Egyptologist Raymond Weill, who studied the shafts and the area around them in the early 20th century, proposed that here were the tombs of David and his royal successors. David, we know, "slept with his fathers and was buried in the city of David" (1 Kings 2:10). The same formula is repeated for Solomon, Rehoboam, Asa, Jehoshaphat, Ahaziah, Joash, Amaziah, Azariah (2 Kings 15:7, despite 2 Chronicles 26:3), Jotham, and Ahaz. Only to the kings does the Bible attribute burial within the city. (For the later tradition of David's Tomb on Mt. Zion, see here.)

Furthermore, the next verse in Nehemiah is this (3:16):

After him, Nehemiah the son of Azbuk, the ruler of half the district of Beth Zur, made repairs to the place opposite the tombs of David, and to the pool that was made, and to the house of the mighty men.

So the author and first audience of Nehemiah 3 understood the tombs to be not far from the steps going down, where we ascended. It seems we are in the area, which was that of Weill's investigation. In the early 20th century, furthermore, the hill was hardly inhabited; if there had been any other likely places into which so many kings could have been gathered, you would think he would have encountered them. On the other hand, we have no fancy sarcophagus or inscriptions from that time, so we cannot know.

Archaeologists respond to Weill's conviction about these shafts with a kind of pooh-poohing. Such a find, after all, would be too good to be true. But they possess no strong arguments contra. True, the tombs don't look like Judahite tombs we know, but the latter date from two hundred years later. True, a bit of the grayish cement that is typical of the Hasmoneans was found on a bit of the wall, along with a typical Hasmonean lamp-niche, but by that time the memory may have been lost and the tombs may have been re-used. True, there are signs of a synagogue in the vicinity, including a ritual bath and a long dedicatory inscription in Greek (found by Weill), so indeed the shafts could have served as basements to it, but that says nothing about their original use. True, the shafts seem rather simple for royalty, but simple likewise are other known royal tombs from the Middle Bronze and Late Bronze ages in the ancient Near East, as Jeffrey Zorn points out in an essay that is my source for much on this page.    

Now let us turn to the positive features (though many could be later modifications). The shaft on the west, which is currently the more impressive, is about 54 feet long, 8 wide, and 6 high. (To judge from the quarrying marks in front, both shafts were once much longer - you could call them tunnels.) At a certain phase people lowered the floor of the first 32 feet, increasing the height there to 12 feet. They then cut a doorway and steps to enable access to this lower portion. Long horizontal grooves on both sides, at the height of the original floor, may have served to insert a platform, so that the result was two floors. In the upper section, in the back, there is a rock-cut depression, 6 feet by 4, which could have held a sarcophagus or a body together with grave offerings. It is the shadowy area in the photo on the left; its long side stretches away from us. Weill found two low masonry walls with a blackish coating that turned the depression - he thinks at the time of the Second Temple - into a basin; he also dates the blackish covering on the ceiling to that time.

We continue to ply our way up the mountain toward the site of the ancient temple. If the going is hard, let us remember what we are ascending. There was a time when most Jerusalemites lived on this hill, which they would mount in procession toward the temple. We may imagine them singing, as they climbed, Psalm 24.