Going underground….

Monday was a day of tunnels. We started off in the Western Wall tunnel that runs along, funnily enough, the western wall of the temple platform. The main part of the tunnel was dug by archaeologists in the 1980’s to try and get a better understanding of how the temple was built and it is a great way to do this. You really get a sense of how large the base stones of this platform were, the bottom few layers of cut stone are made up of blocks that weighed over 500 metric tonnes – to put this in context the largest stones in the Pyramids weigh around 50 metric tonnes so this temple had some seriously big blocks in it!. Fortunately the quarry was next to the temple site but even so moving these blocks was an incredible engineering feat.

Part of the way long the tunnel we came to an area were there were a great many women praying, apparently this area is the closet that Jewish people can now get to the place that the Holy of Holies would have been on the temple platform. So similarly to the orthodox Christians in the Holy Sepulchral there is a real sense of needing to be as close as possible to where events happened. This sense of “theology of place” is not something that I really feel and so it intrigues me as it’s clearly very important to others. *sigh* yet another topic to add to the ever increasing list of things I want to read about!

When we left the tunnels we spent some time at the Western (wailing) Wall which is a place much changed since I was last here. Then you could just wander into the plaza and saunter around and move from there up to the temple platform and visit the Dome of the Rock. Now the plaza is sealed off and to get to it you need to pass through metal detectors and bag checks. There is no direct access to the temple platform anymore, you need to move to another area to get up and sadly non-Muslims can no longer enter the Dome of the Rock. I feel really sad that such a holy place has needed to be sealed in so much, that fear is rife even here, a place of prayer.

After a move around to the Southern side of the temple mount to look at the excavations there we went down into the Jerusalem of David’s time which was sited in the valley below the temple mount close to the local water source. The amount of archaeological excavation that has been done and is ongoing there is astounding and new knowledge is being, quite literally, uncovered on a regular basis. But the highlight of this afternoon in David’s city had to be the trip through Hezekiah’s tunnel (2 Chron 32:30) . This is an amazing feat of water management dating from 701 BC that diverts a local spring through a 533 meter, hand dug tunnel, that would have led under the city walls and kept the city supplied with water during times of siege. The entrance to the tunnel is down a steep spiral staircase and then it’s a case of roll up the trousers, turn on the torches and plunge in – for the tunnel still carries the spring to this day. It was a little worrying at first as the water quickly reached hip height but thankfully it levelled of at mid calf for the remainder of the journey. It was an amazing walk that seemed to pass in an instant even though the reality is it takes over half an hour. We were wading through clear cold water in tunnels barely wider then we were and not much more then 2 meters high and often lower – When I had to stoop I knew it was getting low! Towards the end we turned off our torches and walked in total darkness till we turned a corner and quite literally saw the light at the end of the tunnel. It may not have done much to aid my understanding of Middle Eastern politics or Biblical ecumenism – but boy was it fun!

Mind you so was the shower when I got back – it’s extremely hot here and set to get hotter this week – eeek!