Israel day 4 - Western Wall Tunnels, Chirst walk & more

Israel Day 4
Sunday, July 1, 2007

Ron was able to arrange a tour on short notice of the tunnels that go under the Muslim Quarter of the Old City and hug the Western Wall of the Temple Mount. They are only available by reservation, and due to his connections we were able to go.

From the time the of the destruction of the Second Temple by the Romans, generations of inhabitants would build homes and shops over the homes and shops of previous generations and eventually the ground rose up dozens of meters against the Western Wall covering over 2000 years of history. Tons of dirt and refuse we painstakingly removed by hand to expose the amazing underground structures that go back to the Hasmonean era. And the excavations continue to this day.

Rooms and public halls were discovered as well as a Second Temple road that Jews and Romans walked on 2000 years earlier. The base of the wall was exposed showing the size of the huge foundation stones at the base of the wall. One stone alone was the size of a bus and how these stones could have been moved into place so precisely is amazing. It's like the building of the Great Pyramids in Egypt.

After we came out of the tunnels, we were in the Muslim Quarter and walked the path (Via Dolorosa) that Jesus took from his condemnation to his place of crucifixion and saw many of the churches that were built at various points along his path; where he fell, got help, had his brow wiped, fell again, etc. Each location is marked by another church. It reminded me of the “George Washington slept here” attitude; only this is far more holy.

Please don’t think I am making fun of Christianity, this just seems to be a universal human trait; build shrines to people and events that impact people’s lives, like shrines to places where Elvis was, where Lincoln was shot, where battles took place, etcetera.

We visited the stone where the body of Christ was cleaned and wrapped for burial. Because he was born a Jew, lived as a Jew, he also died as a Jew. This meant his body could not sit around for days before it was buried. He died on a Friday, and because no work can be done on the Sabbath Saturday, he was buried the same day. His gravesite is now in a huge church built by Queen Helena: The Church of the Holy Sepulcher at Golgotha. Helena was the mother of the Roman Emperor Constantine, who converted to Christianity in 326 A.D.

We then went to the Wohl Museum of Archeology where we were able to see some of the largest and most important sites of the Second Temple era in the Jewish Quarter. After that we visited the Burnt Houses from the destruction of the Second Temple by the Romans that occurred in 70 A.D.

One of those houses belonged to the Kathros family. Kathros was mentioned in the Talmud, but not in a complementary way. He was one of the High Priests of the Second Temple and like the quote, “Power corrupts” he could ruin the life of someone through his “poison quill.” The importance of this find provided answers to what life was like for the Jewish aristocracy 2000 years ago in the Old City. And none of this could have been discovered until the 1967 Six Days War when Israel fought back against Jordan, Egypt and Syria to capture the West Bank. While this area was in the hands of Jordan, the Jewish Quarter remained rubble for hundreds of years.