

Lecture 3-Transcript

Jerusalem-An Introduction to the City

In our last lecture, we ended by talking about the death of Saul, which sets the
stage for David to become king establishing a tmited kingdom that he ruled
and that was succeeded by his son Solomon. Perhaps the most famous event
in the time of David and Solomon is David bringing the Ark ofthe Covenant
to Jerusalem which he made the capital of the Israelite kingdom, and later
Solomon building the First Temple on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem.

Jerusalem is going to be a central city throughout this course and therefore
in order to begin talking about Jerusalem we first have to understand how
the city is laid out. What is the topography of the city of Jerusalem? In fact
why is there a city in this particular spot? When you think about it, why do
people settle in particular places, trade roots, strategic locations, whatever,
so why has there been a settlement at the spot where Jerusalem is located
continuously for over 5,000 years? What is it that has drawn people to this
particular spot?

If we look at the location of Jerusalem we see that it’s located smack dab in
the center of the country on top of this hilly motmtain, or ridge, which runs
through the country like a backbone from north to south. This is the Judean
Mountains or the J udean hills, and all throughout antiquity and even up until
today there has been a road going along the top of this mountain ridge. It’s
the same road that goes today from the area of Hebron on the south, then to
Bethlehem, then to Jerusalem, then north to Ramallah, Annapolis.

Of course always the major north-south road through Palestine has been
along the coast which is the easiest way to go. But this was a secondary
route through the center of the country and so Jerusalem lies on that road.
The most important reason for there having been a settlement in Jerusalem
throughout the ages is because of water.

If we look at a map of Jerusalem we see that the city is located on a series of
hills that are separated by valleys. The earliest settlement in Jerusalem lies
on a small, low-lying hill that’s called the City of David. Most people who
go to Jerusalem today and see the modem city see that inside the center of
the modern city is an area surrounded by an old wall and this is called the
Old City of Jerusalem.

Most people who go to Jerusalem today are under the mistaken impression
that the area ofthe old city is the ancient city of Jerusalem, and that’s actually
incorrect. Those walls of the old city as you see them today are relatively
recent in J erusalem’s history. They go back to the Ottoman Turkish period,
the l6*h century A.D., and the area enclosed by those Ottoman city walls
does not necessarily correspond with the ancient City of Jerusalem. In fact,
the earliest settlement in Jerusalem, the original settlement in Jerusalem lies
on this little hill, the City of David, which today is totally outside the walls of
the old city. It comes out like a little spur to the south of the Temple Mount.

This is where over 5,000 years ago people lirst settled in the area of
Jerusalem. The question is why did the first people who arrived in Jerusalem
settle on this small, relatively low-lying hill? The hill is only about ll acres
in size and in fact it’s much lower in elevation than the other hills in the area.
Why didn’t people choose to settle on one of the bigger, taller hills? You
would think strategically that’s what they would’ve done, after all.

Well in fact it all is about water. It all has to do with sources of water here in
the Middle East, because the only perennial source of fresh water in Jerusalem
is a spring called the Gihon Spring, which comes out ofthe grotmd at the foot
of the eastern slope of this little hill ofthe City of David. In order to be as
close as possible to the source of water, over 5,000 years ago people chose to
settle on this little hill. Not only is the City of David convenient because it’s
located next to the water supply, but also it was protected by natural valleys
on two of its three sides. It had natural protection of fortiiications on two of
its three sides.

On the east, the City of David is protected by a very deep valley called the
Kidron Valley, which separates it and the Temple Mount to the north from
a mountain ridge on the other side of the Kidron Valley, to the east of the
Kidron Valley, that is called the Mount of Olives. On the west, the City of
David was protected by a valley called the Tyropoeon Valley. Tyropoeon is
actually an ancient Greek word meaning the Valley ofthe Cheesemakers.

The Tyropoeon Valley is sometimes also called the Central Valley because
today it runs through the center of the Old City of Jerusalem starting on
the north in the area of the modern Damascus gate coming down along the
westem side of the Temple Mount, the western side of the City of David, and
joining up with the southern tip with the Kidron Valley. The City of David
was protected on two of its three sides by these valleys.

If you look at the coniiguration of bedrock in the area of the City of David
you will notice that the bedrock slopes down as you go south, but rises up
as you go north. From the City of David as you go north you get into the
area of the Temple Mount. When the very iirst people came and settled in
Jerusalem thousands of years ago, they settled on that little hill of the City of
David. That is the city that David took from the J ebusites and that’s when it
becomes known as the City of David.

