I was going to post from Israel, but the vacation proved too hectic... The post about Zippori ended up the only one I managed to write there. When I returned, I was going to continue describing our vacation, in chronological order: Belvoir, Gamla, Tel Aviv - Yafo, then Jerusalem, and so on. Now I know, this is not going to happen either. So look at the
photos.
They, at least, are in chronological order, so far:
- Zippori: 1 - 25
- Belvoir:
26 - 32
- Gamla:
37 - 53
- Neve Tzedek:
54 - 63
- Old Yafo:
64 - 74
And finally, photos
76 - 100: our tour of Ir David, the City of David, just to the south of the Old City of Jerusalem. We went there early in the morning: you walk along the Old City walls, just past the entrance towards the Western Wall, turn right - and go down, maybe a 100 yards. It is on a little hill by itself, but lower than the Temple Mount. This is supposedly one of the reasons this city survived unmolested in the ancient times: it was in a valley surrounded by higher hills - so enemies couldn't see it from far away - however, once they descended into the valley and saw the city, they had to get up on the hill from there, to conquer it. And the city had good defenses, very good: strong walls and such. The city belonged to the Jebusites, and that was precisely the reason King David decided to make it his capital: he wanted a city that was situated between the tribes of Judah and Benjamin, but did not belong to either tribe... politics, you know... So he gathered his army and approached the city walls, from below. And from the top of the walls, the Jebusites kept laughing and yelling: "David, you are not going to come here! The lame and the blind will stop you..." - and so on. And, just as it is described in 2 Samuel 5:8, King David told his troops: "Go and find the tzinnor, get through it to the city, and hit the Jebusites where it hurts, whether lame or blind or whatever" - because I guess he didn't like it when somebody laughed down at him, any more than any other king. So, what is the tzinnor?
It was a popular setup, at the time, to have a city up on a hill, and the water source - a spring - down below, outside the city walls. However, the city population had to have access to the water source in case of siege, so various ingenious systems were developed to protect the spring, cover it from the outside, and then dig a tunnel through the mountain to get to the water from inside the city. A good example of this can be seen in Megiddo, which we
visited in 2007.
Jebusites supposedly has a similar system, with tzinnor being the tunnel, and David's plan of attack was - instead of storming the walls - to find the spring, climb up the tunnel, and get to the Jebusites through their soft underbelly, so to speak. Jebusites did not expect that: maybe they thought their spring was well hidden or well protected, or maybe they didn't realize that the narrow shaft, used for dropping down a bucket tied to a rope and pulling it back up, can also be used for climbing up by agile warriors, led by a man thinking "outside the box": the very same man who earlier thought of using a slingshot in a nontraditional way, also with great success...
This is an appealing story, and one that makes sense. What's more, I was shown the tzinnor (called Warren's Shaft, because it was discovered by a British officer, Charles Warren) when we went to Ir David in 2007. I took a photo of it then...
... just as I did now (
photo 79).
Except now, according to out guide Arie, they do not think this is the tzinnor. New discoveries, shown in my photos
80 and
81, suggest that the Jebusites did not have to fill up their buckets by dropping them through a shaft, because they had built an elaborate walkable tunnel leading all the way to the spring. The spring itself was protected by a strong tower, with walls up to 4 meters thick and at least 8 meters tall.
Archeologists date the tower and the original tunnel at 1800 BCE, and say that only much later, about 800 BCE, the tunnel was made deeper for some reason, and Warren's Shaft (which appears to be a natural carst formation, not man-made) thus became connected to the water supply system. Case closed.
I have to confess: I was very disappointed. Here I had photos of the tzinnor, and it turned out not to be the tzinnor. What's more, where IS the tzinnor? Where had David's men climbed, on their way to defeat the enemy and claim the new capital for their genius king? When I asked Arie, he said something along the lines: "We don't know exactly what the word 'tzinnor' meant in Biblical times, it might have meant the whole water supply system. All we know is that these very stones date back 3800 years, they could have seen Abraham, they could have seen David." Now, I don't know about you, but I personally wasn't satisfied. And right then and there, I decided to continue believing that David's men climbed up Warren's Shaft - until such time when the archeologists give me a viable alternative. At that moment, my decision was based on pure stubbornness, with maybe a little gut feeling thrown in. But rereading the whole story now, I want to make a case: the fact that the water supply contained a pool, elaborate tunnel, and tower 3800 years ago would have been relevant if it was Abraham trying to storm the city. David was actually doing this 800 years later, that is, 3000 years ago. And we know that 2800 years ago the tunnel was made deeper "for some reason." So I can suggest a very good reason for making a tunnel deeper: maybe the water left? Maybe the spring shifted, and they had to dig deeper to get to the water? And maybe it started happening earlier, so by the time David was about to storm the city, the old water supply system was no longer used, and Jebusites actually DID get their water by dropping the buckets down a vertical shaft? For lack of a better theory, I am going to stick to that one for now.
The tzinnor (or the non-tzinnor) and the rest of the tunnels that might have witnessed David storming the city are now dry, because the waters from the Gihon spring were diverted into a newer and bigger tunnel built by King Hezekiah some 300 years later. The Assyrians were coming, and he had to secure the water supply. To save time, they were working from both ends towards each other, cutting through stone and obviously receiving directions to turn a bit to the left or to the right at several points, and somehow met in the middle. Modern scientists still haven't figured out how they managed that. When I first heard about this, I said irreverently that they were probably singing really loud, but after going through the tunnel and seeing for myself I was really impressed.
Photo 87 shows where the two groups met - there is maybe 80 cm vertical difference in the ceiling (the floor, of course, had to be made level), and there were several abrupt turns in the tunnel both before and after the meeting place. The captions really tell it all, start at
photo 82 and click forward, and you'll get a virtual tour.
Later photos show recent discoveries - portions of a huge staircase leading to the Temple Mount. Again, the captions have a lot of information, so I am not going to repeat it. Another large chunk of the excavations was supposed to be opened to the public on Yom HaAtzmaut (soon after our departure), so if you visit Ir David now you'll be able to see even more.
