(Suggestion: For background, read The first Jerusalem and the City of David: Historical Geography.)

(In the time of the First Temple, the hill where Silwan is today was honeycombed with cave-tombs hewn into the rock. Most of them are hidden by the houses today. To judge from the workmanship, these were the tombs of the upper classes. The people of ancient Jerusalem lived facing their eminent dead.)

Apart from the water problem, the first city had another major vulnerability. This was where we stand, on its northern end, because here alone no deep valley protected it. There was probably a citadel here. The archaeologists found stone walls in the form of cubes, with dirt and smaller stones packed between them. These broadened the ridge at this point, probably to provide a base for the fortress. (And perhaps for the palace as well: the proto-aeolic capital of a pillar was found in this area; such capitals are found in palaces of the First Temple period.)

Descending a staircase southward, we can see some of these cubes. The path gives us the option of cutting back to the north. Taking it, we turn west and see part of a massive, curved "stepped-stone structure." It is sixty feet from top to bottom.

Clearly, there would have been no need to undertake such a huge construction after Jerusalem expanded, that is, after Solomon built the Temple, whose retaining walls would have defended the city farther to the north. The terrace and the later stepped-stone structure must have preceded Solomon, but who built them?

Archaeological dating is difficult in this earliest Jerusalem, for these reasons:  

a) The slopes are so steep that ancient builders either re-used existing structures or cut back to bedrock, dumping earlier remains, so that little could be found in situ.

b) Part of the hill was used as a quarry, probably in the Roman period.

c) Much of it was explored by 19^th-century archaeologists. The importance of broken pottery for dating had not yet been discovered. They threw away the sherds they found.

The last major dig in this area, called Area G, was directed by Yigal Shiloh from 1978 until 1985. In his interim report (Shiloh 19, p. 17), Shiloh wrote that "considerable effort was spent in this area in locating undisturbed layers and fragments of fill directly related to the stepped stone structure. Several such patches were indeed located and the associated pottery included clear examples from Stratum 14, of the 10th century BCE." That would make the structure Davidic or Solomonic (pre-Temple). Yet some archaeologists question this conclusion; they take the retaining walls and the stepped-stone structure as a single unit which they date to the Late Bronze Age.

About 5 yards to the right (north) of Ahiel's house, there is part of a second staircase adjoining the wall of another structure. (Not shown here.) Archaeologists call this "the burnt room," for they found many lumps of carbonized wood in it. These included finely worked pieces of boxwood (not native) with motifs such as the palmette, also known from the ivories of this time. Mixed among the pottery sherds were arrowheads of bronze and iron. The impression is one of battle and fire, and to this we can relate the destruction by the Babylonians in 586 BC, as told in 2 Kings 25:8-9:

Now on the seventh day of the fifth month, which was the nineteenth year of King Nebuchadnezzar, king of Babylon, Nebuzaradan the captain of the guard, a servant of the king of Babylon, came to Jerusalem. He burned the house of the Lord, the king's house, and all the houses of Jerusalem; even every great house he burned with fire.

East of Ahiel's, beneath the path we stand on, the diggers discovered another burnt house with arrowheads from that day… and more: 51 bullae, that is, clay seals from the letters received by the person who lived in this dwelling. The fire had burned the letters and baked the seals. These contain names, including Yerahmiel son of the King, Benyahu son of Hosea, and Gemariah the son of Shaphan. The last was the royal scribe in the days of King Jehoiakim and the prophet Jeremiah (36: 9-12).

(The seal of Baruch the son of Neriah, Jeremiah's own scribe, was also found, but in an unofficial dig, so we are not sure where. It can be seen in the Inscriptions Room of the Israel Museum.)

Forty-eight years after the Babylonian destruction, the edict of Cyrus allowed the exiles to return and rebuild the Temple. Under Nehemiah (Chs. 1-6), the city wall too was rebuilt, although it enclosed a much smaller area than before the Babylonian destruction. Note the corner of an inset in the wall above us (No. 3 in the photographs above). The British archaeologist, Kathleen Kenyon, dug here from 1961 until 1967, and beneath this inset she found sherds from the time of the Babylonian invasion, no later. She identified the wall, therefore, as Nehemiah's work, designed for a very small city. Later the Hasmoneans incorporated it into their city wall. Most Jerusalemites in their day lived on the larger hill to the west; there was no need then to build houses on the steep slope below us, and so the wall could run this high up near the spine of the ridge.

We shall now head downhill to see how the people of the first Jerusalem defended their water supply.  

© 2003 Near East Tourist Agency (NET)

Text © 2003 Stephen Langfur