After David died his son Solomon expanded the city to the north to include
the area of the Temple Mount, which is higher in elevation than the City of
David and so is a natural high point physically dominating the biblical City
of David, and so the Temple Mount literally became the ancient acropolis
of Jerusalem, a natural highpoint where the most important political and
religious institutions were built. Because the City of David is so small in size
it couldn’t accommodate a large population.

When the city grew in antiquity where did the population spread? Never did
the population spread east across the Kidron Valley to the slopes ofthe Mount
of Olives. The Mount of Olives has always been outside the walls of the
city and therefore from the very earliest periods, the Mount of Olives served
as the necropolis, the cemetery, the burial grounds, for the population of
Jerusalem. Instead in antiquity when the population grew it went westwards
across the Tyropoeon Valley and on to the next hill over.

The next hill over to the west of the Tyropoeon Valley is a large and
relatively high in elevation hill which we call the Western Hill to distinguish
it then from the City of David, which becomes known as the Eastern Hill.
Sometimes we call the Western Hill also the Upper City because it’s high in
elevation, and the City of David then becomes known as the Lower City. The
Westem Hill also is protected by valleys on three of its four sides.

On the east it’s protected by the Tyropoeon Valley which separates it from
the City of David; on the west it’s protected by a valley which starts at its
northwest corner, the area today where the Damascus Gate and David’s
Citadel are located. This valley then wraps around the Western Hill from the
west and around the south and joins up at the southern tip with the Kidron
Valley and the Tyropoeon Valley. This valley which literally encircles the
Western Hill is called the Ben-Hinnom Valley and the Ben-Hinnom valley is
a valley which is known Hom the Hebrew Bible.

In fact a passage in Jeremiah refers to the Ben-Hinnom Valley in a very
negative way,

“For the children of Judah have done what is evil in my sight,” is the oracle
of the Lord, “They have set up their detestable things in the house which
bears my name to deiile it, and have built the high place of Tophet in the
valley of Ben-Hinnom to burn their sons and daughters in the tire.”

In other words in this passage Jeremiah is condemning the practice of child
sacrifice by the Israelites in the valley of Ben-Hinnom, this very valley that
encircles the Westem Hill.

The northern end of the Western Hill is determined by a valley which runs
directly east across to the Temple Mount and which is called the Transverse
Valley. This is not a deep valley like the other valleys and in fact the northem
side of the city of Jerusalem was always its weak side in antiquity. Ahnost
always in antiquity when the city was attacked it was attacked from the
direction of the north because unlike the other sides, the north side ofthe city
was not protected by deep natLu'al valleys.

If you look at the area that we just talked about, which is really the core
of the ancient city of Jerusalem, the City of David, the Temple Mount, and
the Westem Hill, if you look at this area you will see that it overlaps with
the area that is today enclosed within the walls of the Old City, but it’s not
a complete overlap, and that the Old City today represents a shift to the
north from the ancient city with the area of the City of David, today lying
outside the walls of the city and also the southern tip of the Westem Hill,
which today is called Mount Zion, lying outside the walls of the Old City.

This shift to the north we will see later in the course occurred in the Roman
period in the 2nd century A.D. when Jerusalem was rebuilt by the Roman
Emperor Hadrian.

The core of the ancient city of Jerusalem lies somewhat to the south of the
area that is today enclosed within the walls of the Old City and only partly
overlaps with that. All of this has been somewhat abstract so let’s now
talk a little bit more and look a little bit more at what all of these features
look like.

The Gihon Spring still has water coming out of it today. In fact it’s a very
interesting kind of a spring. The word Gihon comes from the Hebrew word
“gichah” which means to gush because it’s a kind of a caustic spring where
the water gushes forth and abates, gushes forth and abates. So that water still
comes out ofthe ground today.

If we look at an aerial map of Jerusalem we can very clearly see the various
topographic features. We can see the layout of the Old City today, which is
roughly enclosed by kind of a square. Marking the eastern edge of the city is
a mountain ridge which includes the Mount of Olives. The northern end of
that mountain ridge is today called Mount Scopus.

