2,600 years ago Wednesday, fire swept through Jerusalem and brought down the First Temple, according to Jewish tradition. This week, archaeologists pulled a piece of that very fire out of the earth.
Massive wooden beams, blackened and charred by the flames that consumed the city in 586 B.C., were unearthed at Jerusalem Walls National Park in the City of David, the Israel Antiquities Authority announced Monday. They had lain in place since the day Nebuchadnezzar’s Babylonian armies destroyed Solomon’s Temple.
The beams once formed the roof of an inner courtyard in a building close to the Temple. The wood collapsed in the blaze, but plaster melting off the walls flowed over it and sealed it, tucking the charred timber into a protective shell that would hold for 26 centuries.
“This discovery makes you feel that you are witnessing the very moment of destruction, the moment when it all happened,” said IAA excavation director Efrat Bocher. “It’s deeply moving.”
But the most haunting detail may be the choice the ancients made. When Jerusalem’s residents returned from the Babylonian exile to rebuild the city, the excavation directors believe, they left the ruins deliberately in place, laying the new city over the scars of the old. A landscape of memory, as Dr. Yiftah Shalev put it, seeking to preserve what once existed.
Given that I and millions of other Jews will be fasting on Wednesday in memory of the Temple, that impulse doesn’t feel ancient at all. Tisha B’Av is the same choice those rebuilders made, carried across 2,600 years: to keep the past present in their lives rather than pave it over. Commanded in Deuteronomy, it has since become an inseparable core of Jewish identity: “Remember the days of old, consider the years of ages past.”
@IhabHassane It’s time to go back to Arabia in peace.Allah gave Arabia to th Arabs/Muslims and Israel to the Jews.Respect Gd! We Jews would never settle a land not given to us by Gd! Shame on you! Palestine never existed and never will. Can never be trusted unless they convert to Judaism
One of the earliest mentions of the kingdom of Israel. The Kurkh Stele is a 9th-century BC Assyrian inscription created during the reign of King Shalmaneser III. It describes the Battle of Qarqar in 853 BC and famously mentions “Ahab the Israelite,” making it one of the earliest known non-biblical references to the Kingdom of Israel. The inscription records Israel as a significant regional power that joined a coalition of Levantine kingdoms against Assyria, providing important archaeological confirmation of ancient Israel’s existence in neighboring historical records.
(From the illustrated guidebook "The Ancient Land of Israel", author unknown)
Image credit: Kurkh Monolith of Shalmaneser III, 9th century BC, British Museum. Public domain. #IsraelStrong #historyville
“Why do the Palestinians have so many boys and girls?
We have so many children so that we can push them to death… to martyrdom”
This is the most sick and twisted culture on the planet. How so many people around the world support this is mind boggling. This is a death cult with 100% child abuse and child sacrifice. It’s pure evil on a mass scale.
@doctor_rahmeh@WelcomeTheGulag We all know islam is a fake…but we jews have a perfect unbroken chin of torah transmission. You also have transmission, but of lies and falsehoods! https://t.co/Wi5R90qiym