The Walls of Jerusalem

The Jerusalem Post is reporting that the remains of the southern wall of Jerusalem, the wall that was built by the Hasmonean Kings during the Second Temple period have been uncovered on Mount Zion.

According to the report, the wall was destroyed during the Great Revolt against the Romans that began in 66 C.E. The photo below shows the remains of the city walls.




Claude Mariottini
Professor of Old Testament
Northern Baptist Seminary

Tags: City Walls, Jerusalem

The Mother of Seven

“The mother of seven will grow faint and breathe her last. She will die, ashamed and humiliated, while it is still daylight” (Jeremiah 15:9).

In ancient Israel, the symbolism of giving birth to seven children was used as a proverbial expression to describe a woman blessed with children or to refer to a family whose future in Israel was guaranteed because the family name would survive in the memory of the community through the sons. Two classic examples of “mother of seven” appear in the Old Testament.

When Hanna was delivered from her barrenness and gave birth to Samuel, she said: “The barren has borne seven” (1 Samuel 2:5). These words reflect Hannah’s joy in becoming a mother and the awareness that she had conceived a son because of God’s help.

The second example is found in Ruth 4:15. After Ruth married Boaz and gave birth to Obed, the women of Bethlehem paid her the highest compliment by telling Naomi that her daughter-in-law Ruth was better “than seven sons.” This recognition spoke highly of Ruth’s character since being a mother of seven sons was the highest accolade a woman in Israel could receive.

For a woman, to be a mother and to have sons was to be blessed by God. Psalm 113:9 says that the Lord should be praised because “He gives the barren woman a home, making her the joyous mother of children.”

On the other hand, women such as Sarah, Rebekah, Rachel, and Samson’s mother were barren and unhappy. These women carried with them the sorrow of being unable to give children to their husbands and the opprobrium of their society for not being blessed by God.

In light of the positive sentiment that the proverbial expression of being a mother of seven carried in Israel, it is significant that Jeremiah used the same imagery to describe the enormous tragedy and the depth of sorrow that would come to Jerusalem as a result of the judgment that God was bringing upon the nation.

During the invasion of Jerusalem, so many husbands would be killed that the widows of Jerusalem would become “more numerous than the sand of the seas.” So many children would die that mothers would receive news that their sons were killed early in battle (Jeremiah 15:8).

According to Jeremiah, when the judgment arrives upon Jerusalem and a mother of seven hears the news of the death of her children, that mother will be filled with anguish, tormented by the terrible deaths of her children. Robbed of her children in the prime of their lives, the woman grows faint, breathes her last, and dies (Hebrew: “breathes out her life”), ashamed and humiliated because she has lost her seven sons (Jeremiah 15:9).

The imagery of a mother of seven losing her children is used to describe the anguish, pain, and sorrow that will fall upon the inhabitants of Jerusalem. The imagery, although painful, is a good illustration of the paroxysms of emotion evoked by the disaster that came upon Judah in 587 BCE.

There is no greater human sorrow than the one which comes to a home when a mother of many children dies in the prime of her life, leaving her children deprived of maternal love. This is the imagery Jeremiah uses to describe the plight of the people of Judah. Jeremiah, anticipating the coming judgment that the Lord will bring upon Judah, uses the imagery of a husband mourning the death of his wife and the mother of his many children.

Mother Jerusalem (2 Samuel 20:19) has lost her children and her judgment is a reversal of the promise God has made to the ancestors. The promise of life that God had made to Abraham, “I will indeed bless you, and I will make your offspring as numerous as the sand on the seashore,” now becomes the reality of death: “Their widows will be more numerous than the grains of sand on the seashore” (Jeremiah 15:8).

The promise of life once made to Abraham has become an illustration of what will happen to Jerusalem when the destroyer comes. The city that once was full of people will now become like a widow deprived of her children (Lamentations 1:1). The proverbial expression used to describe a woman blessed with God’s favor will now become the symbol of bereavement and death.

