Next we have the Throne of the Governor-beyond-the-River. This, like the preceding, is some structure occurring in the course of the wall. In chap. ii. 7, 9, the phrase “beyond the river” seems to mean westward of the Jordan, where the district was governed by a viceroy of the king of Assyria. The viceroy lived or had lived in Jerusalem,[30] and his castle appears to have come into the line of the second wall, in the part which is south-east of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, and perhaps exactly at the re-entering angle.

The Broad Wall, which is named next, was not necessarily broad in itself. Open spaces, such as we should name Squares, were in Jerusalem called Broads. There was one such broad space south of the Temple water gate, on Ophel, in which the people sometimes assembled (Neh. viii. 1; Ezra x. 9). There seems to have been another near one of the city gates, where Hezekiah addressed the people, alarmed at the approach of Sennacherib (2 Chron. xxxii. 6). Sennacherib would approach the city on the north-west, and the people were very likely gathered by the Valley Gate discussing the matter, in an open space afterwards utilised by the construction of the “Pool of Hezekiah.” The “Broad” wall might be so called from running along one side of this broad space. It perhaps started from the second wall at the point which Nehemiah’s description has now reached, and extended southward to the wall of the high town, and so constituted an inner line of defence. Nothing is said of repairing it: perhaps it had not been thrown down; or, as an inner wall, Nehemiah neglects it for the present, as he does also the north wall of the Upper City. At any rate the description carries us beyond it. At the north-west angle of the second wall there was a Corner Gate (2 Kings xiv. 13; 2 Chron. xxv. 23), which is called also the Gate that Looketh. A gate here would command a view of the city walls as far as the Fish Gate on the one hand and the Valley Gate on the other. But this gate also is passed over in the present description.

We have next the Tower of the Furnaces, probably west of the “Pool of Hezekiah.” The word may mean hearths furnaces, ovens, or altars; but we cannot say to what it related.

And then we come to the Valley Gate, which we have already seen must have been near the present Jaffa Gate, and probably was exactly where the present David Street passes the end of the wall discovered, by the Greek Bazaar, in 1885. Unless a gate existed there, the street would lose half its use. Yet there is Herr Schick’s alternative, that the name was given to a gate south-west of the Citadel, and opening on to the Valley of Hinnom.

In verse 13, from the Valley Gate it is “1000 cubits on the wall to the Dung Gate.” This forbids any identification with the present dung gate, in the Tyropœon, and fixes within a little the position of Bethso.

In verse 15, Shallun, who repairs the Fountain Gate, repairs also “the wall of the Pool of Shelah by the king’s garden.” Allow that Shelah is Siloam, yet this need not be a wall running down to Siloam—if we were to take that line we should go wrong all the rest of the way—it is the transverse wall in the same valley above. Through a gate in this wall the Pool of Siloam would be conveniently reached from the Suburb; and this would be the “Gate between two walls,” through which Zedekiah fled away (2 Kings, xxv. 4; Jer. xxxix. 4; lii. 7). The wall was by the king’s garden (le = by or near). Shallun pursues his work along the transverse wall eastward “unto (ad) the Stairs (maaloth) that go down from the City of David.” So the City of David includes Ophel, and the Stairs descend the Ophel slope westward into the bed of the Tyropœon.

NEHEMIAH’S SOUTH WALL, ACCORDING TO GEORGE ST CLAIR.

⁂ The contour lines represent successive steps of ten feet. The height at the Triple Gate is 2379 feet.