The area of the Temple Mount platform is also clearly visible. It is a gigantic
paved esplanade surrounded by walls with the Dome of the Rock, which
has a gold dome sitting in the middle of it, a natural high point probably
where the two ancient temples used to be located, and to the south of it at the
southem end of the Temple Mount a silver-domed structure which is the Al-
Aqsa Mosque. Here’s a wonderful picture showing the City of David which
shows so clearly what a small and low-lying hill this is shown very clearly
how the Temple Mount physically dominates the City of David and therefore
was the acropolis ofthe ancient city of Jerusalem and which clearly show the
Kidron Valley, very deep valley on the right-hand side, that is on the eastern
side separating the City of David and the Temple Mount from the Mount
of Olives.

On the western side of the city of David a valley not so clearly visible
anymore, largely filled in by debris, but with more or less a line of a modern
road following it, which is the line of the Tyropoeon Valley or that central
valley. Today if we stand on top of the Mount of Olives we get a very good
view over the city looking from east to west. Immediately below us covering
the slopes of the Mount of Olives are graves.

This is a cemetery where again the practice of Jewish burial in Jerusalem on
the slopes of the Mount of Olives goes back literally from millennia so we
can see this cemetery still covering the slopes of the Mount of Olives today,
this area having always been outside the walls of the city. The slope then
goes down very deep to this valley, the Kidron Valley and on the other side
of the Kidron Valley we see the area of the Temple Mount and then sloping
off to the left of that is the beginning of the slope down for the area of the
City of David.

In fact, the City of David is so small and so low-lying that it’s ahnost not
visible even from the top of the Mount of Olives. It’s sort of swallowed up
by the rest of the features and behind the City of David you can then see the
area of the Western Hill, which is again much higher in elevation and also a
larger area.

Another aerial view of the Old City looking from west to east immediately
at the bottom is the area of the Jaffa Gate today. Next to it is the citadel,
David’s Citadel, which we will be talking about. This is the point where
the Ben-Hinnom valley starts, and going straight east across to the Temple'
Mount from the Jaffa Gate that would be the line of the Transverse Valley,
that relatively small valley that marks the northern end of the Western Hill..
Finally at the upper end, very visible, is this ridge, this mountain ridge of the,
Mount of Olives and Mount Scopus which marks the eastern end of the cityi
on the other side of the Kidron Valley.

The modern Old City of Jerusalem transposed upon these geographic
features shows clearly how the City of David and Mount Zion lie today;
outside the walls of the Old City. Within the area of the Old City today therei
are different quarters, which is a late development in the history of the city,l.
but basically the area of the northwest part of the Old City is the Christiani
quarter; northwest, because that is the area around the Church of the Holyf
Sepulcher, which we will be talking about quite a bit later in the course.

The northeast part of the city is the Muslim quarter. The southwest part of
the city is the Armenian quarter, and the southeast part of the city across
from the area ofthe Wailing Wall or Western Wall is today’s Jewish quarter.

Now that we’ve sort of reviewed the topography ofthe city of Jerusalem let’s
talk about the history of Jerusalem during the time of David and Solomon
and the other kings of Judah. Remembering now what happened with the
Israelite settlement, the Israelite tribes enter the country in about 1200 B.C.,
settle the interior hill country, eventually form together into one entity and
choose a king, Saul, to rule over them. Saul is then killed in battle against
the Philistines.

After Saul’s death he was succeeded to the throne by David. David then
becomes king and one ofthe things that David does when he becomes king is
to capture the city of Jerusalem from the J ebusites. One ofthe peculiarities of
the early Israelite settlement is that although the Israelites settle the interior
hill cormtry and although Jerusalem was located in the center of that area,
Jerusalem was not taken by the Israelite tribes. In fact Jerusalem remained a
foreign enclave in the heart of the Israelite settlement for approximately 200
years rmtil the time of David.

According to the Hebrew Bible, the reason for this is that J ebusite Jerusalem
was so strongly fortified that the Israelites were not able to take the city until
the time of David. The Bible then describes the conquest of Jerusalem by
David. David takes Jerusalem from the Jebusites and makes it the capital
of his kingdom, very interesting choice by the way. Why did David make
Jerusalem the capital of his kingdom? A couple of good reasons; iirst of
all Jerusalem was located in the center of the country, so geographically
speaking it’s a good point to put your capital.