Claude Mariottini
Professor of Old Testament
Northern Baptist Seminary

Tags: Children, Jerusalem, Judgment, Mothers, Widows

The City of David: Politics and Archaeology

People familiar with excavations in Jerusalem know of the controversy that has arisen with the involvement of the Elad Foundation in sponsoring archaeologists in excavating the city in order to recover “the remnants of a glorious Jewish past.”

A recent article on the controversy reveals how politics, religion, and archeology influence excavations in Jerusalem. The following is an excerpt from the article:

Doron Spielman, the Elad Foundation’s international director of development said, “We do not deny we have a Zionist dream -- to reveal the ancient city beneath the ground and create a thriving Jewish neighborhood above the ground.”

More than 160 feet under Silwan on a recent afternoon, a visitor walked for half an hour in darkness and knee-deep water through Hezekiah’s tunnel, the stillness disturbed only by a party of South American tourists bellowing the theme song from the “Indiana Jones” movies.

The Old Testament books of Kings and Chronicles recount the tunnel’s origins: Hezekiah, king of Judea, dug it to channel water inside the city walls ahead of a siege by Assyrian armies.

Measuring 1,750 feet long -- about a third of a mile -- the tunnel was dug around 700 B.C. by two teams that started from each end and met in the middle, an engineering feat brought to life by their chisel marks, still visible on the walls, and recounted in an inscription they mounted on the wall.

“The City of David shows us the history and archaeology of Jerusalem since the day it was founded. Jerusalem's foundations are here,” said archaeologist Eli Shukrun, standing near the entrance to another tunnel -- a long, dank-smelling Roman-era sewer through which Jews fled Jerusalem as it was torched by Rome's legions in 70 A.D.

The sewer ran beneath a road that led up to the Second Temple, the center of the Jewish faith, destroyed in the same Roman assault.

Roni Reich of Haifa University, another City of David archaeologist, gives voice to the history pulsing through Jerusalem, reeling off the names of history’s giants associated with the city -- David, Jesus, the Roman Emperor Constantine, the Muslim ruler Saladin.

“It's hard to list another city similar to this one,” he said.”"And this hill is where it all started.”

The dig regularly yields important and colorful finds such as 2,500-year-old pins used to hold robes closed, and seals stamped with the names of Yehochal ben Shlemiyahu and Gemaryahu ben Shafan, two figures mentioned in the biblical book of Jeremiah.

Archaeologists not connected to the City of David digs don’t dispute their importance.

Amihai Mazar, a professor at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, said the site has already revealed important details of Jerusalem's history. He mentioned the discovery of massive Canaanite fo.jpgications 3,700 years old and of thousands of fish bones indicating the diet favored in this landlocked city on the desert’s edge.

“This site doesn’t stop surprising us,” Mazar said.

The archaeologists at the site say their work has nothing to do with politics. But others charge their colleagues with complicity in Elad's agenda of moving Jews to the Arab neighborhood.

The City of David dig”"is connected by its umbilical cord to politics,” said Rafi Greenberg, an Israeli archaeologist from Tel Aviv University who dug at the site in the 1970s and 1980s, before Elad was involved.

“No amount of dealing with ceramics and rocks can obscure the fact that the work is being done to establish facts in the present,” he said. He rejected his colleagues’ claim to academic neutrality, saying:”"They are being compensated for their cooperation with findings and money.”

Reich said the people paying for the dig haven’t interfered in his work. “I can divide the political from the archaeological,” he said.”"The people from Elad have never affected our archaeological judgment.”

When politics and archeology join hands to recover “the remnants of a glorious Jewish past,” the results can lead to conclusions that may not reflect the realities of the past. Archaeologists cannot allow donors to influence how the past is interpreted. The danger is that money and politics can become the prism by which archaeologists look at the past. Let us hope that this does not happens in the excavations of the City of David.

