Warren’s shaft. Oren Cohen/City of David Archives, used with permission from the author.
In 1867, Queen Victoria, in celebration of the 30th year of her reign, sponsored the newly created Palestine Exploration Fund, which recruited Second Lieutenant Charles Warren of the British Royal Engineers to lead its first archaeological expedition to the Holy Land. Thanks to the recent and temporary alliance between Britain and the Ottoman empire, Warren was given permission to unearth biblical-era antiquities and bring some of those treasures back to the British Museum. He was to concentrate on finding artifacts from the time of ancient Israel’s storied kings, David and Solomon. The Temple Mount, however, was to remain off-limits.
Upon arriving in the Holy Land, Charles Warren bribed his way through the ranks of the Ottoman bureaucracy and launched his expedition as close to the Temple Mount as he could. He knew that the Mount, upon which today stands the Dome of the Rock, was a Muslim holy site as well as the former location of the First and Second Jewish Temples. When his team began excavating, the initial results were disappointing: pottery and coins, but nothing that reached back to the time of the Bible.
Had Warren’s adventures ended there, his name would likely have been one more in a list of treasure hunters who came before and after him. But his work did not end there. Warren went on to uncover something extraordinary, something that neither he, nor anyone else, had even realized was lost: the original site of ancient Jerusalem, a discovery that changed the way we understand history.
Charles Warren kindled an ongoing quest to uncover Jerusalem as it was during the times of the First and Second Temples. The patient, careful work undertaken since that time has vastly increased the scholarly understanding of the Hebrew Bible (as well as the Christian one) and of Jewish history, and still attracts some of the world’s leading archaeologists, as well as scientists who are constantly developing new methods of exploring these sites.
Of course, those who have been involved in the project that Warren began have brought with them various religious, ideological, and scholarly agendas. But a different kind of agenda has emerged over the past several decades: an attempt to stop further exploration and destroy the archaeological record, in order to throw into doubt the connection between the Jewish people and their ancestral homeland. In what follows, I will look at those who have in recent years continued what Warren began, and how their progress was almost thwarted.
I.
Let us first return to Charles Warren and his expedition. One day, Warren decided to leave the safety and security of the Old City walls and explore the mostly barren, rolling hills outside them. He walked through some vegetable fields, down a mountainside to the valley floor, where he happened upon an arched entrance into a cave, leading to a flight of stone stairs that descended beneath the mountain. At the bottom of the stairs, Warren found a spring of water flowing softly. When his eyes adjusted to the darkness, he realized that the water was flowing not into the valley, but rather through a stone tunnel bored into the heart of the mountain itself.
Warren gathered his team, and they followed the waters of the spring through the bedrock of the mountain. After a few dozen feet they noticed, over their heads, a man-made shaft leading up into the mountain. They built scaffolds and began digging. As they examined the pottery shards coming out of the shaft, they were stunned. The pottery was thousands of years older than what they had found in what everyone at the time considered to be the “Old City” of Jerusalem.
Warren and his team spent the next few months digging out the entire shaft until they burst out of the ground into a vegetable field on the surface of the mountain above. They realized that they had discovered a secret passageway that had once connected an ancient people living on the top of the mountain down to the spring of water on the valley floor.
But what was the purpose of this passageway?
Warren was an aficionado of the Bible and knew the story of King David word for word. As he thought about the shaft, unaware that one day it would bear his own name and be called “Warren’s Shaft,” he remembered a cryptic line from the Bible in which David describes how he captured Jerusalem from a people called the Jebusites: “And David said on that day, he who conquers the Jebusites, will capture the water channel.”
In all the explorations inside the Old City walls of Jerusalem, such a water source had never been found. The “water channel” referred to by King David had always remained a mystery.
Warren understood that he had found a water channel flowing beneath the mountain, along with a shaft that would have been used by people during the time of the Bible to reach its source secretly. But how could King David use this water channel to capture Jerusalem if the hill he was standing on was outside the Old City Walls?
Warren looked up from the hill he was standing on, and gazed toward the Old City walls in the distance and had a thought: “What if the actual site of Jerusalem from the time of King David was not inside what everyone thinks are the Old City walls? What if, instead, it lay beneath the small hilltop on which I now stand?”
