Where God Was Born

by Bruce Feiler

  We were met by an old friend. Gabi Barkay is an archaeologist who looks like the vintage newspaper editor from Spider-Man, with a stringy black comb-over, nicotine-stained fingers, and an air of seen-it-all-before. In 1979 he made what one magazine called one of the ten greatest finds of the twentieth century, a tiny silver roll engraved with the oldest piece of biblical writing ever found. I asked him why Jerusalem began on this hill, when the Temple Mount and the Mount of Olives were so much higher.

  “Because it’s the only one of these hills with a natural supply of water,” he said. “The Almighty springs low to the ground. And the Gihon, which means ‘gusher,’ is the most plentiful one around. We definitely may say that if this spring didn’t exist, there wouldn’t be a Jerusalem.”

  We descended a set of stairs and entered the excavation. Remains have been found here dating from the third millennium B.C.E., long before Abraham would have passed by. As early as the eighteenth century B.C.E., residents began building elaborate underground tunnels to transport water from the Gihon to the surface. By the tenth century B.C.E., Jerusalem was a city controlled by a Canaanite clan, the Jebusites, who surrounded it with walls and built intricate houses and a citadel.

  This is the city David coveted. The second Book of Samuel opens with Saul dead and David swaggering into Hebron to become king of Judah, the southern half of the bifurcated Promised Land. He promptly has six sons by six different women. The Northern Kingdom, Israel, quakes before David’s growing prowess. Saul’s son Ishbaal is king of Israel, but the power behind the throne is Abner, a David-like Svengali. Abner secretly reaches out to David to form an alliance, but David demands that Abner turn over David’s first wife, Michal, who has remained in her father’s kingdom. Abner fulfills his end of the bargain, but David has him assassinated anyway, and follows by beheading Ishbaal. This is how David finally seizes control of Israel and forges the first unified monarchy. It takes a tyrant, but the land of Israel is finally united.

  Though not really. Israel never fully capitulates to this carpetbagger from the south. David, recognizing his crisis of legitimacy, designs a guileful response. He moves the capital of the new united monarchy out of the southern stronghold of Hebron but stops short of taking it to the north. He finds a tactical middle ground, a city in the previously untamed midsection of the country. Millennia later the United States underwent a similar process when it moved its capital from New York into the neutral swamp of Washington, D.C. David’s city would not be in Judah and not be in Israel.

  It would be in Jerusalem.

  “The whole thing is politics,” Gabi said. “David was born in Bethlehem, on the doorstep of Jerusalem. He had the dream of forming a dynasty, but he needed a clean slate. David’s plan all along was to create an Israelite trinity: one dynasty, one god, one city. The dynasty can be seated only on one throne; only one God can be worshiped by that people; and only one city can be home to both. That is the holy trinity concept of the tenth century, and it was centered on this spot.”

  We continued our downward path. Gabi pointed out various highlights, including the famous Area G, a royal compound with tombs that some scholars believe may have been David’s home. Halfway down the hill was a small stone door. We stepped inside and found ourselves at the threshold of a tunnel, one of a series of interlocking passageways that connect the city above with the spring below. The tunnels were designed so that residents could descend through bedrock and retrieve the water without leaving the city walls. Already we could hear the echo of the flow rushing hundreds of feet below us. I felt a sort of boyish excitement, as if I was entering some forbidden part of the basement.

  The tunnel had been outfitted with a staircase. We proceeded into the abyss. The walls were illuminated by a few lightbulbs strung along the vaulted ceiling. Stone niches, about shoulder high, indicated where ancient oil lamps had illuminated the work of burrowing into the limestone. Scrape marks were still visible. “You should regard yourself very lucky,” Gabi said. “Where do you have another place that has hardly been touched in four thousand years?”

  “So what did they use to carve the tunnels?” I asked.

  “Stone,” Gabi said. “Iron was not yet in use. This was the Middle Bronze Age. They knew copper, they knew bronze, but these materials were too soft. The bronze they had was hard enough to stab your foe but not hard enough to cut through the hard rock of Jerusalem.”

