Jerusalem The City of David

I’ve visited the City of David excavations twice. My first visit was with a group of middle aged army reserve officers who decided not to proceed through Hezekiah’s tunnel because the way was blocked by a group of naked men doing things in the deepest water at the beginiing of the tunnel. “They’re performing a ritual”, one of them explained. So we went back to walk through the Canaamite Tunnel, constructed 3,800 years ago and still going strong today!!

All over Jerusalem you meet army groups getting to grips with their history. Whether they are secular or religious, does not matter. It’s all THEIR history even if the diaspora has meant lengthy absences of Jews from Palestine throughout the last three or four thousand years. I really think that this type of education for all the soldiers is a good thing but I must admit to being pleasantly surprised that the process continues throughout the life of a soldier.

They tell me how they hate the duties they have to perform in Hebron in particular. They also regret the fact that they had to kill innocent people in Gaza when the terrorists deliberately chose positions where innocent people would die when they are attacked. It is difficult to be a soldier when confronted by terrorists who will do anything to achieve their objectives. “We cannot ignore people who attack us with rockets”, they say with feeling. “It is very difficult”, they say and I am sure that this is felt by all people who have been attacked by terrorists who will fight to the death.

I walk around the site with them and they take it in turns to translate the Hebrew for me. I am bowled over by the history of the place and the fact that enough evidence has been found to convince archeologists that this really is the site of the City of David.

One thing puzzles me. The City of David is to me is probably the most important site for Israelis possibly after the Western Wall and the remnants of the Second Temple. Why was the archeology only seriously begun fairly recently? One Israeli tells me that people tried to stop the early excavations when they found an enormous number of idols in the houses. If this was a stumbling block, it is easily explained by sections in the bible which actually mention this. In fact, I even viewed some of the “foreign idols”, as Jerimiah described them, which have been found so that stumbling block has presumeably been overcome.

The site of David’s city seems to have been inhabited from the very earliest times but the first fortified city, whose ruins presumably lie under the present excavations, appeared about four thousand years ago. David turned up to capture the city, probably through the water tunnel, about three thousand years ago. After living amongst houses over seven hundred years old in Florence, three thousand years seems an enormous period. The contemporary events are particularly interesting as most of them are recorded in the Bible or the Old Testament of the Christian Bible.

For a large part of my life, I have sung the psalms and slept through the Old Testament lessons. I have sung the ‘Lamentations of Jerimiah’ where the forthcoming destruction of Jerusalem by the Babylonians is foretold. The recent discovery of a seal of Gedaliah the son of Pashur, an accuser of Jeremiah, has confirmed the dates of the buildings found so far. Again, I still wonder why this is only happening now as people are actually starting to live again in the City of David area.

On my visit, I was overwhelmed by the fact that I was standing over the spot where probably ” .. David heard that Absalom was slain”, a text on which a number of moving anthems are based and one which I have sung. Standing over the site which they think is David’s place, I can imagine that, being about where the first floor would have been, this is where David actually wept for his revolting son!The politics of David’s time seem even more problematic than today resulting in the death of Absalom and David’s grief. ‘Absalom’s column’ still stands at the original place in the valley below the City and Jews were supposed to bring their naughty children to the monument to throw stones at it and ponder what would happen to them if they continued to disobey their parents. (I have been assured by all the Jewish people I have met that they do NOT follow this tradition today. What a shame!!! It seems a great idea!).

So it was with a great feeling for history that I paid a second visit to the City of David. (Actually that isn’t strictly true. I turned up at the Temple Mount and found that, because the Moslems were feasting non-stop for three days, I could not get up to the Dome of the Rock that day and the City of David is directly below the Temple Mount.) Anyway, I decided that I would take the tour at ten o’clock and get an English commentary instead of Hebrew. Meanwhile I chatted to a chap who arranged tours to Israel but who knew absolutely nothing about the goings-on around the West Bank and was rather wary of visiting Bethlehem.

I’ve become fed up with being blamed for “hanging Jews” during the British Mandate so today I’m Australian, although people wonder why I speak English and not German. But I like being Austrian so that’s OK with me.

We first have to endure a 3D film experience with sound rather like those awful ‘experiences’ you get when you go round Universal or Warner Brothers Studios. It blasts out at us and gives a brief history of the City of David and Jerusalem. The visuals are fairly good if it weren’t for the pigeons which keep flying into the camera. Armed with all that information which we have already forgotten, the guide begins his historical spiel starting four thousand years ago.

The astounding feature of this spiel is that he is talking about stuff that was discovered during the last few weeks!!!!! Again I am dumbfounded about the way this important site has been neglected. We gaze at the idols and some facsimiles of seals which; as I’ve mentioned, are pretty good indications of the authenticity of the date and function of the various buildings.

When you look down on the City of David site from the Mount of Olives, you see the Otterman walls and the modern city above the old city. Why did the earlier occupants choose the smaller hill on which to build?

The answer is water. There is a spring, the Gihon Spring, at the base of the hill from which people could draw water all through the year. It is still a plentiful source of water today. We descend the hill and gaze at the original spring, still running. This is where Zadok the Priest anointed Solomon son of David, blew the ram’s horn and the people said “Long Live King Solomon”. (Unfortunately Handel wasn’t around to complete the scene!) The present Queen Elizabeth insisted on being anointed with oil at her coronation in a similar way so this tradition has lasted for about three thousand years and explains why Handel’s anthem “Zadok the Priest” was so important at the present Queen Elizabeth’s coronation.

By now I know why the City of David is so important to me. The events here produced then and have inspired since, so much music!!! King David played the old lyre, a instrument rather like a harp, which is the icon of the City of David and is still used as a ‘flash badge’ by bands all over the world today. In the evenings, when he had some spare time after governing all day, he’d knock off a psalm now and then. And we’re still singing them.

The highlight of the tour – the ‘rite of passage’ – is wading through Hezekiah’s tunnel. I’m not that interested in doing things like this but, because my ‘street cred’ is at risk and there are no naked men in the way, I join the group. The water is only mid-thigh deep and it is pleasantly cool so the experience is not unpleasant. The water still flows fast from the spring through the tunnel and it’s reassuring to know that it has done so for the last 2,700 years.

The tunnel is a feat of engineering undertaken by King Hezekiah when the Assyrians were about to beseige the city. (Remember Sennacherib?) Besides beefing up the fortifications, he diverted the source of water from the Gihon to a place inside the walls of the city. The tunnel was hacked out of solid rock from each end for a distance of over five hundred metres and miraculously the two tunnels met head-on in the middle. However, they used a ‘snake’ method of tunnelling to increase the chance of meeting. You can see the place where the tunnellers from each end met. It takes over half hour of stooped walking to get through the tunnel and, when you arrive at the other end, you have the satisfaction of knowing that you have enjoyed an archeological extreme sport!!

We leave the tunnel and reach the Siloam or Shiloach pool where the water is collected today. This was built during the Byzantine period (fourth century), but further on is an original large pool from the Second temple period. This is a beautiful large pool built, archeologists think, over the original Siloam Pool of Hezekiah. Only a portion is unearthed. The remainder lies under land owned by the Greek Orthodox church. (Apparently much of Jerusalem is owned by the Greek Orthodox Church!)

This must be one of the most amazing archeological sites in the world. Discoveries are being made almost weekly here. Being such an important site for Jews, it is a mystery to me why so much excellent work has been done elsewhere and this project has proceded so slowly. I don’t buy the ‘idol’ theory although some of the ‘ultra-orthodox’ people have managed to stop other projects citing more tangible reasons. For me, it puts other archeological projects in the shade.