Over the next three years, Warren dug where he was allowed to—and sometimes where he was not—sometimes through a hundred feet of rubble or tunnels, locating sources of water leading to and from the Gihon Spring and the Pool of Siloam along with a broad section of an ancient wall that would be identified years later by Kathleen Kenyon, another British archaeologist, as King Solomon’s Wall, predating the medieval walls that surround the Old City today by more than 2,500 years.
It became clear that outside what is today referred to as the Old City of Jerusalem there is a much older city, the biblical site of Jerusalem. Charles Warren had discovered what was once, and would later be again, called the City of David.
At one point during the excavations, an artist, part of the team sent by Queen Victoria, drew a picture showing Warren’s assistant, Corporal Henry Birtles, dangling on a rope and holding a candle, climbing down the rope between two massive, diamond-shaped stone blocks suspended at the top of a tunnel.
The drawing raises many questions: researchers would debate whether the drawing was based on a real event; if so, where it took place; and what the two large stones were.
II.
The story of the City of David is also a personal one for me. Over the past 21 years, I have had the privilege of working closely with the founder of the City of David National Park, David Beeri, known in Israel simply by the diminutive “Davidleh,” along with Yehuda Maly, cofounder of the project, and a small group of people who have dedicated their lives to transforming the site from a neglected hilltop village into one of the most important archaeological heritage sites in the world.
One of the many digs Davidleh took us on was an early-morning journey to the past. In 2010, a digger on the evening crew made one of those discoveries that changes everything. He was using his pickaxe to clear away the archaeological fill that had accumulated at the upper section of an ancient water tunnel, built during the Second Temple period and likely commissioned by King Herod, when suddenly the top two feet of a wall gave way, exposing a long, dark tunnel. This was a very unusual experience, the kind of thing that only happens in Indiana Jones movies. Climbing closer to get a better look, he peered inside the tunnel with his flashlight. The tunnel extended far into blackness. He crawled in with the flashlight for around twenty feet before having the good judgment to crawl back out again.
The crew immediately called the archaeologist Eli Shukron of the Israel Antiquities Authority, who was spearheading the excavations at the site. The tunnel was part of an ancient underground water system, only parts of which had been explored. Shukron worked his way up and into the narrow shaft and crawled a dozen meters or so. The tunnel continued into the distance. Realizing it wasn’t prudent to continue alone and without necessary supplies, Shukron crawled out. He needed a small team of people willing to head into the narrow tunnel without knowing exactly how long they would be crawling, people who would be able to keep their wits about them.
At around 10 p.m. that evening, he contacted Davidleh, who immediately agreed to join him. Shortly afterward, Davidleh called me, recognizing the immense significance of the moment. Without hesitation, I agreed, fully aware of the significance of what was about to unfold. I brought with me a new colleague of mine, Eli Alony, who would go on to play an instrumental role in raising the finances for further exploration. Yehuda Maly also joined, and he recruited Gil Mezuman, a videographer, to document the crawl.
We were to meet at 5 a.m. the next morning, before even the day shift arrived at the site. The tunnel was called Herod’s Water Channel, and excavators had been digging it for six years straight. King Herod, who reigned at the end of the 1st century BCE, was both a madman and an architectural genius, and he was both feared and respected by his Jewish subjects. The achievement he is most known for was his reconstruction of the Second Temple.
Following the return of the Jewish people from Babylonian exile in 515 BCE, they had built the Second Temple, using whatever materials they could scrounge together from what remained of the destroyed First Temple. The result was a patchwork of stones that lacked the beauty and grandeur of the original First Temple. Herod decided to transform this structure into an edifice that would rival anything in the Roman world at the time. He created an architectural masterpiece. Although the Temple itself was destroyed by the Romans in 70 CE, the platform upon which he built the Temple, called the Temple Mount, stands to this day. It has a surface area large enough for twenty football fields. Today, the Dome of the Rock and the Mosque of Omar, two Muslim holy sites, stand on top of the Mount.