But there is another reason; because Jerusalem since it had not originally
been taken by any one ofthe 12 tribes, therefore did not belong to any one of
the 12 tribes. In other words, Jerusalem was a politically neutral city. It’s sort
ofthe same idea as today that Washington D.C. doesn’t belong to any one of
the 50 states, so with Jerusalem. So David then makes Jerusalem the capital
of his kingdom.

The Hebrew Bible says, “And David dwelt in the stronghold [of Jerusalem]
and called it the City of David.” So obviously before the time of David the
city was not called the City of David. Once David takes it, it becomes known
as the City of David and since Jebusite Jerusalem consisted of that little hill
to the south of the Temple Mount, that is the hill that is called the City of
David. That was the city of Jerusalem in the time of the Jebusites and in
the time of David. According to the Hebrew Bible David brings the Ark of
the Covenant to Jerusalem and I quote from 2 Samuel, “David went and
brought the ark of God with joy from the house of Obed-Edom to the City
of Jerusalem.”

After David died he was succeeded to the throne by his son Solomon.
Solomon is famous for many different things. One thing that Solomon is
known for is having been a lover of many women. He’s known for having
had many wives, and the relevant passage in the Hebrew Bible says, “Now
King Solomon was a lover of women; and he married many foreign wives-
Moabites, Ammonites, Edomites, Sidonians, and Hittites.” Notice a very
interesting thing here. Maybe Solomon really was a lover of women, but
when you look at the foreign wives who we had, you see that there is a lot
more going on here.

These were strategic political alliances. The women who Solomon married
literally are from all of the peoples who neighbor on, who surround the area
ofthe Israelite kingdom. Moabites, Ammonites, Edomites, those are all those
people in the area of modern Jordan to the eastern side of the Jordan River
and the Dead Sea and Sidonians. Who are the Sidonians, the people of Sidon,
the Phoenicians just to the north and the Hittites are the people of course in
Asia Minor. Obviously these marriages were strategic for political purposes,
so Solomon was basically forming political alliances through marriage,
something of course that was very common in antiquity.

In addition to his many wives Solomon of course is also known for having
built the First temple on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem as l Kings says, “In
the fourth year of Solomon’s reign over Israel   he built the house of the
Lord.” Notice the temple is a house. In antiquity, a temple was a house of
a deity. We talked about the House of Dagon, the Temple of the Philistines.
Here we have the House ofthe Lord, the God of Israel, and this is the temple
that Solomon builds on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem.

Together, the kingdom of David and Solomon is known as the United
Kingdom or the United Monarchy, because all of the 12 tribes were united
Lmder the rule of David and Solomon. When Solomon died, though, in about
roughly 930 B.C. the United Monarchy comes to an end because the kingdom
splits. There’s a quarrel over the succession to the throne and this United
Kingdom splits into two halves. The northern half now becomes known as
the kingdom of Israel and it has as its capital a city eventually at a place
called Samaria, which is in the heart of this northern kingdom of Israel. The
southem kingdom becomes known as the kingdom of Judah with its capital
at Jerusalem.

Each of these kingdoms then has its own series of kings and its own
independent political history despite the fact that the inhabitants of both
kingdoms continue to worship the God of Israel in his temple on the Temple
Mount in Jerusalem. The kingdom splits into two parts after the death of
Solomon and you have these two kingdoms, the northern kingdom of
Israel and the southern kingdom of Judah. While all of this is going on
though something happens farther to the east that’s going to impact both of
these kingdoms.

What happens is that in the 9th and 8th centuries B.C. a great power was
growing to the east. This power was the kingdom or empire of Assyria;
that is a territory that is located in the northern half of what is today Iraq,
the northern part of ancient Mesopotamia. In the 9th and 8th centuries B.C.
Assyria became the dominant power in the ancient Near East. As the Assyrian
became stronger and stronger they began to expand their control over more
and more areas eventually moving westwards towards the Mediterranean
coast and launching a series of invasions into the kingdom of Israel.

ln the year 722 B.C., the Assyrians conquered the northem kingdom of Israel
and 20 years later they launched an invasion of the kingdom of Judah. The
Hebrew Bible describes the Assyrian attack on Judah and speciiically on the
city of Jerusalem.

