Written by Stephen Langfur
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Page 5 of 6
Who shall ascend the Hill of the Lord?
After we issue from Hezekiah's Tunnel, our bus can receive us near the Pool of Siloam, but if we prefer, we can make the steep climb up the spine of the ancient city, or in the words of Psalm 24, we can "ascend the hill of Yahweh." On scaling the edge, we stop for a look at the meeting of the valleys: the Kidron, Tyropoeon and Hinnom, which, as one, cut from here through the wilderness to the Dead Sea.
Over most of the Herodian Pool of Siloam is a rich green area. It too received (and still receives) the Gihon water. Here, probably, was the royal garden mentioned in Nehemiah 3:15, where Shelah is Siloam (Shiloach in Hebrew):
Shallun the son of Colhozeh, the ruler of the district of Mizpah repaired the spring gate. He built it, and covered it, and set up its doors, its bolts, and its bars, and the wall of the pool of Shelah by the king’s garden, even to the stairs that go down from the city of David.
 We would have liked Shallun's stairs on ascending a minute ago! Continuing upward, we soon find a wire gate on our right. We enter and head a bit further east until we see, to the north, the openings of two large rock-cut shafts. They were once even longer than what we see, but this area later (in the Roman period?) became the focus of intensive quarrying.
People have been tempted to regard the shafts as the tombs of the kings of Judah. David, we know, "slept with his fathers and was buried in the city of David" (1 Kings 2:10), as were his royal descendants. (Ordinary folk were not buried within the city. For the tradition of David's Tomb on Mt. Zion, see here.) As O'Connor (p. 114) points out, the quality of the stone-cutting in the shafts is poorer than that in the tombs on the other side of the Kidron Valley. Yet this is not a decisive objection, since David's shaft was surely earlier than those, and its neighboring shaft may have been earlier too.
 We also have the next verse in Nehemiah (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.
These repairs may have been to a wall that later became part of the Hasmonean fortifications: we see a piece of it just NE of us.
On the other hand, nothing was found in the shafts to indicate their date or use. Between them is the opening of a large "mikveh" (ritual bath), near which was found a stone slab with a long inscription in Greek (enlarge the picture below). It gives credit to one Theodotus, priest and ruler of the synagogue, for building a synagogue and the associated chambers (evidently a large complex). The presence of the ritual bath suggests that the synagogue was here. The two rock-cut shafts may have been its basements. (Reich, Avni, Winter, pp. 62-63 )
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| Synagogue inscription |
Leaving by the same wire gate, we continue our upward climb. Soon, on our right, we can see, below us, the ruins of a residential section, mostly from the 7th century BC, protected by a stretch of the eastern city wall. The latter was built on pieces of the cyclopean wall from a millennium earlier, the same one that Kenyon found below Warren's Shaft.
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. Until the time of King Hezekiah and Isaiah the prophet, 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.
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