  These tunnels were so unusual that for thousands of years they went unknown. The Bible alludes to them in II Kings 20, which lists the exploits of King Hezekiah in the eighth century B.C.E.: “He made the pool and the conduit and brought the water into the city.” Some medieval travelers ventured inside, looking for evidence of the lost treasures of Solomon. But the tunnels were introduced to the West by Edward Robinson, the American antiquities specialist, son of a Congregationalist preacher, who came to the Holy Land in 1838 as part of the West’s new quest to prove that the events in the Bible truly happened.

  Setting out from Egypt, Robinson retraced biblical sites through the Sinai and Negev. He hired camels to tote along his supplies: rice, biscuits, and dried apricots, as well as three compasses, a thermometer, telescopes, two muskets, and copies of the Bible in English. Muslim residents in Jerusalem had assumed several stones projecting from the Western Wall of the Temple Mount were the result of an earthquake. Robinson’s familiarity with ancient writings allowed him to identify them as remnants of the Second Temple compound. Today they are called Robinson’s Arch.

  Robinson also made his way into the tunnels, where he hoped to find evidence of the Temple. “He was crawling on his belly,” Gabi said, “with the help of his elbows, in mud and filth that had accumulated here for generations. He didn’t know there was an outlet on the other side, so he stopped before he found the water.”

  The real breakthrough came three decades later, with Charles Warren, a twenty-seven-year-old lieutenant in the British Army. Warren had begun his career scaling Gibraltar and arrived in Jerusalem in 1867 to search for the Temple. Arrested by local Turkish officials for appearing too bellicose, Warren eventually garnered permission to scale the southern wall of the Haram. One day his sledgehammers disturbed daily prayers at the Al Aqsa mosque and worshipers pelted him with stones. Not to be stymied, he moved to the Church of the Holy Sepulcher and searched for the real tomb of Jesus, only to be shut down again. Finally he turned his attention to the City of David.

  “Warren was a very talented man,” Gabi said. “To think that he was only in his twenties. It was written that for every day he would have been in battle he would have earned the Victoria Cross. For every day he was in Jerusalem, you can’t imagine what he suffered. He got malaria, he got arrested, his workmen staged violent uprisings. Shakespeare writes in Macbeth about the forest of Birnam Wood moving toward Dunsinane; in this case the forest moved toward Charles Warren in the form of a mudslide. As he was digging in the tunnels, he triggered an avalanche that nearly buried him alive; he survived by dangling from a rope. In another case he dug a pit and disturbed the equilibrium of some underground sewage, which broke through and nearly drowned him. He quickly dismantled some doors and floated to safety in liquid waste. Every day was such an adventure that Indiana Jones was nothing in comparison to the truth of Charles Warren.”

  “So why did he do it?”

  “I don’t believe his motivation was religious. He had a scientific, human curiosity. He had an interest in the past. And he was naturally brave. Later he was knighted and became head of Scotland Yard, before being forced to resign because of not catching Jack the Ripper. He was the only true victim of Jack the Ripper, in fact, because there was no Jack the Ripper. The whole story was blown up by the public as a result of fear.”

  I started to question his theory but stopped short: If we can’t even agree on what happened in London a century ago, how are we ever going to agree on what happened in Jerusalem thirty centuries ago?

  Warren was the first to pierce the length of these tunnels, i
n March 1867. Crawling on his stomach, he carried a notebook in his left hand, a pencil in his right, and a candle in his mouth. He was his own canary in the shaft, wondering what would happen if his oxygen disappeared. The most famous outlet in the system, a thirty-foot vertical shaft, still bears his name. Warren thought he had discovered the base of the Temple. Fearing the building would collapse, and finding no wood in tree-starved Israel, he bought up beams from as far away as Egypt to buttress his discovery. He eventually ran out of money and had to close down.

  Warren’s aborted mission meant the full triumph of discovering the secret underside of David’s conquest of Jerusalem had to wait forty years for yet another eccentric Brit, Montague Parker. As a thirty-year-old captain in the Boer War, Parker held a séance and claimed to have made contact with Solomon, who revealed the location of his buried treasures. Joining with a Finnish soothsayer who claimed he could decode the Bible, Parker raised hundreds of thousands of pounds from titillated investors. With a staff of London subway engineers, they pitched up in Jerusalem in 1909. They met near universal resistance, from the Turks and the Jews. The latter were led by Baron Edmond de Rothschild, the French philanthropist, who resented this interloper mucking around holy sites.

