After these towers of the Baris the various gates and places come before us in the following order:—
The Fish Gate, placed in Herr Schick's plan where the first main line of street ran out into the country.
The Old Gate, where the next main line of street ran out. It is where these two roads cross one another that we get, at a later period, the Damascus Gate set up. Streets running direct towards a city wall seem to demand a gate in that wall to complete their usefulness.
Next we have the Throne of the Governor-beyond-the River. This, like the preceding, is some structure occurring in the course of the wall. In chap. ii. 7, 9, the phrase "beyond the river" seems to mean westward of the Jordan, where the district was governed by a viceroy of the king of Assyria. The viceroy lived or had lived in Jerusalem,[1] and his castle appears to have come into the line of the second wall, in the part which is south-east of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, and perhaps exactly at the re-entering angle.
The Broad Wall, which is named next, was not necessarily broad in itself. Open spaces, such as we should name Squares, were in Jerusalem called Broads. There was one such broad space south of the Temple water gate, on Ophel, in which the people sometimes assembled (Neh. viii. 1; Ezra x. 9). There seems to have been another near one of the city gates, where Hezekiah addressed the people, alarmed at the approach of Sennacherib (2 Chron. xxxii. 6). Sennacherib would approach the city on the north-west, and the people were very likely gathered by the Valley Gate discussing the matter, in an open space afterwards utilised by the construction of the "Pool of Hezekiah." The "Broad" wall might be so called from running along one side of this broad space. It perhaps started from the second wall at the point which Nehemiah's
- ↑ Ezra iv. 16, 20; v. 3, 6; vi. 6, 8, 13; viii. 36.