The western supporting wall that holds up this massive structure is the Western Wall that still stands today. King Herod’s tunnel is one of the most important discoveries made in the City of David. It ran the entire length of the City of David from top to bottom. The theory was that Herod’s teams built the tunnel, which was more than half a mile long, as a drainage system for rainwater that fell in the area of the massive Temple Mount, which was located to the north of the City of David and at higher elevation. The water would flow through culverts or drains in the ground around the Temple Mount and follow gravity through the tunnel, all the way past the City of David to the valley floor, into a pool at the far end.
In 2005, the entrance to the southern section of Herod’s Tunnel was discovered at the bottom of the City of David, next to a pool we were excavating. This section of the tunnel is called the Lower Tunnel, and inside it we found the site where the last Jews of Jerusalem had been hiding until the Romans found and killed them. Since then, archaeologists had been inching along, heading away from the pool, all the way north toward the area of the Temple Mount, removing bags of dirt for years. Now, the crews had made it to the upper half of Herod’s Tunnel. There were still another 300 feet left before reaching the area of the Temple Mount. No one could know for sure where the tunnel actually ended up until the dig was completed.
We gathered in the early dawn, and Shukron laid out the rules: we would crawl single file, head to tail. We would go for as long as we could, until we hit the end of the tunnel or decided we couldn’t continue any farther physically. If we couldn’t find a place to turn around before heading back, we would have to crawl in reverse all the way out of the tunnel. He estimated that we would be able to keep up the crawl for around two hours.
After around 40 minutes, Shukron paused and called back to us that the tunnel veered sharply to the left. That was a new development. For the entire length of the tunnel up until that point, it had been on a straight course from the Siloam Pool directly up toward the Temple Mount. I saw Shukron disappear around the sharp corner followed by the cameraman and Davidleh. When I rounded the corner, I could see the three of them propped up, sitting against the walls of the tunnel.
The roof of the tunnel in this section was much higher, shaped like a dome over their heads, and it was at least a foot wider. I breathed a sigh of relief. They were smiling. We all knew at least one thing for sure: we wouldn’t have to back out in reverse on the way back. We had more than enough room to turn.
Shukron was examining the sharp angle the tunnel had made, mumbling something to himself, like a mathematician trying to figure out a formula. He then looked at us and told us what was on his mind. “The only reason that I can think this tunnel suddenly breaks to the left is because something is on the other side of this wall that the tunnellers wanted to avoid.”
He looked back at us and continued. “I think that the foundations of the Temple Mount are right on the other side of this wall, and that we are now skirting the southern edge of the Temple Mount toward the west.”
We all stared at him open-eyed. Pointing to the domed roof over our heads, he continued, “This also explains why the roof here is domed, as opposed to the rest of the tunnel. The structure of the Temple Mount is massive, and it must put enormous stress on the ground and anything built around it. As the original tunnellers neared the area of the Temple Mount itself, they constructed an arched ceiling with a much stronger weight-bearing capacity than the rest of the tunnel, which is simply a flat roof.” He pointed up to the keystone in the middle of the tunnel that held the arched dome in place.
I looked at the gray limestone wall next to me. Just a few feet on the other side of that wall lay the holiest site in all of Judaism, the place our ancestors had been praying to for thousands of years. And now, deep inside the earth, the six of us were crawling along the very foundation stones upon which it had been built.
We sat there for a few minutes reflecting, until Davidleh turned to Shukron and said that we should probably continue if we were going to go any farther that day.
Shukron led the way again and we continued crawling. After around 50 feet, the tunnel turned sharply back to the right again, back to the original trajectory we had been following. We were once again heading north, and realized that we were now probably crawling along the edge of the Western Wall of the Temple Mount. After a few feet, the tunnel led to a small opening approximately a foot and a half high. Shukron tried to squeeze his head through, but he got wedged in. Davidleh pulled him back out.
Davidleh was smaller, and he thought he could make it through.
He squeezed in through the opening and dropped in on the other side. After a few seconds, his voice echoed back to us. He said he was in some kind of round chamber. He told Shukron to put his arms first and head through. Davidleh pulled him and Shukron made it in. The next was Gil. He lowered his camera gear and was then pulled through. By the time I came through, the area had already been a bit dug out by the pulling. I put my arms first and felt the hands of Davidleh and Shukron take me and pull me through. After a few minutes we were all in.
