City of David Center

This steep slope was the site of an ancient city. Stone walls emerge at different heights, and passages of the old water system open in the ground; Warren's Shaft was part of that system. Here, old houses were dismantled and new ones erected, using the earlier stone; filled-in floors became the foundation of the next structure. That is why the slope does not form one surviving neighborhood: separate fragments reveal several cities that stood here one atop another.

Beyond the city wall begins a hill that has been questioned with particular intensity for a century and a half. Here, people search the ground for more than walls, potsherds, and steps. They demand that it answer the question from which Jerusalem's history as a capital begins: how did the city come into the hands of King David?

In the Second Book of Samuel, Jebus stands on this site—a fortress so confident that its defenders mock David. They seem to say: you will not enter here; even the blind and the lame will keep us safe. Then a single mysterious word appears in the story: “tsinnor.” David's men are meant to reach the city through this “tsinnor.” The text does not explain exactly what it means.

One unclear word proved enough for a magnificent scene to be born. Later, “tsinnor” was turned into a secret water passage. According to popular tradition, the warrior Joab was the first to make his way through an underground route, climb to the spring, and open impregnable Jerusalem to David from within. In this version, everything is perfectly arranged: proud defenders on the walls, a dark passage underground, water, stone, a brave warrior, and gates thrown open before the future king.

The legend even found suitable scenery—Warren's Shaft, part of the hill's ancient water-supply system. It looked exactly as a forgotten entrance to a fortress ought to look. All that remained was to connect the biblical word with an archaeological structure, and there was an almost ready-made script for an assault.

But archaeology does not like perfect scripts. Scholars still have not reached agreement on whether Warren's Shaft was that very “tsinnor,” or whether it was possible at all to capture the city in such a way. The ancient text remains brief, the stone remains silent, and between them there is room for a whole adventure. Thus one vague phrase survived the centuries and became a secret tunnel through which Joab enters Jerusalem again and again—at least in the storytellers' imagination.

This ability of the hill to turn a conjecture into an almost tangible story once brought here a man who seemed to have stepped from the pages of a novel. In nineteen oh nine, the British aristocrat Montagu Parker appeared in Jerusalem. He was interested less in unhurried scholarship than in a treasure beside which ordinary archaeological finds faded away.

The Swedish Finn Valter Juvelius claimed that he had managed to decipher a hidden biblical code. By his calculations, temple treasures lay somewhere beneath Jerusalem—and perhaps the Ark of the Covenant itself. Parker believed him. He gathered money, a team, and equipment, and began digging on the hill of the City of David. No Ark appeared. No gold appeared either. But a particular impatience kept growing—the kind that seizes treasure hunters when they think success is only one turn away.

The expedition worked for several seasons. Parker searched for underground routes, cleared ancient passages, and became ever more deeply caught up in his own story of a hidden sanctuary. At last, the search moved to a place where any mistake could become a catastrophe—the Temple Mount. In nineteen eleven, the team began secret nighttime work at the holy site.

It was impossible to conceal such a thing in Jerusalem. A rumor spread through the city that foreigners had intruded onto the Temple Mount and were trying to steal its treasures. Unrest began. Parker and his companions left in haste, having found neither the Ark nor royal gold. In the British press, the story looked almost like a comedy about wealthy adventurers who believed in a cipher and fled without treasure. Here it was remembered differently: as a reminder that a person with a shovel may call himself a researcher while behaving like a hunter after someone else's sanctuary.

Half a century later, a very different British woman came to the same hill—Kathleen Kenyon. She worked in the City of David from nineteen sixty-one to nineteen sixty-seven and seemed deliberately to do everything differently from Parker. No promised treasure, no spectacular solution. Instead of a broad gesture of clearing—narrow trenches. Instead of a chase after one great object—a careful record of how each layer of earth lay.

A city on such a hill is like not a book with neatly numbered pages, but a manuscript that has been erased many times and written over the old text. A house was destroyed, and another was built on its stones; a floor was filled in, leveled, and turned into the foundation of the next era. If you move too quickly, several centuries will mix into a single heap. Kenyon moved slowly, leaving sections of earth between the excavations so that the sequence of layers would be preserved.

Her colleagues were sometimes irritated. From the side, her site resembled a chessboard: narrow pits, partitions, pieces of unexcavated ground. To those who dreamed of seeing an entire palace or an imposing fortress wall, this method seemed painfully cautious. Yet it was precisely this caution that made it possible to separate one city from another—not by a beautiful conjecture, but by the position of pottery, stone, and soil.

The war of nineteen sixty-seven interrupted Kenyon's work. It did not settle every dispute or turn the hill into a chronicle read to the end. Rather, it left behind a rule: the more loudly a find promises to confirm a familiar story, the more carefully one must look at the ground around it.

That is why this place has two very different protagonists. Parker went underground in search of one great sensation and nearly caused a catastrophe. Kenyon removed layer after layer, accepting that the answer would prove incomplete. And between them Joab continues to live, supposedly climbing up the secret water passage. The hill does not choose one version. It preserves both the biblical mystery and the treasure hunter's adventure, and the archaeologist's strict grid—three ways of making stone speak, and three entirely different answers to the question of what exactly a person hopes to find here.