The king of Judah in 7 Ol B.C. when the Syrians invaded was Hezekiah, and
the Hebrew Bible describes the Assyrians coming and ravaging the Judean
countryside destroying many of the major Judean cities, the cities of Judah,
and then besieging the city of Jerusalem itself. Here is what the biblical
account says,

In the fourteenth year of King Hezekiah, King Sennacherib of
Assyria came up against all the fortified cities of Judah and captured
them. King Hezekiah of Judah sent to the king of Assyria at
Lachish, saying, “I have done wrong; withdraw from me; whatever
you impose on me I will bear.”   Then the king of Assyria sent
the commander-in-chief and the chief of the eunuchs and the Held
marshal from Lachish with a large army against King Hezekiah
at Jerusalem.

Notice in this passage that the Assyrians are encamped at Lachish. Lachish
was one of the major cities in Judah outside of Jerusalem, and we have very,
very interesting evidence archaeologically and also documentary of the
Assyrian siege and destruction of this major city of Lachish. We have an
aerial view of Lachish, but most interesting on one side of this very large site
are remains of an Assyrian siege ramp, a ramp that the Assyrians built so that
they could break through the fortification wall of the city.

Furthermore the Assyrian king then decorated his palace with carved stone
reliefs showing the fall of the city at the end of the siege. Those reliefs now
are on display in the British museum in London, and those reliefs clearly
show the Assyrian siege machines and in particular the battering ram coming
up and battering against the city wall and the various darts and arrows and
other things that are being shot back and forth and we have very clear remains
ofthe Assyrian siege ramp at the site that remain until today.

One thing that happens in 701 B.C. is that the Assyrians then come, ravage
the Judean countryside, destroy the city of Lachish, and then besiege the
city of Jerusalem, the capital of Judah. This Assyrian siege of Jerusalem is
also described in the Hebrew Bible as follows, “Therefore thus says the Lord
concerning the king of Assyria: He shall not come into this city, shoot an
arrow there, come before it with a shield, or cast up a siege ramp against it.
By the way that he came, by the same he shall return; he shall not come into
this city, says the Lord. For I will defend this city to save it, for my own sake
and for the sake of my servant David.”

So very interesting, according to the biblical account, the God of Israel then
says I am going to protect the city of Jerusalem from the Assyrians; they will
not be able to take this city. “That very night the angel of the Lord set out and
struck down one hundred eighty-five thousand in the camp of the Assyrians;
when morning dawned, they were all dead bodies. Then King Sennacherib
of Assyria left, went home, and lived at Nineveh.”

According to the biblical account, the Assyrians were not able to take the city
of Jerusalem during the siege because of a plague that broke out and killed
many of the soldiers in their camp. We actually have Assyrian documents
which present a slightly different story, which suggests that the Assyrian
king was called back to Assyria because of internal problems, because of
some sort of internal rebellions or unrest. Either way Jerusalem survived the
Assyrian siege and continued to exist with the kingdom of Judah continuing
to exist, albeit weakened, after the Assyrian invasion in 701.

The Assyrian empire itself eventually weakened and collapsed, and in fact,
in the year 612 B.C. the Assyrians were replaced as the dominant power in
the ancient Near East by the Babylonians. The Babylonians were based in the
southem part of what is today Iraq; that is the southern part of Mesopotamia.
When the Babylonians then become the dominant power in the ancient Near
East they begin to launch a series of invasions into the kingdom of Judah.
ln 586 B.C. the Babylonians conquered Jerusalem and destroyed the temple
on the Temple Mount. So it is described in the 2 book of Kings.

In the fifth month, on the seventh day of the month-this was in
the nineteenth year of King Nebuchadnezzar, king of Babylon-
Nebuzaradan, the commander of the guard, a servant of the king
of Babylon, came to Jerusalem and burned the house of the Lord
[so notice the temple], and the king’s house [the palace], and all the
houses of Jerusalem.

So 586 B.C. the Babylonians conquer Jerusalem, burn the palace, burn down
the temple, burn the houses in the city, and what do they do, they then force
the inhabitants of Judah to go into exile and Babylonia beginning a period in
Jewish history that we refer to as the period of the Babylonian exile.

What we have done here is to review the history of Jerusalem based largely
on the biblical accounts beginning with David and Solomon and going down
to its destruction by the Babylonians in 586 B.C. This now sets the stage for
us to look at the archaeological remains that we have in Jerusalem that date
to this period and compare the archaeological remains that we have with the
descriptions in the Hebrew Bible.