We were crouched down on a pile of dirt that filled a circular room carved into the bedrock of the mountain.
Shukron said it looked like a cistern that had been filled with dirt. On the wall opposite us, we could see another small opening, which led out of the cistern and continued north. Shukron crawled over and looked with his flashlight. He said that he could see the drainage channel continuing on the other side and a few big rocks hanging down from the roof of the tunnel.
Over our heads, in the roof of the cistern, a hole had been carved out heading upward. Shukron called us to take a look. At the top of the shaft, around twenty feet above us, a ray of sunlight was shining down on us from above. After crawling underground through the belly of the earth for so long, the sight of the sun was exceptionally beautiful.
Shukron thought it likely that, in Temple times, people had dropped their buckets into the cistern through the shaft above to draw water before heading up to the Temple. We were elated and started asking Shukron questions in loud voices when he abruptly hushed us all.
We could hear the faint sound of voices coming from the top of the shaft. I moved closer to listen, and I thought I could hear a male voice, speaking English. He was speaking loudly, explaining something to a group of people. As my ears adjusted, I could make out his words.
“Here we are, standing next to the southern section of the Western Wall. If you look closely above our heads, you can see a row of stones jutting out—those are the remains of Robinson’s Arch, one of the original entrances to the Temple.” The voice was that of a tour guide giving an early-morning tour to a group at the southwestern corner of the Temple Mount.
Unknown to him—but because of him—the six of us underground now knew where we were. We had gone all the way from the Siloam Pool and continued under the Old City wall, and we had now reached the original gate to the Temple, known as Robinson’s Arch, located at the southern end of the Western Wall. Davidleh’s vision—that one day we would make it to the area of the Western Wall—had finally come true. We had made it from the City of David to the Western Wall of the Temple Mount—and in one morning and in one crawl.
Gil Mezuman recorded the moment when we spontaneously burst into cheer and gave each other high-fives. It dawned on me while we were cheering that it was imperative that the group above would not hear us. I hushed the group. Where we were located carried significant implications. We were underground, next to one of the most important and sensitive structures in the entire world. We knew we were not under the Temple Mount itself. However, if rumors began to circulate that there was an excavation taking place beneath the ground, this close to the Temple Mount, it would become easy to conclude that we were underneath the Temple Mount itself.
Those who were constantly inciting that “al-Aqsa was in danger” would see this as a ripe opportunity to inflame the Arab world into fiery protests—or worse. In fact, in 1996, when a tunnel had been opened leading from the Western Wall into the Arab Quarter, such a claim had been made, and while not true, it had ignited a massive clash between Israelis and rioting Palestinians. The clashes lasted four days and left seventeen innocent Israelis killed along with 59 Palestinian rioters and militants. Now that we had connected the City of David to the Western Wall of the Temple Mount, we had entered the realm of geopolitics. We would have to be incredibly careful to make sure that our momentous discovery did not cause the same reaction. We all agreed that until further notice, no one was to breathe a word of our adventure that day, or of how far the excavation reached.
Before crawling back, we still had one more area to explore.
We formed back into our crawling order and exited on the northern side of the ancient cistern into the continuation of the drainage channel. After a few paces, we came to an extraordinary sight: there, cracked right through the roof of the tunnel, two massive stones were poking through, like diamonds that had fallen from high above, wedged into the roof of the tunnel. Each looked like it weighed a few tons.
Shukron thought that they had been carved to be used in the construction of the Temple, and perhaps, during the construction, had fallen from above and gotten wedged down here. Then he reached down and pulled something out of the ground. It looked like the remains of an old kerosene lamp and some metal chisels. We were all confused. Someone had been here before us.
Shukron ran his hands along one of the diamond-shaped stones and told us that they were the same stones used by Herod’s men to build the Temple Mount and the Western Wall. Shukron kept staring at the diamond-shaped stones. “I’ve seen these stones before,” he said.
We looked at him in confusion. It wasn’t possible that Shukron had been here before, unless he was 2,000 years old. “I think Charles Warren was here,” he blurted.
