Abraham Rabinovich
Gabriel Barkay knew the hill from his army service with the Jerusalem Brigade. He had stood on its slope looking across no-man’s land at the crenellated walls of the Old City on the other side of the Hinnom Valley and reflected that other soldiers had stood there before him. Pompey and Titus had had siege camps here during their encirclements of Jerusalem and so, doubtless, had many other commanders. The building housing the British consulate near the crest had been a Turkish watchtower protecting this major approach to Jerusalem from the south.
Scouting in 1975 for a site for his first independent archaeological dig, Barkay — then a 31-year-old teacher at Tel Aviv’s Institute of Archaeology — returned to the hill opposite the Jerusalem railway station. Walking across its eastern slope, this time fixing his attention on the ground rather than the stunning view, he gathered from the surface pottery sherds from the First Temple period and placed them in the plastic bags he carried with him.
To the trained eye, there was considerable other evidence of ancient activity — a flattened stretch that indicated a road beneath the skin of the hill; remains of a quarry; the exposed threshold stone
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of what had been a large building; and, near the upper edge of the slope, a sliver of stone thrusting out of the soil.
A German archaeologist had seen this last in the 1930s and thought it might be the edge of one of the numerous tombs encircling old Jerusalem. Barkay thought so too, and the following year executed a pilot dig that soon uncovered two tombs that had been cut out of the living rock in the seventh century BC. The tombs were empty, but their existence encouraged him to make a full-scale dig in the area.
It was not until the end of June 1979 that Barkay was able to put his plan into operation, but on the very first day two of the volunteer diggers uncovered the edge of a tomb later labeled Cave 25. Other teams were uncovering similar rock-cut tombs on the slope beneath St. Andrew’s Church, but during the next two weeks Cave 25 began to emerge as something different under the shovels and brushes of the volunteers.
The tombs all contained burial chambers shaped like a squarish U. Lining three sides were benches on which the dead were laid for their final sleep. In Cave 25, there were sculpted headrests on the benches. One of the benches was so wide that it held six headrests. The special architectural treatment showed originality and perhaps wealth.
Beneath one of the benches in every tomb was an opening leading down into a large chamber, the repository, in which remains gathered from the benches were placed. This practice in family tombs of the First Temple period was the origin of the biblical phrase “gathered unto one’s fathers” and it was a form of burial unique to Judea.
Also transferred to the repository were gifts placed in the burial chamber by the kin of the deceased. That practice came to light a century ago, when a First Temple tomb was found in Silwan village with an ancient inscription announcing that the tomb contained no gold or silver, but only the bones of the deceased and his slave wife.
The other tombs on the slope had been picked virtually clean by grave robbers in the past; but when Barkay put his head into the Cave 25 repository, instinct told him that this might not be empty. A layer of cream-coloured dirt covered the chamber, indicating that part of the ceiling might have collapsed.
The original team of volunteers had now been replaced by a group of youngsters participating in a summer-camp program. A
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12-year-old boy was sent into the cave with a broom and he soon began shouting. He had found a pottery sherd. Although Barkay told him not to lift anything before it could be photographed in situ, the boy was soon excitedly waving about other items he was plucking from the dirt.
He was replaced by a team of adults from the American Institute of Holy Land Studies on Mount Zion across the valley. The chamber was divided by strings into sections, and each item was photographed and sketched before being moved.
Ancient Jerusalem is niggardly in yielding up its memories: a collection of basements rather than anything resembling the Roman Colosseum is the rule. What the archaeology profession calls “small finds” — jewelry, coins, weapons and the like — are even more rare. But within a few days of entering the Cave 25 repository, Barkay had used up all the small find bags he had brought for the entire season. Never before had an intact repository been found in Jerusalem, and this was a gusher. There were more than 100 pieces of silver jewelry. There was gold jewelry and stone beads, and faience and alabaster vessels, household ware and arrowheads. Only one coin was found, but it proved to be the oldest coin ever found in the country — a sixth century BC piece with a crab design from the Aegean island of Kos.
Fearful of what might happen to such a treasure trove in the middle of a city if its existence became known, Barkay kept teams working in the tomb for up to 20 hours a day, electric lights being strung from St. Andrew’s church. It took a week to finish the job, and by that time some 700 objects had been retrieved.
The most intriguing were two tiny silver scrolls. To unroll them without causing damage was a technical challenge that laboratories in Israel and Germany would ponder for three years before the head of Israel Museum laboratory. Dodo Shenhav, successfully opened them.
The scrolls were amulets on which prayers had been scratched. They were very difficult to decipher, but on one of the scrolls Barkay was able to make out distinctly the Hebrew word for God; the letters yud-heh-vav-heh transliterated as Yahwe or Jehovah. It was the first time the Name, the Tetragrammaton, had been found in Jerusalem.