Claude Mariottini
Professor of Old Testament
Northern Baptist Seminary

Tags: Archaeology, Jerusalem

Archaeology and Politics

Raphael Greenberg, writing in the Jewish Quarterly, 208 (Winter 2007), has written an excellent article in which he deals with the history of excavation in Jerusalem and how politics have influenced excavation in the city. He begins his article with the following words:

Any intellectual practice in Israel entails both the representation of politics and the politics of representation. The ideological implications of practising archaeology in Jerusalem are as many-layered as the cultures that lie buried beneath the city's surface. Archaeology has always been implicated in the conflict of claims to the contested land but now archaeologists find themselves increasingly in the pay of right-wing settler groups, who use their finds to write their own particular version of history.

His article begins discussing the first archaeological conference in Jerusalem following the Six-Day War. This conference, which was held in October 1967, brought together Yigael Yadin, Benjamin Mazar, and Nahman Avigad. The aim of the conference was to discuss the possibility of large-scale excavation of Jerusalem by Israeli archaeologists.

Greenberg’s article details how archaeology was influenced by politicians and religious leaders to affirm the Jewishness of Jerusalem. Greenberg wrote:

The history of Israeli-Palestinian relations in Jerusalem reached a remarkable turning point in 1992-3. The electoral success of Yitzhak Rabin and the Labor Party paved the way to the 1993 Oslo accords, yet the election of Ehud Olmert as mayor of Jerusalem a few months later signaled the victory of a religious and right-wing agenda in the city. Galvanized by the threat to their settlement program in the West Bank, the ideological right went into overdrive. In Jerusalem, a two-pronged campaign was pursued, aimed at suppressing Palestinian political activity in East Jerusalem while also establishing a Jewish presence in as many locations as possible around the Old City.

This activity marked the beginning of a hitherto-unknown intimacy between the non-governmental settlement movement and archaeology in the historic basin. The ultimate aim of the settlers was to create wedges of Jewish settlement in the interstices between Palestinian neighborhoods that would prevent any political division of the city, and eventually to dilute the entire Palestinian presence. Archaeology provided physical and symbolic capital for this project, in the form of a narrative emphasizing Jewish continuity and of relics that testify to such continuity.

Raphael Greenberg has served as a staff member in the Temple Mount and City of David excavations. He also served as the Senior Editor in the Israel Antiquities Authority from 1985 and 2000 . At the present he is a Senior Lecturer in Archaeology at Tel Aviv University.

Read the article in its entirety by visiting the official page of the Jewish Quarterly.

Claude Mariottini
Professor of Old Testament
Northern Baptist Seminary

Tags: Archaeology, Jerusalem, Temple Mount

The Destruction of Antiquities on the Temple Mount

The most extensive work on the Temple Mount in more than a decade is being carried out by Islamic officials and it is causing a great deal of consternation among Israeli archaeologists.

In a news article published in the Jerusalem Post, Dr. Gabriel Barkai, an archeologist with the Bar-Ilan University said that “the Israeli government is lending a hand to the destruction of one of the most important archeological sites in the world.”

According to the news report, “Barkai said that the dig, which is being carried out with tractors and other heavy construction machinery, has created a 400-meter long and 1.5-meter deep trench on the site, destroying several layers of ancient remains. Among the antiquities which have been damaged is a seven-meter-wide wall which apparently dates back to the Second Temple, and is likely to have been part of its courts.”

Read the news report by clicking here.

It is sad that this excavation of the Temple Mount is being carried out without the supervision of archaeologists. The destruction of antiquities cause irreparable damage and obliterate precious evidence that could help archaeologists in their study of the site.

When prominent archaeologists such as Ephraim Stern, Amihai Mazar, Ehud Netzer, Israel Finkelstein, Moshe Kochavi, Gabriel Barkai, and Eilat Mazar say that evidence is being destroyed, someone in the Israeli government should listen and act fast.

Claude Mariottini
Professor of Old Testament
Northern Baptist Seminary

Photo: The Jerusalem Post

Tags: Archaeology, Jerusalem, Temple Mount