Zion

Old Jerusalem sits on two ridges with a valley between them. The Kidron runs along the east, the Hinnom wraps the south and west, and the central valley Josephus calls the Tyropoeon separates the eastern ridge from the western hill. The eastern ridge, the one excavators call the City of David, is narrow and low, rising to about 700 metres above sea level, with the temple platform at its north end at about 740 metres. The western hill is broader and higher, at about 765 to 770 metres. All these heights are approximate. What decides the question is water rather than height: the Gihon spring rises at the eastern foot of the eastern ridge and is the only perennial spring at Jerusalem, flowing in the irregular siphoning rhythm typical of karst. The map pin on this page marks that eastern ridge above the Gihon rather than the western hill outside the modern Zion Gate. No city plan of the two ridges exists on this site, so the ground is described here in words rather than drawn. Four reasons put biblical Zion on the eastern ridge, and they come from the text as much as from the spade. The spring is there, and an Iron Age fort had to sit on its water. 1 Kings 8:1 and 2 Chronicles 5:2 have the ark carried up out of Zion, the City of David, to the temple, which works from the lower eastern spur and does not work from the higher western hill. Nehemiah 3:15 puts the Pool of Shelah beside the king’s garden and the stairs going down from the City of David, which sets the City of David next to the Siloam waterworks at the south end of the eastern ridge. And the Middle Bronze and Iron Age remains, the tombs and the waterworks all lie on the eastern ridge, while excavation on the western hill has produced nothing comparable for those periods. This is the settled reading in the field and this page leads with it. The name crossed the valley for reasons that can be dated. Josephus, writing in Rome in the AD 70s, describes the city as built on two hills, calls the higher western one the Upper City, and says David fortified it and that it was known in his own day as the Citadel (Jewish War 5.136 to 5.141). He was a priest who had known the city, but four centuries of building had buried the older ground, and by his time the ridge above the spring was the poor southern quarter. The identification then hardened. The Bordeaux Pilgrim, who reached Jerusalem in AD 333, went up to Zion on the western hill and was shown the site of David’s palace there. Epiphanius of Salamis, writing about AD 392, reports a small church on Zion, again on the western hill. The basilica called Hagia Sion, Holy Zion, the mother of all churches, was built on that hill in the late fourth and early fifth centuries. From then on Mount Zion on a Christian map meant the western hill, and it has meant that for about sixteen hundred years, which is why every modern signpost says so. The correction came in the nineteenth century from topography, from the position of the spring, and from excavation on the eastern ridge, and it is now the consensus. The older identification is a real piece of history with a date on it, and this page treats it as that rather than as a blunder. Three holy places on the western hill are honoured traditions, and their dates are given here plainly. The Cenacle, the room shown as the site of the Last Supper and of Pentecost, rests on a fourth-century tradition of an upper room on that hill, and the hall a visitor walks into is a Gothic building of the Crusader and Franciscan periods, usually dated to the fourteenth century. David’s Tomb, on the ground floor of the same complex, is a medieval identification with no clear witness before Benjamin of Tudela, who reported the tomb on Mount Zion in his Itinerary about 1170. Scripture places David’s burial in the City of David on the eastern ridge, and Peter tells the Pentecost crowd that David’s tomb is with them to that day. The Dormition Abbey, the church of the falling asleep of Mary, was built on the western hill between 1900 and 1910 on an older Byzantine tradition. Each of these is old, continuous and honoured, and each stands on the hill that took the name Zion later. Charles Warren explored the underground of Jerusalem for the Palestine Exploration Fund between 1867 and 1870 and traced a vertical shaft rising from the Gihon into the ridge, reached by a sloping tunnel from inside the town. It has carried his name ever since, and he published Underground Jerusalem in 1876 and the Jerusalem volume