Ian W.J. Hopkins
[Ian Hopkins is the author of Jerusalem: A Study in Urban Geography, published by Baker Book House in 1970, as well as a number of articles in scholarly publications.]
Increasing recognition is being given to the fact that ancient cities, although built in a very compact manner, were nevertheless usually surrounded by gardens and fields which provided them with much of their food supplies. In the case of Jerusalem, some of these gardens are mentioned in the Bible either by name or by association with some historical event. However, while we know that these gardens existed and often what they were called, there is some uncertainty as to exactly where they were located and what they were like.
The Garden of Uzza
The first specific mention of a garden in Jerusalem in the Bible is in two references to a royal garden called the Garden of Uzza (Uzziah). In 2 Kings 21:18, we are informed that “Manasseh slept with his fathers and was buried in the garden of his own house, in the Garden of Uzza”. A few verses later it is recorded that Manasseh’s son Amon “was buried in his grave in the Garden of Uzza” (2 Kings 21:16). It is clear from these two references that this was a garden owned by the king and attached to his own house.
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The location of the Garden of Uzza is consequently related to the question of the location of the royal household. The most recent opinions tend to locate the royal palaces just south of the temple platform (the present Haram esh-Sharif) on a narrow neck of land in the northern part of the Ophel ridge. It might seem that the Garden of Uzza should therefore be located in this area. Yet clearly since burials, even royal ones, would not normally be made within the city walls it cannot have been a palace courtyard garden. It is more likely to have been the garden which supplied the royal household with provisions and may be located either in the Kidron valley or perhaps even the Tyropoeon which lay between the ridge of Ophel which held the Old Testament city and the hill now known as Mt. Sion. The
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Kidron valley has more water available and it is therefore most likely to have been the place for a royal garden.
There is, however, further information available on this garden. The fact that it was used for royal burials was the clue for George Adam Smith to link it with the statement in Ezekiel 43:7 that the temple had been defiled “by the corpses of their kings when they die.” In the following verse it is made clear that the complaint is that the kings were buried too close to the temple “with only the wall between Me and them.” If we assume that the kings would not be buried within the city walls, the only real possibility is on the high slopes of the Kidron valley immediately east of the temple walls. Since the extreme south-eastern part of the present Haram esh-Sharif enclosure is probably the Herodian extension, the Garden of Uzza would be in the southern part of the present Moslem cemetery just east of the Haram walls and probably extended down to the Kidron Valley in what is now a terraced garden. Intense cultivation could have been possible immediately beneath the walls if water was made available, and the steeper slopes were no doubt planted with trees and terraced as at present.
The terraces of the Kidron Valley and Gethsemane looking west from the Mount of Olives.
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The King’s Garden
A second garden named in the Old Testament is the King’s Garden. In 2 Kings 25:4, it is recorded that:
…all the men of war fled by night by way of the gate between the two walls which was by the King’s Garden, though the Chaldeans were all around the city. And they went by way of the Arabah.
It might be tempting to assume that this is the same as the Garden of Uzza since they were both under royal ownership, but it is unlikely that the author of the book of Kings would refer to a garden by two different names without explanation within the space of four chapters. The King’s Garden is more likely to be part of the royal estate compared with the Garden of Uzza which was the royal household’s private garden. Royal estates were common in ancient times and even today the British monarchy owns many thousands of acres of farmed land. In 1 Chronicles 27:26–31 we have listed the overseers who were in charge of David’s royal fields, flocks and herds. Supervisors were in charge of such products as tillage crops, vineyards, olive and sycamore trees as well as flocks of sheep and herds of cattle, camels and donkeys. This royal estate would have included lands in villages around the city, including probably Bethlehem which was David’s home village, but it is likely that vineyards, olive groves and vegetable plots existed very close to Jerusalem itself.
Our knowledge of the location of the King’s Garden is fairly certain. In Nehemiah 3:15 it is mentioned as being adjacent to the wall of the Pool of Shelah (Siloam). This wall was part of the city wall which ran adjacent to the public access to the pool, which we are now fairly certain was an underground cistern (see K.M. Kenyon — The Bible and Recent Archaeology, London, 1978, p. 80). The garden would be just outside this wall, possibly over the cistern and extending across the mouth of the Tyropoeon valley. This valley, normally dry, would have carried some surface run-off from the area west of the city and there is sufficient depth of soil here for an area of trees, shrubs and garden crops. It has generally been occupied by agricultural land use up until the present time.
