Under the Holy City

A long-running excavation in Jerusalem unearths evidence for two of the city’s least-known eras

- Andrew Lawler

Just steps from the walls of Jerusalem’s Old City, Tel Aviv University archaeologist Yuval Gadot stands in a deep pit and peers at two massive and finely dressed limestone pillars framing a doorway. More than 2,500 years ago, they marked the entry into a large two-story building in a prestigious area of the bustling city. Stepping across the threshold, Gadot points at a rough stone surface bordered with soil that has an eerie yellow hue. When the building burned, “the earth was heated to such a high temperature that it turned the ground into a yellow crust,” he says. The fire that swept through the structure in August 586 b.c., when a Babylonian army invaded the doomed city, also collapsed the second floor, sending plaster, stone, and timbers crashing down. “They set fire to God’s temple and broke down the wall of Jerusalem,” records the Hebrew Bible’s Book of Chronicles. “They burned all the palaces and destroyed everything of value there.”