  “Parker was a lunatic,” Gabi said. But he did manage to enlist one pivotal booster, Father Hughes Vincent, a Catholic priest and the town’s leading authority in antiquities. While Parker may have thought his excavations were leading to a hidden trove of jewels, Vincent went along and studied the masonry and water flow. Noting the presence of Bronze Age burial caves and ancient fortifications, he concluded that the water system belonged to the pre-tenth-century B.C.E. Canaanite city. Hallelujah! Montague Parker (er, Father Vincent) had discovered the City of David and perhaps unlocked the three-millennium mystery of how the wily prince had managed to breach the inviolable city walls.

  But how reliable was this information? Surely these men were daring and colorful. For me, one of the joys of trekking around Jerusalem is learning the stories of these adventurers and trying to step in their shadows. The Bible surely has provided grist for the greatest scavenger hunts in history. Where else can a morning stroll bring one into contact with Baron de Rothschild, Jack the Ripper, and Birnam Wood comes to Dunsinane? But given a century of improvements in archaeology, were they scholars?

  “They were pioneers,” said Gabi. “They were brave. They were crazy enough to go on adventures that nobody today would dare. They were creative enough to use whatever techniques were available to them at the time. Even if we disagree with some of their conclusions, we have to admire them. But mostly, we have to thank them. They invented archaeology.”

  By midmorning we had arrived at the bottom of the tunnels. We stopped walking down and began walking on level ground, turning sideways to squeeze through a sliver in the walls. The ground was muddy, the ceilings caked with cobwebs. Our faces were covered in dust.

  We turned a corner and suddenly stared down into a vast cavern. Our voices bellowed into an echo. Below us was a huge stone pool of water, twenty feet in diameter and deep enough to dive into. The chamber was pitch-black, except for the beams from our headlamps. It looked like the inside of a stone igloo.

  Parker discovered this pool at the termination of Tunnel 3 and labeled it the Round Chamber. The boulders used to construct this pool were the largest ever employed in Jerusalem until Herod the Great remodeled the Temple Mount at least eight hundred years later. The importance of this pool, the massiveness of its walls, and the sheer effort that went into tunneling so extensively through solid limestone raise the question that has tantalized Bible lovers since Warren first dug here.

  “So,” I said, turning to Gabi for what he knew was coming, “is there any evidence that these tunnels were used for anything other than water?”

  “These are waterworks, first and foremost,” Gabi said. “But as they exist, they could have been used for anything else, for storage, for quarrying the stone for construction, and yes, for penetrating the city. The enduring question surrounds how David conquered Jerusalem and whether he came this way. That, I’m afraid, is a linguistic question.”

  Near the start of II Samuel 5, the thirty-seven-year-old King David leads an assault against the Jebusite city of Jerusalem. “You will never get in here!” the residents shout. “Even the blind and lame will turn you back.” But David handily captures the stronghold. He then announces what the Revised Standard Version translates as “Whoever would smite the Jebusites, let him get up the water shaft to attack the lame and the blind.” The term water shaft in this sentence comes from the Hebrew word tsinor. The King James Version renders the same word as gutter, and others translate it as water channel or conduit. Does this term mean David climbed up the water system and took the city by surprise? Maybe that’s why no one had taken Jerusalem before: They hadn’t thought of this route.

  “Tsinor is translated in all English Bibles as gutter,” Gabi explained, “following the translation that first appeared in the Latin Vulgate. The reason is the Hebrew term was never understood, and translators couldn’t do what we do today, which is to say, ‘Well, it’s Hebrew, but we don’t understand it.’ So the English makes sense, but it has nothing to do with the original Hebrew, which doesn’t make sense. It’s a defective text. We know today, from the Dead Sea Scrolls, that the full text of second Samuel did not survive.”

  “Does the word appear elsewhere in the text?”

