Navigating the biblical road to the Temple

This road was definitely not the one less traveled. In fact, it’s believed to have been significantly central to the Jews of both Jerusalem and Israel on their journey to the Temple.

The discovery of this road, dubbed the Pilgrimage Road, was announced last year by the City of David and it’s believed to be about 2,000 years old.

On Monday, The Jerusalem Post was given the opportunity to trace the steps that thousands of Jews took as part of an exclusive tour with the City of David.

The story that led to its discovery is over a decade old. According to Raphael, a guide who led the tour, in 2003 there was a snow storm and Jerusalem was not equipped to deal with it.

“A [sewage] pipe burst under the weight of the snow and terrible smell was emanating from underground, so the Jerusalem municipality called workers and obviously in Jerusalem, and in Israel, any time you do  deep repair work, you have to bring an archaeologist,” he explained. “A massive crane was removing a bunch of dirt and suddenly the archaeologist Eli Shukron heard this terrible sounding scrape of metal against stone.”

Raphael said that because of Shukron’s experience with the Israel Antiquity Authority, he recognized what it meant and realized it was an archaeological site.

They started excavations, “but it took them a little bit of time until they actually discovered that what they had found was the Shiloah pool.”

The Shiloah pool was first built under the reign of King Hezekiah, during the First Temple times, in order to provide fresh water within the walls of Jerusalem. It was supplied by the Gichon spring. It was destroyed by the Babylonians, but was later rebuilt during the Hasmonean period.

Today, it is also a site holy to the Christians because it’s believed that this is where Jesus performed one of his miracles – where he healed a blind man.

“For 1,500 years, this place was completely covered because the Byzantines had built a Church, among other structures, to memorialize this site because it was the place where Jesus performed one of his two miracles in Jerusalem,” Raphael said. “We know that under Herod, who changed the landscape over Jerusalem, that this pool was expanded and made larger any Roman pool you will ever see.”

Herod expanded the pool from the size Hezekiah had built it and transformed it from a reservoir of drinking water to the largest ritual bath ever built.

It was in between where he built the road. According to Raphael, the discovery of the pool helped them to orientate and start looking to the road to the Temple.

“Josephus Flavius wrote about it [the Pilgrimage Road], he writes that during the three festivals of Passover, Shavuot and Sukkot, Jerusalem would swelter because of the millions of people who came, and we’d been looking for this road,” he stressed.

From the discovery of the pool, archaeologists found  the central water drainage channel that had served ancient Jerusalem, and later the Pilgrimage Road.

Raphael explained that The Pilgrimage Road runs all the way from the Shiloah Pool close to the area next to the Western Wall where today there are still remnants of the stairs that once led up to Temple.

As the Jerusalem Post team trekked through the road, the monumental realization of how important this discovery is began to hit. Stairs that were still standing and old store fronts, and the remnants of what were once homes that marked the route to the Temple, were clearly visible.

A plaza with a podium, which Raphael said they thought was originally stairs to a home, is still intact and in pristine condition, was hard to miss during the trek up the road.

“This was the ideal spot, if you wanted an audience, this was where you would find your captive audience. If you wanted to get people’s attention, it’s clear that this was the place to do it,” Raphael said, pointing at the podium. “This was like the fifth avenue of Jerusalem – the people who lived along this road were extremely wealthy, and how do we know this?”

Answering his own question, he said pointed to an area where there was once a private mikvah in someone’s home. “This mikvah had an arm rest… We’ve found perfume bottles, very fragile, coin presses, weapons and weapons of war.”

The Post was also shown an area where excavations were actually going on, men and women digging, carrying buckets of dirt, stone and rock, which all has to be checked and analyzed very carefully in case there could be a significant archaeological find among them. Something like a seal hiding among the dirt could be the size of a fingernail or a thumb.

As the crews worked, different sound tracks ranging from Italian opera to contemporary pop music like Coldplay was playing through the tunnels.

Raphael added that they’ve found some 50 seals so far during the excavations at the City of David, 12 of which are corroborated with figures from the Bible.

As the Pilgrimage Road tour came to an end, the Post was shown buckets upon buckets of pottery dating back to all different time periods.

He also pointed out that they have also found pottery were from the storm drains underneath the road where some 2,000 Jews hid as the Romans pillaged the city. The pottery had the remnants of food inside and other items were also found inside the drains.

The Romans eventually found the Jews, smoked them out and murdered them.

Raphael concluded that this find could change the geography of Jerusalem “and open up a new gate to the Old City, and the Western Wall… actually, theoretically it would be opening up the original gate.