The city of Jerusalem

by C. R. Conder

We may endeavour therefore to form some idea of the position and extent of Jebusite Jerusalem. It was a royal city, a sacred place, and a fortress of great strength, the taking of which was one of David’s greatest exploits. The site indeed seems to have been chosen for its strength, which has again and again been proved by many long and desperate sieges. The city has always been taken from the north, and the upper city on the south-west hill has always been the last quarter to fall. This flat hill, rising 2,500 feet above the level of the sea, measures about 600 yards east and west by 800 yards north and south, thus containing an area of about 100 acres. Since the fourth century A. D. the name Zion has been applied to this hill, which is surrounded on all sides by deep valleys having steep slopes or precipices—that called Hinnom forming a natural fosse which sinks some 400 feet below the hill plateau, and defends the hill on the west and south, while the Tyropœon Valley—about 500 feet wide—sinks on the north to about 150 feet below the plateau, and turns south, defending it on the east. The hill of Zion is only joined to the watershed by a narrow neck, or isthmus, of high ground at the north-west corner of the upper city, and it required to be defended by a fortress wall at this point, which has always been the place attacked by besiegers. The lower city lay to the north, in the broad Tyropœon, and was defended by a smaller summit, now occupied by the Cathedral of the Holy Sepulchre, which rises 2,497 feet above sea-level, and bulges out eastwards from the plateau of the Judean watershed which runs north, west of Jerusalem. Thus, as Josephus says, the city as a whole lay “over against the temple in the manner of a theatre”[80]; for the horseshoe shape was caused by the head of the Tyropœon on the north side of the upper city, the original form of which has been somewhat obliterated by the accumulation of from 40 to 90 feet of rubbish under David Street, which leads east to the Temple ridge. Yet even now there is a sharp descent eastwards along this street, and steep side streets lead up southwards thence to Zion.[81]

OPHEL

Such, then, was the natural fortress which made the capture of Jerusalem so difficult, and which appears to have been occupied from the earliest times. The temple ridge on the east was 60 feet lower than Zion even at its highest point; and, as this ridge became narrower and tailed off towards the south, it sank—on the Ophel spur—to about 200 feet below the level of the upper city. The Ophel spur was unfit for a fortress, and the part south of the temple contained an area of only about 15 acres. It is impossible, therefore, to regard it as having at any time been by itself a “city,” for the more important cities of Palestine were much larger than such a small hamlet would have been. Tyre covered 100 acres, Cæsarea and Samaria about 300 acres each, while even Gezer—a town of less importance—included 40 acres within the walls. Ophel is not mentioned in history till three hundred years after David’s time. Nor are the remains of caves or cellars on this narrow tongue of land apparently of any remote antiquity, though some writers have supposed them to be of Jebusite origin, and have even called them “neolithic”—a term which has no meaning in Palestine, because (as in Egypt and in Babylonia) instruments of stone and of flint are found at all levels in the excavations, and are contemporary with others of bronze and of iron. The remains found in connection with these caves are of Roman origin, and one of the largest of them was a dyeing establishment, in which Byzantine objects were discovered. There are similar caves or cellars on the hill of the upper city, and these may be equally late.[82]

