Wailing Wall Coins
Critics have long complained that the Mt Ophel excavations in Jerusalem are ideologically motivated. Certainly it is doubtful if they would have received permission anywhere other than Israel, because Israeli archaeologists have dug underneath the homes of local Arabs, propping the buildings up precariously on scaffolding poles. The aim of the excavations, stated or otherwise, is to prove that the Jews were in Israel in the centuries before Christ.
Last time I was there I had to wait a quarter of an hour for the film in the exhibition centre to start again, so I went up onto the roof of the centre to take some photographs of Silwan. A group of school children was being harangued by someone telling them that the wonderful discoveries proved that the Jews had a right to the land of Israel. I watched the film, which told me that the wonderful discoveries proved that the Jews had a right to the land of Israel. I then climbed down to the newly discovered Large Stone Building - claimed by Eilat Mazar as the palace of David - and guess what? There was an Israeli guide telling a party of Americans that the wonderful discoveries proved that the Jews had a right to the land of Israel.
It is a somewhat futile exercise, because no one other than a die-hard Palestinian doubts that Jews lived in Israel in the time of Christ and for a millennium and a half before that - and no matter how much archaeological evidence you turn up, the die-hard Palestinian isn't going to be convinced, so why bother? That, of course, is not to decry the interesting and important discoveries that have been made, but the discoveries will still be there in a century or two, so why alienate the Palestinians by undermining their homes?
In the most recent dig, the archaeologists have been following an ancient Roman drainage system back up the Ophel Mount towards the Temple Mount. Such tunnels can be fascinating places to dig: when the Diggings team excavated a sewer at Maresha we found lots of pottery, a few coins and a pair of dice, embedded in a rich brown compost - the less said about that the better! In the Mt Ophel dig the excavators have found oil lamps, endless broken pots, lost coins and, most intriguing of all, a Roman sword! As it was unlikely that a Roman soldier would discard his sword in a toilet (or carelessly drop it in and not retrieve it!) the suggestion is that this was a Roman sword in unauthorised hands. Perhaps it had been captured in the early stages of the AD 70 revolt and then discarded as its carrier tried to pretend to be a civilian when the city was captured, or perhaps it was seized from a Roman who had been stabbed by the Sicarii (ancient Jewish terrorists) and was discarded in haste when the Roman police started to search everyone in sight.
As the dig approached the Temple Mount, the archaeologists began to find the remains of buildings on either side, some of which predated the tunnel itself and had been cut through by the builders of the drain, others which abutted onto the tunnel and even used it for their own waste disposal. Some of those houses contained ritual baths known as a mikvah, where people who were unclean for any reason could bathe in a purification ritual. Interestingly, they found one such mikveh that had been deliberately destroyed so that the Western Wall of the Temple Mount could be built.
Devout Jews have venerated the Western Wall - often called the Wailing Wall - for centuries, believing it to be the only surviving remnant of Solomon's Temple. More modern analysis of the way in which the stones are cut says that it is part of the Third Temple, built by Herod the Great, who died in 4 BC.
Herod's rebuilding of the rather meagre temple constructed by Zerubbabel when the Jews returned from exile in Babylon was a highly controversial affair. The temple authorities did not trust him an inch - her was, after all, an Edomite, a hereditary enemy of the Jews - and suspected that he had only offered to rebuild the temple in order to tear down the existing temple and would lose interest as soon as that had been done! Herod had to just about double the cost of the project by demolishing the old temple part by part and rebuilding each demolished part before going on to the next!
This work, historians believe, was just about complete when Herod died. All that remained to do was a bit of decoration and tidying up. The 18,000 workmen left unemployed when the project ended contributed in no small part to the difficulties faced by Herod's son Archelaeus and may have been responsible for the fact that he was deposed by the Romans after ten inglorious years on the throne. The only discordant note in this story is the statement recorded in the gospel of St John. Around AD 27 or 28 Jesus, challenged to display a sign, declared, "Destroy this temple and in three days I will raise it up."
The indignant temple authorities riposted, "It took forty-six years to build this temple and you're going to rebuild it in three days?"
Herod is supposed to have begun his rebuilding around 19 BC, which would mean that work had only been going on for fifteen years when he died. Assuming that the figures quoted in the heat of controversy were correct, that would mean that in AD 27 the work was either still on-going or had only recently been completed. That is far too long to account for a bit of decoration and tidying up!
The newly discovered mikvah, however, shows that the Bible was right. As the excavators cleared the bath they discovered that someone had dropped four bronze coins which had been lost in the soil as workmen filled in the bath house and tamped the earth down to provide a secure foundation for the huge stones that were to be laid on them to form the Western Wall.
And they were huge - a point that needs to be emphasised in case anyone thinks that the coins might have somehow found their way into the bath house at a later date! Herod - and Solomon before him - wanted to provide a large flat area on top of the Temple Mount where the temple could be erected and where worshippers could congregate. The easiest way, of course, would have been to cut the top off the mountain, but that was unthinkable: the whole purpose of building a temple up high was to elevate it above the mundane and bring it and the worshippers closer to God.
The alternative was to build a wall around the summit of the mount, whose top would be level with the top of the mount, and then fill the resulting space with earth! As all that earth would be pressing down and out, the wall needed to be massive in order to retain the earth. Herod - or his architects - solved the problem by using huge stones. The largest of these is 9' high, 12' thick and 45' long! Even today I think builders would quail at the prospect of having to shift such heavy masonry, yet the ancient builders not only move the stone from the quarry to the building site, but lifted it up and put it on top of two other courses of stones almost as big. Once those stones were in place, no one - but no one - was going to mess around underneath them.
In other words, we can be sure that the four coins were buried about the time that the mikvah was demolished and filled in - they probably slipped from the pocket of one of the men hauling the earth or tamping it in place. The problem is that the four coins bear the name of the Roman Procurator Valerius Gratus and date from AD 17!
What that means is that the Western Wall cannot have been built before AD 17 - in fact, that is the earliest date for when it started to be built. If the wall was not built before then, then the dirt in-fill that makes up the platform for the temple courtyard cannot have been built before AD 17. In other words, at the very most, the temple cella, the rooms known as the Holy Place and the Holy of Holies, were built before Herod's death, but the store rooms, living quarters for the priests, the colonnades and porticoes which surrounded the temple, even the paving of the courtyards, all dated from long after Herod was in his grave.
This discovery also confirms a throw-away comment by Josephus, the Jewish historian, who mentions in his Wars of the Jews that the temple had been completed by Herod Agrippa II a mere twenty years before it was destroyed by the Romans in AD 70.
According to the gospels, when Jesus came down the Mount of Olives on Palm Sunday and saw the beautiful temple, at that stage still twenty-three years away from completion, He burst into tears, lamenting that because the city had rejected Him, the temple would be made desolate. Given that the Jerusalem temple was widely claimed to be one of the most beautiful buildings of antiquity, those tears are understandable.
the Bible was right This is hardly surprising, seeing as it was written by contemporaries. What is surprising is how often historians and critics think that because they live in the Twenty-first Century, they therefore know more about the First Century than the people who were alive at the time! Return
© Kendall K. Down 2011