It has been one of the anomalies of biblical archaeology that in close to a century and a half of exploration, the Hebrew name of
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God had never been found in the city in which the divine presence was most immediately felt and which was the center for centuries of religious literature. The reason, says Barkay, is that the material on which the name was commonly written, papyrus, had long since disintegrated. Very few stone and pottery inscriptions have been found and none of these was of a religious nature. Although a signet from the First Temple period with the inscription Servant of God is reportedly in the possession of a Harvard scholar, it was purchased in a Jerusalem antiquities shop and its origin is unknown.
Barkay did not publicize his find for fear of drawing unwelcome visitors to the site. In 1980 he returned for another season of excavations and uncovered several more First Temple period caves, two of which contained, between them, several hundred more small finds. There were also important finds from other periods, down to the Turkish, which last yielded a cache of old rifles.
Hopeful that he might resume his excavations on what he calls the Shoulder of Hinnom, Barkay decided to maintain his no-profile position. However, the opening of the scrolls and their dramatic disclosure prompted him to deliver a lecture on his excavations at the Rockefeller Museum recently.
The first temple period had always been Barkay’s special interest. Known in the trade as Iron Age II, this is the period from the 10th to the 6th century BC when 21 kings of the Davidic line ruled in Jerusalem. The period ended when the Babylonians breached the walls of the Temple and destroyed it.
“This is the period in which Jerusalem acquired the meaning it has in Jewish tradition and Western civilization,” Barkay said in an interview last month. His finds illuminate the material and cultural life of Jerusalem during that period.
They also shed light on the immediate post-destruction period in Jerusalem about which almost nothing is known, not even from Jeremiah, who lived through it. Many of its residents were carried off to weep beside the waters of Babylon, but there is no literary evidence to show whether anyone stayed behind in the Holy City. Nor had there been any archaeological evidence.
Now, says Barkay, pottery in the tombs clearly indicates that burials continued to be carried out in the years immediately after the Temple’s destruction. “This says that there was activity, that people continued to live in Jerusalem or to come here to bury their dead in family burial caves, probably quite wealthy people,” says Barkay.
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At least one of the tombs was being used by the Romans in the Third Century AD, 1,000 years after it was originally hewn, making it as Barkay puts it, “The longest-lived burial cave in Jerusalem.”
The Romans also used their own methods of interring the dead. Barkay found blackened pits in which Romans, presumably soldiers of the Tenth Legion garrison, were cremated and nearby cooking pots in which the ashes were interred. Also found were Roman shaft burials, in which a shaft was dug and its bottom widened to receive bodies. These were covered by stones and two more layers of bodies could be interred on top of them.
The exposed threshold that Barkay had noticed during his first survey of the hill in 1978 proved to be from a magnificent and hitherto historically misplaced Byzantine church which Barkay partly excavated. He deduced that this was the St. George Outside the Walls mentioned by a Byzantine monk who collected the corpses of the city’s clergy after a massacre by invading Persians. Two decades ago that name had been attributed by archaeologists to a chapel found beneath what is now the parking lot of the Hilton Hotel during the development of the adjacent Binyenei Ha’uma. Although it contained a mosaic inscription mentioning St. George, its distance from the Old City — about two km. — seemed to some too great to warrant that identity. Barkay is convinced that his church, just across the narrow vale from the Old City, is the one mentioned by the monk.
His conviction is reinforced by the St. George inscription on a burial cave in the valley below. The entire area between the Cinematheque and the nearby gas station at the edge of Liberty Bell Park was part of a Byzantine Church and monastery complex, says Barkay.
Another of the 10 burial caves he uncovered had been in use during the Turkish period, not as a tomb but as an armory. There are clear signs of a large explosion, but from the rubble dozens of rifles were extricated. One of the American volunteers on the dig identified one of the weapons as a Winchester designed for buffalo hunting on the American plains.
The wealth of ancient finds Barkay uncovered has not been matched by current financing that would enable him to analyze what he has found. More than 100 bags filled with earth from vessels found in the tombs have not yet been combed, nor have there been chemical analyses of jewelry and other artifacts to help
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determine the origin of the materials. The Turkish rifles are lying under a cupboard in Tel Aviv University’s Institute of Archaeology, deteriorating while they wait for an arms expert to study them.
For the future, Barkay hopes to see the slope — owned by the Greek Orthodox Church and leased to the Church of Scotland — become an archaeological park in which visitors can share the dramatic glimpses into the city’s past opened by the excavations.
He would also like to see Cave 25, which has become a dumping ground, restored to a state that would do honor to the place from which the ancient name of the Lord first emerged in Jerusalem.
“This is one of the marvelous points in Jerusalem,” says Barkay, “where you have a meeting of landscape and history in a rare combination.”
(Reprinted from the Jerusalem Post International Edition, April 3-9, 1983.)
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