The Garden of Gethsemane
In the New Testament two gardens are referred to — Gethsemane and the garden where Jesus’ tomb was located. Gethsemane is mentioned in the Gospels by name as “a place called
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Gethsemane.” The word rendered in English as “place” is the Greek Chorion which is perhaps more accurately translated as an enclosed piece of land or a field. The word Gethsemane itself literally means olive press, so we might conjecture that it was an enclosed olive garden with a press. The verse occurs in a discourse taking place on the Mount of Olives (Matthew 26:30) and so a location in the area of the mount is to be expected. Information from John’s Gospel confirms this. John records that “He went forth with His disciples over the ravine of the Kidron, where there was a garden” (John 18:1). The implication here is that Jesus left the city, crossed the Kidron Valley and immediately entered the garden. This would place Gethsemane on the eastern side of the Kidron Valley and probably at the foot of the Mount of Olives.
Now the Kidron Valley as we see it today is a small stream, usually dry except in the winter months. It “flows” across various deposits of rubble and its present course is 240 feet east of the original course and about 30 feet higher (see G.A. Smith, Jerusalem Vol I, p. 80). It is significant that in the Old Testament it is called a nahal (2 Samuel 15:23) and in the New Testament a Cheimarros, both meaning a winter torrent. It is not a large permanent watercourse, but nevertheless is more reliable and significant than any other wadi stream in the area and provides enough moisture to assist crop growth and has carved out a valley which provides enough bottom land for cultivation.
In Christian tradition, the location of the Garden of Gethsemane has been fixed at the point where the ancient route across the Mount of Olives crosses the Kidron, although it is not necessarily identical with any of the Gethsemanes which are pointed out to tourists today. Tradition has generally located the garden around the Church of the Virgin’s Tomb, which has survived the centuries as one of the oldest Churches in Christendom. In the time of Mas’udi (ca. 943 A.D.) this Church was in fact known as Al Jismaniyyah, a corruption of Gethsemane. In this area Theodosius, who in the fourth century A.D. made Christianity the official religion of the empire, had built a basilica commemorating the agony of Jesus in Gethsemane as recorded in Matthew 26:27–46. This was replaced by a Crusader building and after a period of Moslem ownership, the area around this spot was acquired by the Franciscans. It is now the official Roman Catholic Gethsemane. However, if John 18:1 implies that Gethsemane was directly across the Kidron Valley from the
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St. Anne’s Church (Virgin’s Tomb) with terraced slopes behind.
city, the original site may well have been west of the Catholic garden. The Greeks have a rival garden north of the Catholic site and there is also a Russian Gethsemane, higher up the Mount of Olives.
The Crucifixion Garden
The fourth garden is that referred to in John 19:41:
Now in the place where He was crucified there was a garden and in the garden a new tomb in which no one had yet been laid.
The location of this garden has been the source of much debate.
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The site with the oldest tradition behind it is the Church of the Holy Sepulchre (see Bible and Spade, Spring 1974, pp. 33-39). Present opinion of scholars is that the area in which the Holy Sepulchre is situated was outside the city walls in the first century A.D. and therefore there could well have been a garden with a tomb in it, although of course this does not prove that the present Holy Sepulchre Church does in fact enclose the actual tomb in which Jesus was laid. The Garden Tomb area to the north of the present Damascus Gate has been pointed out as an alternative, but the evidence for this is weak. What seems certain is that the garden where Jesus’ tomb was located was not in a valley but on the ridge between the Kidron and Hinnom valleys. Rock contours indicate the possibility of a shallow valley running westwards through the Holy Sepulchre Church and this valley may have been significant enough to allow some accumulation of soil and moisture to aid the location of a garden. It also appears that in this general area there was a gate in the city walls called the Gennath (garden) gate, mentioned by the Jewish historian Josephus. The excavations by the British School of Archaeology in Jerusalem under the late Kathleen Kenyon have shown that the area known as the Muristan, just south of the Holy Sepulchre, was outside the city walls and unoccupied until the second century A. D. The Gennath Gate must therefore have opened directly onto this and it could well be that the garden was centered around the present Muristan area. The present writer and others have previously contended for the Gennath Gate to be located near the site of the citadel (‘David’s Tower’) with the gardens in the Hinnom valley (see writer’s Jerusalem: a Study in Urban Geography, Grand Rapids. 1970, p. 128).
Soil and Water in the Jerusalem Area
The location of the gardens in Jerusalem follows a certain pattern in common with other towns. Heinrich von Thunen, a 19th century German agriculturalist, concluded that land use around a city is related to distance from the city as a result of the effects of transport costs on the rent of land. He produced a ‘model’ of land use forming concentric rings of different types of farming and land use, spread out around a city. The belt of land use nearest to the city would be, according to Von Thunen, woodland for building and domestic fires and beyond this a belt of horticulture and intensive arable farming. In most Middle Eastern towns, the belt of woodland would be superfluous since stone was used for building and fuel
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would be less important. Consequently, we would expect Jerusalem to have a belt of intensively cropped gardens immediately around the city, producing those foodstuffs or other products which were perishable, heavy to move or in frequent demand. The olive was in high demand because it was the source of the oil which provided light, heat and edible oils.