“What I mean,” he said, “is that I have seen a drawing of these stones before. There is a drawing of Warren’s assistant Corporal Henry Birtles, dangling on a rope between two diamond-shaped stones. The stones we are looking at are the stones in the drawing.”
III.
It was a hot summer day in 1880, ten years after Charles Warren returned to England. Jacob Eliyahu, a fifteen-year-old boy from a Turkish-Jewish family, was shepherding his flock of sheep in the Kidron Valley, which borders the area of the City of David on its eastern side. In the blistering heat of summer, the temperatures in Jerusalem can often exceed 100 degrees Fahrenheit. Thirsty for water, Jacob grazed his flock over a small hill and made his way to a stone staircase that led down to a small freshwater pool that was known to the local shepherds in the area. Jacob bent down and drank from the fresh cool waters, while his flock crammed in for space around the pool and dipped their heads in and drank.
While the sheep drank, Jacob carefully lowered himself into the pool. He waded through the knee-high water toward a cleft in the mountain rock, from which the water flowed to fill the pool.
He poked his head into the cleft of the rock and saw a dark tunnel heading beneath the mountain. The water was flowing past him to the pool behind, from some unknown source lost in the darkness ahead of him. He came out, took a wooden torch from his bag, lit it, and went back in to explore. The tunnel was filled with shallow water and continued into the distance. As he walked inside, he ran his fingers along the chisel marks of whoever had carved the tunnel out of the limestone mountain long ago.
We know from Jacob’s account that after around twenty yards in the darkness he slipped on a stone and fell into the shallow waters. As he pulled himself back up out of the water, he felt something protruding from the wall. He relit his torch and looked closely. The protrusion was a rectangular stone tablet that had letters carved along its surface. The letters resembled Hebrew, but with an odd shape, including many letters he had never seen before.
Jacob Eliyahu ran out of the tunnel, excited to report his discovery. As the story of the inscription circulated through the narrow streets of Jerusalem’s Old City, some villagers from nearby Silwan eventually removed the tablet, probably hoping to broker a deal with a European museum. As they removed the sign, it broke into six or seven pieces. The Turkish governor of Jerusalem apprehended the villagers and sent the sign to the Istanbul Archaeology Museum in Turkey where it remains to this day. Several experts examined the sign, first in its original location in the tunnel and later at the museum, in an effort to decipher the writing.
They were stunned. The sign was written in the ancient Hebrew of the Israelites, dating back to the Biblical First Temple Period, around the 8th century BCE. The linguists concluded that it was the oldest biblical inscription ever discovered. They also noticed something remarkable: the event described on the inscription closely matched an event in the Bible attributed to King Hezekiah, a descendant of King David who lived in the 8th century BCE. The “Siloam Inscription,” as it came to be called, describes the construction of the water tunnel Jacob Eliyahu had waded through, a tunnel that stretched more than half a kilometer in length. The inscription told the story of the workers who dug the tunnel and managed to meet from two opposite ends in the belly of the earth in what we recognize as the year 702 BCE.
What most astounded the scholars is that the tunnel—and the time period of writing on the inscription—matches the biblical description of a tunnel that was dug out under the orders of King Hezekiah, who ruled Jerusalem in 702 BCE. Hezekiah was besieged by the leader of the Assyrian empire, King Sennacherib, who had at the time the largest army in antiquity. The Bible describes how Hezekiah, desperate to secure the city’s water supply, ordered the waters of the Gihon Spring to be diverted inside the mountain:
When Hezekiah saw that Sennacherib had come, intent on making war against Jerusalem, he consulted with his officers and warriors about stopping the flow of the springs outside the city, and they supported him. A large force was assembled to stop up all the springs and the wadi that flowed through the land, for otherwise, they thought, the king of Assyria would come and find water in abundance. (2Chronicles 32:2–4)
The gamble paid off and, in the end, Sennacherib’s army never reached the water source, earning Hezekiah praise:
It was Hezekiah who stopped up the spring of water of Upper Gihon, leading it downward west of the City of David; Hezekiah prospered in all that he did. (2Chronicles 32:2–4)
The story is recorded, in great detail, in both the book of Kings and the book of Chronicles, making the Siloam Inscription one of the most important pieces of evidence ever found that corroborates the biblical text with archaeological evidence.
