Pure for God
Just digging at the Western Wall was excitement enough for us back in 1995. Only yards away black-coated Jews bobbed and swayed as they chanted prayers and a short distance beyond that was a tunnel dug alongside the wall. The soil there was considered so holy that even the Jewish archaeologists were not allowed to dig: they had to sit on stools five feet away while yeshiva students (theology students) carried out their instructions!
Quite why the artificial earth ramp leading up to the Gate of the Mograbbin made all the difference we are not entirely sure, but when we were offered the chance to dig at the Western Wall, we didn't stop to split theological hairs. We leaped at the chance with both hands, so to speak, and spent a fascinating week working under archaeologist Ronny Reich.
Our task was to clear away centuries of soil down to the level of a Roman road that at that time was believed to date to the time of Christ. (Subsequent excavations raised some of the ancient paving stones and discovered coins from a later period beneath them, meaning that the road in its present form was constructed after Jesus left the earth.)
Digging down we discovered brightly coloured and glazed pottery from the Crusaders and beneath that plain white mosaic from the Omayyid period. Lower still was painted plaster from the earliest days of Islam before the fanatics perverted it. Then we found a bronze ring and a tiny bronze coin - a mite - from the Byzantine period.
Jutting up through these layers of archaeological fill - and eventually dominating the square we were clearing - were huge stone blocks with the finely cut rebates and smooth bosses typical of Herodian work. These, we were told, were stones from the temple. When the Romans captured Jerusalem in AD 70 and destroyed the city, squads of soldiers equipped with crowbars had set to work on the walls and cloisters that surrounded the temple courtyard, levering the stones out of position and toppling them into the Tyropoean Valley below.
There was great excitement when we discovered a small stone ball, which Ronny Reich identified as a Roman ballista ball. There was even more excitement when we found an iron Roman arrow head. Both had obviously been fired into the city as part of the struggle to defeat the Jewish terrorists who had taken over the heart of Judaism, murdering priests and populace alike in their struggles for supremacy.
Alas, we never did clear down to the street - Jerusalem was suffering a heat wave that year which made our digging more lethargic than it should have been - but we came pretty close. There was only about a foot of soil to be removed when the time came to down tools on the final day of our dig. I was a little disappointed: it would have been something special to have uncovered stones on which Jesus walked! Nevertheless, we could congratulate ourselves on having added a few more pieces to the jigsaw that is the archaeology of Jerusalem.
It was somewhere near here that Jesus really got up the noses of the temple authorities by busting a very profitable scam they were running. According to the law of Moses, an animal presented for sacrifice had to be whole and healthy - you weren't allowed to offer the runt of the flock or one on its last legs from disease or defect. Before the sacrifice ritual began, therefore, a special priest would examine the animal to be sure that it was ritually pure.
Oddly, no matter how careful you might be in selecting the best animal from your flock or herd, it never quite passed muster. A single white hair on a black animal (or vice versa), a miniscule difference in size between horns or hooves, or an invisible blemish in one of its eyes and the animal was declared unclean. Fortuantely, you did not have to go home to fetch another one. Conveniently at hand in the temple courtyard was a dealer with a stock of animals complete with certificates of purity and you could part exchange your defective beast for one of these. Never mind the fact that the certified animal seemed weak and scrawny and only had three legs; your large, healthy ram or goat was only worth about three-quarters of the price of the certified beast, but once you had paid, your sacrifice could go ahead and no doubt God was well pleased with you.
Equally crooked was the provision for offering money. Clearly you could not offer an ordinary shekel, made obnoxious by the image of Herod or Caesar or a pagan god on the face. Even a Jewish shekel was suspect, as who could tell whether it had been handled in the recent past by a leper or, even worse, a gentle? Fortunately the solution to this problem was as convenient as the other: set up in the temple courtyard was a counter where you could exchange your ordinary shekels for temple shekels, but not on a one-for-one basis - dear me, no. Ten ordinary shekels might, if you were lucky, get you eight temple shekels that looked and smelled and felt identical to the ones you were handing over.
How did the officiating priest know that the animal you were bringing for sacrifice was one of the approved ones? According to the Mishna the answer was simple: along with the animal you were given a small stone token. The priest pocketed the token - to be returned to the dealer later in the day - and went ahead with the sacrifice.
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| A seal from the Second Temple period certifying an object as "Pure for God". |
Although the Diggings team has not been privileged to work at the Western Wall again - it was a fortunate concatenation of circumstances that got us in there that first time - Ronny Reich has continued to explore and dig and every time I go to Jerusalem I peer over the wall to see what new things have been uncovered. His latest discovery, announced at the end of 2011, is probably one of the most exciting finds ever made in Jerusalem.
It is a small block of stone with rounded corners. On one face are two Aramaic words meaning "Pure for God". As the letters are the right way round, it would appear that the object was not used as a stamp to impress the letters into clay or wax. Almost certainly, therefore, it was one of the tokens referred to in the Mishna, dropped in the street by a dealer with a hole in his pocket or hurled there by a disgruntled worshipper.
Or, for all we know, it may have rolled there when a certain Galilean rabbi rampaged through the temple courtyards, wielding a short piece of rope like a scourge and overturning the tables of the money changers and scattering the cages of doves reared at Maresha. "It is written," He shouted at the outraged temple officials as they scrambled to rescue their dishonest takings, "'My house shall be called the House of Prayer for all nations', but you have made it a den of thieves!"
More than anything else, this action sealed Jesus' fate. The temple authorities could stand being called hypocrites, they could cope with having their theology challenged, but when Jesus touched their bank accounts, He had to be stopped.
© Kendall K. Down 2011