The rock strata at Jerusalem fall with an inclination of about ten degrees south-east from the watershed, so that the rain-water is carried naturally in this direction towards the junction (below Siloam) of the Kidron, the Tyropœon and the Hinnom valleys. The town indeed has the appearance of sliding downhill towards the south-east, the Ophel spur being the lowest of those covered by the city at its time of greatest magnitude, when Jerusalem—including the 30 acres of the Temple enclosure—covered about 300 acres in all, being half as large again as the present city within the Turkish walls. The lowest rock stratum, which appears in the low cliffs on the east side of the Kidron, is a hard dolomitic limestone, impervious and forming the bed for streams which sink through the more porous upper limestone. It appears again on the watershed to the north-west, and is known as the Santa Croce marble, being mottled with red, which—on the hillock of the traditional Calvary—was regarded as being due to the blood of Christ. This formation is of the Greensand period geologically, and the stone is known as mezzeh, or “superior,” in Arabic. Above it lie beds of fine but rather soft building stone, belonging to the Lower Chalk age, and called in Arabic meleki, or “royal” stone.[83] In this white limestone the Temple cisterns are cut. Another stratum of hard limestone, or mezzeh, lies over the meleki, and above this on Olivet is the white Upper Chalk, full of ammonites, hippurites, and other characteristic shells, with beds of the Eocene age, including a capping of nummulitic limestone. These porous strata are known as k’akûli, or “conglomerate,” and nâri, or “fire stone.”

This description may be sufficient to account for the natural water-supply, which was always most abundant on the south-east, where the dolomite bed is nearest to the surface in the valleys. The principal spring is in the Kidron, below the steep eastern slope of the Ophel spur south of the Temple. It rises under the floor of a cave, where there must be an underground reservoir in the rock, resembling many in the Lebanon and in other limestone regions. Towards the end of winter, when the heavy rains have fallen, this reservoir overflows frequently through a fissure which acts as a natural syphon, sucking out all the water as soon as the reservoir is full. The sudden gush—like that of the Sabbatic River in Syria—occurs every few hours in early spring, but at the interval of several days in autumn. The stream originally flowed down the rocky bed of the Kidron, which is now filled in to a depth of 30 feet. But from early times it would seem that attempts were made to carry the water to the foot of the east slope of the upper city hill, in order to bring it nearer to the fortress. By the time of Hezekiah at least—as will be detailed later—a rock tunnel carried the waters of the spring to Siloam, or “westwards to the city of David.”[84] This statement—in consequence of the English mistranslation—has become the foundation of a literary theory according to which the city of David was a mere hamlet of 15 acres on Ophel, whereas in reality it appears to show that the stronghold of Jebus lay towards the west. It is not impossible that a yet earlier rock-cut channel existed, with the same object of conveying the waters of this intermittent spring towards the western citadel; and, as the point has some importance in connection with the history of the city, the reasons may be given more fully.

GIHON

Excavations were made in front of the cave in which the Kidron spring bursts forth, in the year 1902, and it was then discovered that a rock tunnel leads away towards the south outside the entrance to the cave.[85] The level of its floor is only 5 feet above the water-level at Siloam, and this aqueduct unfortunately has not been explored along its whole length, nor has it furnished any indications of the age in which it was made. It has been thought to be part of an old rock channel traced for 600 feet northwards from the old pool below the Siloam reservoir. This, however, is doubtful, as the channel in question rises rapidly, and the levels in consequence would oblige us to suppose that pipes must have been used, as water does not run uphill in an open channel.[86] This Siloam channel was still connected, in 1874, with a series of surface channels on the slopes of Ophel, which have been quarried away since, but which once carried the surface rain-water to the old pool.

The excavations at the spring showed that a large tank or pool probably once existed before the cave. The overflow from the cave was also carried away by the aqueduct, and perhaps brought round to tanks still existing below Siloam south-west of the pool. If this work was really ancient, representing the “brook that flowed through the midst of the earth”[87] even before Hezekiah’s tunnel was made, it is an argument in favour of the view that the upper city of Jerusalem was the original Jebusite stronghold.

EN-ROGEL

The earliest reference to any feature of Jerusalem topography is the notice of the spring called En-rogel, on the boundary between Judah and Benjamin east of the Valley of Hinnom. The meaning of the name has been differently conjectured,[88] but if the true rendering be “spring of the water channel,” it would seem that an aqueduct must have existed at En-rogel when the Book of Joshua was written; and the topographical evidence in that book indicates a date earlier than the time of Isaiah and Hezekiah, thus favouring the conclusion that the aqueduct in front of the cave is ancient.