IV.
Fast-forward to 2011. Since our expedition into the tunnel where we discovered Charles Warren’s stones, the excavation of King Herod’s drainage channel had made rapid progress. We now had a major decision to make that would affect the trajectory of the City of David for years to come. Should we stop digging in the upper drainage tunnel and return to the Pilgrimage Road excavation at the bottom of the City of David, or continue digging the tunnel until we reached the Temple Mount? Both couldn’t be done at the same time, as each required tight archaeological supervision and teams, and there weren’t enough to go around.
On the one hand, the Pilgrimage Road was a monumental excavation that would enable millions of people to experience Jerusalem, while the tunnel was a narrow shaft, and only small numbers could walk through it at a time. The road would take many years to complete, and the cost was now estimated at over $100 million dollars, which would require enormous government and private funding.
On the other hand, the drainage channel was close to the Old City wall and only around 100 meters (330 feet) from the Temple Mount. If the archaeologists could finish the excavation, it would establish once and for all that the City of David was archaeologically connected to the Old City, something that could be important when justifying the Pilgrimage Road if there were any attempts to try to stop it. We had learned an important lesson in 2008, when Palestinian activists, backed by Europeans and with the support of the U.S. State Department, shut down the project for several months with a lawsuit at the Israel Supreme Court. (The Court ruled against the activists in 2009, allowing the digging to resume.)
Davidleh understood the emotional impact of bringing tourists through the tunnel to connect with the destruction and the return. The National Parks Authority felt the same way. Both for this reason and the importance of connecting the site to the Old City, the decision was made to put the Pilgrimage Road on hold and continue to excavate the tunnel.
This proved to be a pivotal decision.
There was only one issue. Given the tight conditions, and the lack of airflow, another entrance to the tunnel had to be made in order to remove the bags of fill more easily and give the workers more fresh air. The answer to this came, of all places, from beneath the Givati Parking Lot. At first, the parking lot was an unassuming piece of property, approximately one acre in size, lying directly between the City of David and the Old City. It hardly seemed worth the millions of dollars we had to raise to buy it. But little did we know it would turn out to be one of the most important excavation sites in Israel.
An Arab family initially owned the parking lot. In the mid-1990s, the original Arab owner had been in negotiations with Davidleh to buy the property for $350,000, but Davidleh couldn’t raise enough funds and was forced to let the property go. In the late 1990s, the lot was bought by two Jewish developers from Tel Aviv. While they waited for the value of the land to increase, they allowed cars and buses to use it as a free parking lot for people coming to visit the Western Wall. When Davidleh heard that two Jewish developers had bought the property for apparently much more than $350,000, he breathed a sigh of relief. Since it was now in Jewish hands, the property would certainly not be used toward anything that would harm Israeli interests in the area.
Or so he thought.
As the excavations on the City of David were starting to get underway, the two Jewish developers began to see some value in the property. On the afternoon of August 10, 2000, Yehuda Maly was walking back from the Western Wall after praying.
That year, the tenth of August happened to be the ninth day of the month of Av in the Jewish calendar. Tisha b’Av, as it’s known in Hebrew, is a day of mourning and fasting that originally commemorated the destruction of Solomon’s Temple by the Babylonians, as well as the destruction of the Second Temple by the Romans on the very same Hebrew calendar date. Over the centuries it became a day to fast and reflect on some of the other major calamities that have happened to the Jewish people, events like the expulsion from England in 1290, the expulsion from France in 1306, the expulsion from Spain in 1492, and of course the Holocaust.
As Maly walked by the parking lot, which ordinarily would have been empty on a fast day, he saw workers installing an electric gate at the entrance. When he asked them what was going on, they said the parking lot was under new ownership and the new owners had decided to fence it off. It was widely known that the site was owned by the two Jewish developers, and Yehuda didn’t remember hearing that they had sold it. When he asked who the new owners were, the workers offered only a silent look in return, obviously eager to end the conversation.
