Western Wall that was accessible was about a hundred feet long, and the area in front of it was only some ten feet wide. The Israelis razed the area, and levelled and paved the square.
To the left of the Wailing Wall, beyond the wall of the adjoining building with its two massive buttresses, is the Kotel Tunnel, open to the public and a very popular tourist destination. The entrance is an archway set almost in the centre of the building, with a curved line of Hebrew writing above it, following the shape of the arch. Below the Hebrew is the English translation: 'The Western Wall Heritage'.
The tour begins in a room known as the Donkey Stable, an epithet bestowed by the British explorer Charles Warren. It took workmen and archaeologists seventeen years to clear the accumulated rubble and rubbish from that room. From there, visitors walk into the Secret Passage. According to legend, the passage had been used by King David as a way of making his way unseen and underground from his citadel, which lay over to the west, to the Temple Mount. Unfortunately, the archaeological evidence suggests that the tunnel had actually been built by the Arabs in the late twelfth century AD. They had needed to raise the level of that section of the city and had built massive foundations to achieve that end. The tunnel had, in fact, been used to allow access to the Temple Mount, but for Muslim residents of Jerusalem, not Jewish worshippers. Later, the vaults had been sectioned off and used as cisterns, providing the citizens who lived directly above the tunnel with a constant supply of fresh water. This passage ends abruptly in a pile of rubble, a mute reminder of the state of the subterranean labyrinth before the Jewish archaeologists started work there.
In the Hall of the Hasmoneans, a large chamber that dates from the Second Temple period, is a Corinthian pillar more or less in the centre. One of the indicators of the dating of the chamber is the way the stone is dressed, a mark of the way Herod's builders carried out their work, but the pillar itself dates from medieval times. It was brought in to support the roof, which was cracked and damaged and needed extra support.
In a narrow corridor later in the tour is an absolutely massive single stone. It's over forty feet long, nearly twelve feet high and between eleven and fifteen feet thick. The best estimates suggest it weighs around five hundred metric tons, which makes it one of the largest, perhaps even
That stone forms part of what's known as the Master Course, and research suggests that there was a very good reason for this method of construction. No mortar or cement of any kind was used when the wall was built, and the theory is that these huge stones served to stabilize it. Their massive weight kept the stones below them in place, and provided a firm base for the courses above. It's known that the wall has remained intact for some two thousand years and has survived several earthquakes, so Herod's builders were probably right.
Har Megiddo
Har Megiddo, sometimes referred to as Tel-el-Mutesellim or the 'Hill of the Ruler', as well as 'Armageddon', is a real place in northern Israel. It's a strategically-important location, and has been the site of dozens of battles through the centuries, including three known as the 'Battle of Megiddo'. Of these, the fifteenth-century BC clash between the forces of the Pharaoh Thutmose III and those of the Canaanites was probably the most famous.
There were three possible routes the invading army could have taken as they headed north towards the Valley of Jezreel, where the enemy troops had assembled. The shortest was the middle route, a straight passage through Aruna, part of which would have meant the army marching through a very narrow ravine; the other two were longer but safer routes to the east and west.
Thutmose sent out scouts and discovered that his enemy had clearly assumed he wouldn't take the middle road. They'd split their forces to cover the other two approaches, but had left the ravine virtually unguarded, obviously assuming that the Egyptians wouldn't be stupid enough to send their troops into such an obvious killing ground. So the pharaoh himself led his men through the ravine. Aruna only had a few enemy troops stationed there and they were quickly scattered by the Egyptian forces, who then entered the valley unopposed. They did battle with the King of Kadesh's forces, defeated them, and ended up besieging Megiddo itself, which eventually fell.
Unusually for the time, the Egyptians spared both the city and its inhabitants, and their victory marked the beginning of around five hundred years of Egyptian rule and influence in the area.
The Mosaic Covenant It's been generally accepted that the Ark of the Covenant was a real object, probably a highly ornamented acacia-wood box covered in gold leaf, which was carried by the wandering Israelites. The logical assumption is that the Covenant' itself was also a real, tangible object, and was kept inside it.
According to the Old Testament, in the third month after the Exodus, Moses gave the original so-called 'Tablets of the Covenant', or more accurately the 'Tablets of Testimony', to the people of Israel at the foot of Mount Sinai. This Covenant was a contract between God and His chosen people, the ten simple rules, the Ten Commandments, that later formed the basis of both the Jewish and the Christian faiths (though, as I state in the book, Exodus actually specifies that there were
Moses then went back up to Mount Sinai before later returning to his people to find that they'd already deviated from the path he'd laid out for them. He found that they had ignored the second Commandment, which forbade the construction of any kind of graven image for the purpose of worship. Moses' brother Aaron had made a Golden Calf and erected an altar in front of it. Moses flew into a violent rage and in his fury smashed both the tablets of the Covenant.
God then offered to personally carve a second, duplicate, set of tablets, and Moses went back up to Mount Sinai yet again to receive them, and it was these tablets that were placed in the Ark of the Covenant. In fact, the Ark should have more correctly been called the 'Ark of Testimony'.
This Ark vanished in about 586 BC when the First Temple in Jerusalem was destroyed by the Babylonians, led by Nebuchadnezzar. But there are no traditions relating to the tablets themselves, only to the Ark, to the box they were kept in. It's been assumed that when the Babylonians looted the Temple they took away the Ark
But it
What is almost certain is that, whatever happened to these tablets, they weren't lost. They were far too important to the Jewish religion to simply be mislaid. If they weren't seized by Nebuchadnezzar, then they were almost certainly hidden before the conflict began, and probably somewhere outside Jerusalem because the likelihood was that the city would be sacked and plundered by the invaders. Again, the oasis at Ein-Gedi would have been a possible, perhaps even a probable, hiding place for them.
At the end of the book I describe the Israelis hiding the Mosaic Covenant in a cavity behind the Wailing Wall. If this relic was ever found, and the political situation prevented them from announcing they'd recovered the object, I think this is exactly where they'd want to put it, to return the Covenant to the place closest to where the Ark of the Covenant originally stood.
And in doing so, they'd effectively be reuniting the
If you enjoyed The
THE FIRST APOSTLE
BY JAMES BECKER
An Englishwoman is found dead in a house near Rome, her neck broken.
Her distraught husband enlists the help of his closest friend, policeman Chris Bronson, who discovers an