of the Survey of Western Palestine with Claude Conder in 1884. For a century that shaft was read as the tsinnor of 2 Samuel 5:8, the way into the fort, and the reading fills a great many books. Ronny Reich and Eli Shukron, excavating around the spring from 1995, recovered fortifications of the Middle Bronze Age built of stones so large the excavators called them Cyclopean: a Spring Tower over the spring itself and a Pool Tower guarding a rock-cut reservoir. They read the vertical shaft as a natural karstic chimney rather than a cut water access, and hold that it was not in use for drawing water in the period the biblical account describes. Reich published the site in Excavating the City of David: Where Jerusalem’s History Began (2011). The word tsinnor is itself disputed, appearing only once elsewhere in the Hebrew Bible, at Psalm 42:7, and translators have offered a water shaft, a water channel, a grappling hook and a scaling device. What is not disputed is that the Gihon was fortified on a serious scale in the Middle Bronze Age, that those works were still standing in the Iron Age, and that tunnels and shafts connect the spring to the ridge. What is disputed is whether the vertical shaft was ever a way in, and whether tsinnor names it. The liveliest argument on this ridge concerns two structures. On the eastern slope stands the Stepped Stone Structure, a terraced retaining wall rising some eighteen metres, the largest Iron Age structure of its kind known in Israel. Kathleen Kenyon exposed part of it between 1961 and 1967 and published Digging Up Jerusalem in 1974, reading the terracing below it as Jebusite work, the millo of 2 Samuel 5:9 and 1 Kings 9:15, with later repairs. Yigal Shiloh excavated it as Area G from 1978 to 1985 and published Excavations at the City of David I in 1984. The dating of its phases has never been fully agreed. Immediately above it, Eilat Mazar excavated massive walls in 2005 and read them as one public building of the tenth century BC, proposing it was the palace Hiram’s craftsmen built for David in 2 Samuel 5:11. She put the case in Biblical Archaeology Review in 2006 and in a preliminary report in 2007. Israel Finkelstein, Ze’ev Herzog, Lily Singer-Avitz and David Ussishkin answered her in Tel Aviv in 2007. Their case is that the walls Mazar joined into one building may belong to more than one structure and more than one period, that the pottery from the fills is mixed and includes later material, that some of the masonry may be Hellenistic, and that a tenth-century date for the complex is not carried by the finds. Behind the exchange sits the wider argument over how large Jerusalem was in the tenth century BC, and readers will meet the same names on both sides of that larger question. What is not in dispute is that a very large Iron Age retaining and terrace system stands on the eastern slope, that monumental masonry stands above it, and that somebody in the Iron Age was building at a scale that needed organisation and resources. What is in dispute is the date of the phases, and therefore whether any of it belongs to David or Solomon. This page prints both readings at full strength and stamps no verdict. Two water systems run from the Gihon. The older Siloam Channel is a shallow, partly rock-cut and partly covered channel that carried spring water south along the foot of the ridge to irrigate the terraces in the Kidron, and it is the gently flowing waters of Shiloah in Isaiah 8:6. The Siloam Tunnel, commonly called Hezekiah’s Tunnel, runs about 533 metres through the rock from the spring to the Pool of Siloam inside the wall, cut by two teams working toward each other. The Siloam Inscription, found in the tunnel in 1880 and read by Archibald Sayce, records the moment the two teams heard each other’s picks and broke through; it was later cut from the wall and is today in the Istanbul Archaeological Museums. 2 Kings 20:20 and 2 Chronicles 32:30 credit the work to Hezekiah about 700 BC, and the letter forms have long been read as eighth-century. John Rogerson and Philip Davies argued for a Hasmonean date in Biblical Archaeologist in 1996. Amos Frumkin, Aryeh Shimron and Jeff Rosenbaum then dated the tunnel directly, by radiocarbon on plant material in the plaster and by uranium-thorium on the stalactites, and published a date around 700 BC in Nature in 2003, which supports the biblical attribution. The challenge was made and the physical dating answered it, and both belong in the record.