  “Tsinor is a hapax legomenon,” Gabi said, “meaning it occurs only once in the Bible. Is it a gutter? Is it a sexual organ? Is it a statue of the Jebusite defenders that had to be touched to signal the takeover of the city? We don’t know.”

  “Then how did this whole idea of David climbing up the water shaft get started?”

  “Ah.”

  When Warren published his findings of the waterworks in 1871, some people immediately suggested the waterworks might be connected to the David story. These speculations caught the imagination of Father Vincent, who during Parker’s excavation suggested that the general Joab climbed through the tunnels, snuck into the city, and flung open the gates for David and his men. This would explain the lack of extensive destruction at the time of the supposed conquering. Father Vincent was also a close friend of Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, the inventor of modern Hebrew, who wrote the first dictionary of the language in Vincent’s monastery. Vincent persuaded Ben-Yehuda to accept the term tsinor as “windpipe,” which is how the word is used in spoken Hebrew today.

  So is this what happened?

  Most scholars have said no. For decades the great archaeologists of Jerusalem lined up against the theory. They received confirmation in 1981, when Yigal Shiloh reexcavated the tunnels and concluded that none dated before the ninth century B.C.E., meaning David couldn’t have climbed up through them because they hadn’t been built at the time. The theory was dead, at least until 1999, when Roni Reich reexcavated the tunnels yet again and made a startling discovery. In order to see what he found, Avner had concocted a plan. Gabi would stay on dry ground and aid us from above. Avner and I would remove our shoes, take off our trousers, and wade into a stretch of tunnel that seemed impenetrable.

  The water around our ankles was cold and the bottom filled with pebbles. As we slogged forward, we had to lean against the limestone walls, which were covered in crust and cobwebs and felt like the inside of a cocoon. At times the space was barely broader than my shoulders.

  The water began only a few inches high but gradually deepened, and quickened. In no time it reached the middle of my thighs, and I had to bend my knees to avoid being toppled by the current. I felt reptilian. The tunnel smelled like the inside of the tank I used as a boy to grow tadpoles into frogs—a fetid, muddy grog that gave off the disquieting odor of evolution.

  Soon the water neared my waist, and I had to pull my T-shirt up to prevent it from getting drenched. I was wading waist deep in the freezing, raw sewage of Jerusalem in some quixotic attempt to discover how King David had captured
his capital. I thought back to one of my mother’s mantras: “The best way to learn is by being hands-on.”

  Thanks.

  After about twenty minutes, we reached a fork in the tunnel. One passage veered to the left. The other continued straight ahead, where it quickly dead-ended into a stone wall. The wall had a round opening about three feet off the ground that was the size of a ship’s porthole. “We’re going through it,” Avner said.

  “There?” I said. “We’ll never fit!”

  Avner rolled over a small boulder from the middle of the stream and placed it underneath the hole. I stuck my head through the porthole and saw dryish land. I dropped my belongings on the other side and figured that the fastest way through was feetfirst. Avner gave me a boost. I stepped up on the rock, put one foot through the cubbyhole, and leaned back against the wall of the tunnel. My calves began to strain. My underwear ripped. And suddenly I couldn’t move. I’d always gotten a kick out of saying that Avner, with his round belly and jolly face, looked like Winnie-the-Pooh. Now I was the one stuck in a hole.

  We pushed and pulled, tugged and aarghed, and eventually I squeezed through the opening, collapsing into the muddy glop on the other side. Avner, learning his lesson, went headfirst and came through in a matter of seconds. We were standing in the mud, our belongings in a heap. My light was extinguished. His beam provided the only glimmer. Avner broke the silence. “Look up.”

  Turning, I stared at a thirty-foot vertical chute that looked no wider than a backyard well. With its mottled lining and brown color, it looked like a classroom model of a piece of large intestine. This was Warren’s Shaft. When Roni Reich reexamined this site, he discovered Jebusite pottery where we were standing that clearly contradicted earlier theories and proved this shaft did predate David. It has been here since the middle of the second millennium B.C.E. Even more, Reich discovered that the shaft wasn’t carved at all; it was a natural sinkhole. “This is not Warren’s Shaft at all,” Avner said. “It is the Almighty’s Shaft.”