Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 13.djvu/668

640 JERUSALEM procession of Neh. xii. halted and stood " in the house of God," meeting the other choir, which ascended from Siloah by the stair above David s house and reached the temple at the water gate. It appears further from Neh. iii. 27 that the fortifications of the prison were adjacent to Ophel, so that the palace seems to have stood about the south-east corner of the temple area. 1 After the division of the kingdoms Jerusalem was shorn of its political glory. The city itself was taken by Shishak in the reign of Rehoboam, and lost the riches accumulated by Solomon. The great houses of Omri and Jehu quite overshadowed the kingdom of Judah, which forgot its weakness in the reign of Amaziah only to receive signal chastisement from Jehoash, who took Jerusalem, and partly levelled the walls (2 Kings xiv.). The decline and fall of Samaria raised the relative importance of the southern capital ; the writings of the prophets show that wealth had accumulated and luxury increased, and so we find King Jotham adding an upper gate in the northern or higher court of the temple (2 Kings xv. 35 ; Jer. xxxvi. 10 ; Ezek. ix. 2), while Hezekiah, as we have already seen, laboured for the improvement of the water supply, and so rendered the city more capable to resist siege. The later history in Chronicles adds details of fortifications erected by Uzziah and Manasseh, which probably express the oral tradition current in the author s day. In the later days of the monarchy Jerusalem had so far increased that we read of a second town or quarter (2 Kings xxii. 14 ; Zeph. i 10, Heb. ; comp. Neh. iii. 9). There was also a trading quarter called the Maktesh, inhabited by Canaanites or Tyrians (Zeph. i. 11), who still formed a large part of the mercantile population after the exile (Neh. xiii.; Zech. xiv. 21). Maktesh means mortar, so that we must suppose the traders to have lived in a hollow valley, perhaps the upper part of the Tyropceon. But the main part of the town was still grouped round the temple plateau, from which steep streets ran down the slope of the hill (Lam. iv. 1), the houses rising tier above tier, so that the roof tops com manded a view of the environs (Isa. xxii.). According to Eastern custom the handicrafts e.g., the bakers, Jer. xxxvii. 21 had their own streets or bazaars. For the compass of the walls of Jerusalem at the time of its capture by Nebuchadnezzar the chief document is the account of the restoration of the fortifications by Nehemiah, who followed the old line, and speaks of the various gates and towers by their old names. His description presents many difficulties, the most intelligible part being that which deals with the eastern wall, from Siloah and the fountain gate to the point where the temple and the palace joined one another. The western boundary of the city is particularly obscure, and its position must be mainly determined by reference to the "valley gate" (Neh. ii. 13 ; iii. 13). The valley (gay} is used as a proper name, and is no doubt identical with the valley (gay) of the son of Hinnom, the Kidron valley being always called nahal i.e., fiumara. The common opinion makes this gay the valley to the west of modern Jerusalem (Wady er Ilababy), in which case the valley gate must necessarily have occupied much the same position as the modern Jaffa gate, and the whole of the later upper city on the south-west hill must already have been included within the walls. This view, however, is far from indisputable. A thousand cubits south of the valley gate was the dung gate, the gate before which the rubbish heaps of the city lay. This on the common theory must have been about the south-west corner 1 Another view is that Solomon s palace stood on the western hill, and was connected with the temple by a bridge. But "the ascent" of the A. V. of 1 Kings x. 5 does not exist in the original, and seems to rest on a false reading in Chronicles. In Ezek. xliv. the sovereign enters the temple from the east. of the hill, near the present Protestant school. Between this point and the fountain gate in the vicinity of the pool of Siloah is nearly half a mile in a straight line, and the intervening wall must have been much longer if it followed the natural line of defence. Yet Nehemiah gives no account of this section of the ramparts (Neh. iii. 14, 15). His record seems to imply that the fountain gate was near the dung gate ; and similarly in chap. xii. the procession which went southward to the dung gate is immediately