However, in the case of most cities, the zones of land use are far from being neat concentric rings. In Jerusalem, while there was clearly a tendency for gardens to be found just outside the city walls, other factors played an important part in determining garden location. Of these, soil and water provision and availability of level patches of land were the prime considerations.
Soil is very largely determined by the type of rock beneath the surface and the steepness of slope. Most of the rocks in the Jerusalem area are types of limestone which usually produce a relatively thin rendzina soil which is not notable for its fertility. The problem is accentuated by the pronounced relief of the Jerusalem area, producing steep slopes which tend to lose their soil downhill unless terraced. This means that gardens are normally located in the valleys, using the valley bottoms and terracing the gentler slopes. Even the area north of the first century A.D. northern wall which was used as a garden seems to have been in a slight valley.
Not all of the valleys contained gardens, however. In this respect there is — and perhaps always has been — a contrast between the Kidron and the Hinnom valleys. The Kidron valley has fields, orchards and gardens from its upper reaches (Wadi El Joz) down to the area of Job’s Well whereas the Hinnom at present only has fields and gardens in its lower reaches. There are two reasons for this. The first lies in the water supply. The Kidron is a nahal or winter brook and therefore tends to dry in summer, but carries water on a regular basis during the winter months. Originally, the Virgin’s Fountain (Gihon Spring) flowed into the lower Kidron and probably supplied a permanent source of water there. The Hinnom, in contrast, has always been a dry valley and any water flow has been confined to surface run-off after heavy rain. In the Old Testament it is not referred to as nahal, but a gai or dry valley. This would make cultivation more difficult and give the Kidron priority for cultivation, even when the city had spread onto the western hill overlooking the Hinnom.
An important side-effect of this is that the Kidron Valley contains
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JERUSALEM – GEOLOGY
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deposits of river alluvium over the basic limestone. This gives the valley a level of fertility not known in other parts of the area. In the valley north of the bridge formed by the Jericho Road, there are plowed fields where the alluvium broadens out and it is significant that the gardens east of the Old City walls end abruptly at the Silwan Road — where the alluvium peters out. From the Virgin’s Fountain south there is increasing alluvium and also more cultivation, although the growth of the suburb of Silwan has seen the transition of many gardens and fields to residential building.
In contrast, the Hinnom valley lacks this water deposited superficial layer and the rock surface is the cenomanian limestone which has been a popular building material in the city. It can produce a fertile terra rossa soil, especially if it contains marl, but the soils in the Hinnom valley do not seem to have been notable.
Characteristics of the Gardens
From a discussion of the location of Jerusalem’s gardens it is logical to move on to the question “What were these gardens like?” We get a few clues in the Bible as to the type of crop grown. In the Hill Country cultivation was, and still is, centered around the three tree crops of the olive, the vine and the fig, with wheat and barley only grown in areas of more level ground. There is reference in Ecclesiastes to royal gardens and orchards (2:5) and another Solomonic text refers to a garden of nuts (Song of Solomon 6:11). The name Gethsemane implies the existence of an oil press and therefore presumably of olive trees in the vicinity.
It has long been considered that the present system of traditional farming has broad similarities with that of Biblical times and might give us a picture of what these gardens were like. In rural areas changes are introduced slowly and until the land reforms of recent years and the Zionist colonisation, the agricultural areas of Palestine remained much the same as they had always been. The Moslems cut down the vines and they have only really been reintroduced on a large scale since the development of modern Israel, but vicissitudes of war apart, change has otherwise been relatively superficial. The very age of the olive trees in Jerusalem testifies to their cultivation for a long time. There have been estimates that some of the trees in the Catholic Garden of Gethsemane are 3, 000 years old, although according to Josephus, Titus destroyed all the trees around Jerusalem in his seige of the city in the first century A.D. However, it is certain that a large proportion of the olive trees around the city
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are of considerable age. Between the trees, land has been used for vegetables or for grazing and examples of both can still be seen in the Bethany area. On the other hand, cereals have been grown in small enclosed fields in the valley bottoms.
In order to examine the form of the gardens, it might be best to look at one in some detail. Perhaps the most interesting from the Biblical point of view is Gethsemane and for the purpose of this study we shall define this as the area of the Kidron valley and of the lower slopes of the Mount of Olives, between the road leading down to Silwan and the end of the olive trees north of the Church of St. Anne (Virgin’s Tomb).
