The Western Wall tunnel + field trip

On Monday evening, I crossed an important item off my Israel bucket-list: the Western Wall tunnel. As I have explained before, the Western Wall is one of the retaining walls built by Herod the Great after he expanded the Temple Mount complex. Originally, a Herodian street (see the previous post) ran along the entire base of the wall. Jerusalem was much hillier in this time, and this area of the city was situated in the valley between the Temple Mount and the western hill. In the Muslim Period, this valley was filled in, making the city level (as it is today). The Muslims installed a series of supporting arches beneath the area, to hold up this renovated (and flat) part of the city. During the time of the British Mandate and subsequent Israeli period, a tunnel was dug out beneath these supporting arches that runs the entire length of the Western Wall--the Western Wall tunnel.

The tunnel begins underneath a supporting arch (see first picture below) dating not from the Muslim Period, but from the Second Temple Period. This arch was used to hold up a pedestrian bridge which led onto the mount, and also channeled water into the numerous ritual baths (the model in the second picture shows what the bridge would have looked like).

The Western Wall itself is made of huge limestone blocks, some of the largest building blocks used in architectural history. The stones were likely quarried from beneath Jerusalem itself, where they were cut, painstakingly hauled, and put into place. To complete the work, stonemasons etched borders around each individual block.

The important draw of the Western Wall Tunnel is that it brings the visitors as close to the Holy of Holies--the inner room of the Temple in which the Ark of the Covenant was once kept--as possible. (At this point, the tour guide shared that it is her belief that the Ark of the Covenant was hidden in the tunnels underneath the Temple Mount itself, however, "every time we start digging for the Ark, a bus gets blown up and we have to stop." I felt that this comment was more than a little insensitive.) The third picture below shows a number of Jewish women praying at this special spot.

Towards the end of the tunnel, the wall merges with the bedrock itself (second picture below). In the Second Temple Period, a fortress was built upon this spot (this corner of the Temple Mount was lower to the ground and much more accessible to enemy armies) to defend the mount. The tour ends in a large cistern, connected to the same water system which is visible at Ecce Homo and St. Anne's. The final picture is the more familiar, outdoor Western Wall plaza.

On Thursday, my rabbinic literature class embarked on a tour of northern Israel to visit some of the ancient synagogues uncovered there. We also repeated a few of the significant Christian sites. Our tour began at Beit Alpha, a synagogue dating from the 500s CE. What is significant about Beit Alpha is that the synagogue's mosaic floor sports an image of the zodiac (complete with the Greek sun-god Helios), a pagan symbol which has no business in Jewish art. Furthermore, in the panel depicting the binding of Isaac, it is the ram in the thicket, not Abraham, that is emphasized--this is clearly a borrowing from Christian art (the ram that was substituted for Isaac is traditionally seen as a foreshadowing of Jesus).

After Beit Alpha, we drove to Tiberias, where another, even older synagogue also uses zodiac symbols. Archaeologists believe that the zodiac was the "in" style of the Greco-Roman and Byzantine worlds; these images pervaded even the Jewish communities. This resulted in a relaxation of the Jewish commandment against the fashioning of images.

Here is a picture from the ancient (fourth century) synagogue in Capernaum, the town of Jesus.

In Tsippori, a third synagogue displays the wheel of the zodiac, but with an important difference: the sun-god Helios is not pictured at the center. This later synagogue might therefore represent a backlash against the borrowing of pagan styles.

The tour concluded in Jewish burial caves at Beit Shearim, the famous burial place of R. Judah HaNasi (compiler of the Mishnah) and his contemporaries. The graves have been looted in the many centuries since the Nasi's burial, but it was still cool to see all of the sarcophagi.