afterwards found at the fountain gate. It is hardly possible that so important a part of the circuit should be twice omitted, and in fact the vast lacuna disappears at once if we suppose that the gay is the Tyropoeon, and that the upper city of Josephus on the south-west hill was not enclosed in the circuit of Nehemiah s walls. In that case the valley gate lay on the Tyropoeon, somewhere near the south-east angle of the Haram area, and the wall ran south ward along the east side of the valley, till at the pool of Siloah an outwork was thrown out to protect the water supply. Besides simplifying the topographical difficulties of Neh. iii., this view has several other advantages. On the received view the Tyro pceon is nowhere mentioned in Scripture, though it lay in the heart of the city. This difficulty is removed by the view above suggested, and the third valley (W. er Rababy) appears to be quite out of re lation to the circuit of the Biblical Jerusalem, so that one does not look for much mention of it. Again, vehaveseen that the Canaan- ite quarter of the city lay in a hollow presumably in the Tyropoeon, and it is very natural that the seat of Canaanite worship in the valley of Hinnom should be in the vicinity of this quarter. Once more, by placingthe valley gate quite near the temple, we understand how it was in this neighbourhood that the sacred procession in Neh. xii. began its course. Even at a much later date the Temple hill was the real stronghold of Jerusalem, which Judas and his suc cessors were concerned to fortify with walls. It would have been folly in Nchemiah to enclose a much vaster and less defensible cir cuit when the inhabitants were so few that it was necessary to draft one-tenth of the whole people into the capital (Neh. xi. 1). The course of the wall north of the valley gate must still have skirted the base of the Temple hill east of the Tyropoeon. It is not improbable that the Maktesh or Canaanite trading quarter lay outside the fortifications, a bazaar beyond the gate being a common feature in Eastern towns. 2 From the tower of furnaces or ovens the "broad wall" ran to the point where in the Persian time the governor of the Syrian provinces had his throne. The throne would stand in an open place by a gateway, and comparison of Neh. iii. 7 with xii. 39 shows that the gate must have been that of Ephraim, i.e., the gate of the main road leading to the north, which then as now must almost of necessity have followed the upper course of the Tyropceon, and so would skirt the walls for some distance before entering the city. In fact there were 400 cubits between the gate of Ephraim and the corner gate (2 Kings xiv. 13). The corner gate is also named the first gate (Zech. xiv. 10), and so is probably identical with the old gate of Nehemiah. For obvious engineering reasons the eminence at the north-west of the Haram area must always have been a principal point in the fortifications, and here the old gate may very well be placed. It is indeed very likely that this was the site of the ancient bastion of Millo. From the corner gate the north line of the wall ran by the fish gate to the towers of Meah and Hananeel, the latter of which appears in Zech., loc. cit., as the opposite extremity of the city from the royal wine vats in the gardens by Siloah, while in Jer. xxxi. 38 the line between it and the corner gate is named as the natural direction of extension for the city. The tower, therefore, must have stood very near the north-east corner of the wall, but not so far east as the angle of the Haram area, which is here built out, disguising the natural line of the hill side. From Zech.., loc. cit., we see that the Benjamin gate was at the east end of the north wall. There was a road into Benjamite territory over the Kidron (1 Kings ii. 37), and to this there was a natural descent by a small valley now nearly obliterated, having its head a little south of the Birket Isrdil. Here too is the direct way to Anathoth, which was through the Benjamin gate (Jer. xxxvii. 13). In Nehemiah s record the phcep gate seems to have the same position. From the angle near the tower of Hananeel and the Benjamin gate the line of the hill run southwards, trending to the east. At the extreme east point, beyond the present line of wall, and a little south of the modern - In fact at the siege of Titus the wool and clothes market and the brassworkers bazaar still lay in much the same quarter, in the new city, outside the old line of fortification, though within the second wall (B. J., v. 8, 1).