Excluding the Moslem cemetery just east of the Old City walls, the area of “greater Gethsemane” can be divided into four blocks by its present day land use:
1) First of all there is the area of the Kidron valley, extensively terraced on the western bank, between the Moslem cemetery and the Jericho Road. As we have seen, the Kidron once ‘flowed’ further east and so the present slopes are not the original ones. Quite likely they date back to the destruction of the city in A.D. 70 and its rebuilding in A.D. 132. However, it is fairly certain that much of the characteristic nature of the garden as reconstructed reproduced that of previous centuries because the basic economy remained the same as did the level of technology. This part of Gethsemane was, as we have seen, probably the site of the old Garden of Uzza and even though the bed of the nahal has migrated there is no reason to suspect any drastic change in the main characteristics of the garden.
One very striking feature of this part of Gethsemane is the flight of terraces which climb up the slope from the Kidron to the Moslem cemetery. Terraces are a common feature of the populated valleys of the Hill Country and there are a large number to be seen in the Jerusalem area. It has been suggested that many of them owe their origin to outcrops of harder limestone but even if this gave men the original idea, nearly all the present ones are entirely artificial. Research by Zvi Ron of Haifa University and other geographers has recently shed considerable light on these terraces and C.H.J. de Geus has suggested strongly that the evidence supports the view that most of them originated in antiquity (C.H.J. de Geus in Palestine Exploration Quarterly, Jan. 1975). In Gethsemane, as in many other places, they provided additional soil where the natural slope would prevent soil accumulation and also aided water
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conservation.
Many were planted with olives or figs and provided stability to the terraces while vegetables or even cereals could be cultivated between them. In the case of Gethsemane, there are five terraces rising up the western slope of the Kidron for most of its length between the Jericho Road bridge and the Silwan Road, with olive trees planted at intervals of eight to ten meters. The whole of this area is devoted to olive cultivation with some tropical palms in a small Christian cemetery immediately opposite the Basilica of the Agony (Church of All Nations). The trees are generally too close together for any cultivation between them, but grass covers the rest of the terraces.
2) The Roman Catholic Gethsemane is an enclosed area of approximately 250 meters x 75 meters in area. The northern part consists of a small garden with — reputedly — the oldest olive trees in the area and this garden provides access to the Basilica of the Agony. This is a relatively recent church built on the site of older remains and because of the international contributions towards its construction it is often called the Church of All Nations. The garden is ornamental in nature and is intended to create a favorable impression
Area of the Christian cemetery in Gethsemane with olive and palm trees in the foreground and terraces beyond.
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with the tourists and pilgrims who flock through it each year. South of the Church is a larger area which is terraced and covered thickly with olive trees, laid out regularly along the terraces forming seven lines, each a step higher than the one below.
3) Above the Roman Catholic gardens lies the distinctive 19th century Russian Church of St. Mary Magdalene and the gardens of ‘Russian Gethsemane’. This is maintained by the Russian Orthodox Church in exile and the garden is distinctive in that olive trees give way to taller trees including poplars. Together this Russian enclosure forms almost a small wood on the slopes of the Mount of Olives and is not really typical of the rest of Gethsemane.
4) Finally there is a large area north of the Virgin’s Tomb extending for about 250 meters up the Kidron valley which is sometimes known as Greek Gethsemane. The valley sides are terraced and the olives again grow quite thickly but they peter out just prior to the point in the valley opposite the northeast corner of the Old City wall. Beyond this the valley bottom is plowed, with rough grazing on the hill slopes. The extent of alluvium in the valley bottom is considerable here and allows extensive cultivation but it is clear that the olive grove just north of the Virgin’s Tomb is deliberate and maintained, and at a particular point rough grazing takes over on the
The Church of All Nations on the traditional site of the agony in Gethsemane.
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View of the Kidron Valley looking north from the Mount of Olives.
valley slopes. In other words a tradition of olive cultivation in Gethsemane has grown up and is maintained, but there is no current interest in extending the olive groves up the valley. The tree takes some time to mature and is a long-term investment and is generally grown, at least in Gethsemane, on terraces which also need maintenance.
To what extent the present gardens do in fact mirror those of Biblical times is a matter of conjecture. In view of the greater ease of transport today, it is quite likely that in previous centuries there was more vegetable cultivation than at present. Certainly since Byzantine times there has been clear pressure from the traditional ecclesiastical institutions to maintain a picturesque Gethsemane rather than just a functional one, although the olive conveniently serves both purposes. The original ancient gardens no doubt had to be used with the maximum of intensity and small patches on the terraces were probably used for horticulture as in fact is the case in many villages and towns in the Hill Country today. However, the general characteristics of terraced slopes and olive trees provides a basically similar scene to that enjoyed by the inhabitants of Jerusalem in the Biblical period.