Before leaving, Yehuda looked at the building plans the workers were holding and noticed that they were written in Arabic. This was unusual. All building plans in Israel are in Hebrew whether the contractors are Arab or Jewish. After Yehuda reported on what he saw, a few of the long-time Arab workers at the site went to investigate the issue. They came back with a bombshell: the two Jewish developers had agreed to sell the property to the Palestinian Authority.
What they heard was that the Palestinian Authority had offered the Jewish developers eight times what they had paid for the property just a few years before, in addition to other incentives. A copy of the building plans showed that the Palestinian Authority was planning on building a Center for the Legacy of the Palestinian People adjacent to al-Aqsa Mosque, directly over the parking lot. A road was also proposed that would cut directly through the City of David and link the new center with the Palestinian parliament building, just over the Green Line around a mile and a half away.
In other words, the center would divide Jerusalem, cutting the City of David off completely from the Old City. It was a bold move and one that would relegate the City of David ultimately to the hands of the people who had carried out the largest archaeological destruction in Israel’s history at the Temple Mount just a few miles away.
The two Jewish developers had apparently hit hard financial times on some of their other real-estate deals and had agreed to sell it to the Palestinian Authority. This posed a major risk to the City of David, and to Israel’s sovereignty in Jerusalem as a whole.
Our investigations revealed that the Palestinian Authority had not yet put the final ink on the deal. In their haste to try to take over the property and assert possession, they had simply jumped on things and had the workers gate off the parking lot. It was their haste that gave their plans away.
Davidleh turned to one of the original supporters of the City of David, the very person who had originally encouraged him to work on it: Prime Minister Ariel Sharon. Sharon listened to the story and agreed it would be a terrible turn of events for the area. Furthermore, Sharon said, it would put both the Western Wall and the City of David at risk. Sharon agreed to contact the two developers and encourage them to meet with Davidleh at the soonest opportunity. A day later, a meeting was arranged to take place at the property.
But on the day of the meeting, only one of the two developers showed up. He didn’t answer phone calls from his partner. Apparently, the meeting would have to be postponed. Davidleh told the developer who had come to sign the contract that as long as he had already driven to the site, he might as well take a brief tour to see what the City of David was all about.
The developer was hesitant, but Davidleh won him over. The brief tour turned into three and a half hours. Like many visitors to the City of David, the developer couldn’t believe what he was seeing. He was shocked that he had never visited the site. He said that every Israeli should come to see it. At the end of the tour, Davidleh stopped at the Givati Parking Lot. He pointed up to the Old City and the Jewish Quarter and explained that if the parking lot fell into the hands of the Palestinian Authority, the City of David would forever be severed from the Old City.
“Who will visit here,” Davidleh asked, “if the site is sold to the Palestinian Authority?” The owner looked at Davidleh and told him that he wanted to sell the property to the City of David and that he would go and speak with his partner and report back in a day or two. Davidleh heard nothing for four weeks. Even calls from the prime minister’s office went unreturned by both partners. Davidleh began to think that in the end they had caved in and sold the property to the Palestinian Authority.
Then, a month later, the first developer called Davidleh and said he’d gotten his partner to agree to sell to the City of David—for a high but not extortionate price, and he would come the next day to sign the deal. “Get your finances lined up, and your lawyer ready, so we can get this done quickly,” he told Davidleh.
Davidleh urgently called a few loyal supporters of the City of David who agreed to buy the property in the name of the City of David. The next day both partners came. The second one had a very glum look on his face and signed the document with barely a word. After the deal was done, Davidleh asked him if he wanted to tour the site. He shrugged off the suggestion and drove off without a further word. The original partner then proceeded to recount everything that had transpired over the previous month.
While the first partner had been with Davidleh on the tour, the second partner had been meeting with the Palestinian Authority. Once the Palestinian Authority learned that we were nearing a deal on the property, they offered the other partner several million dollars more, along with additional “benefits,” including a substantial sum of cash deposited in foreign bank accounts. After the second partner admitted this, the first partner told him, “We are not going to sell this property, one of the most important properties in the state of Israel, to the Palestinian Authority, an organization that supports terrorism and does everything it can to sever the ties between the Jewish people and Jerusalem.”
For over a month, they met every morning and argued about the deal. A few days before the closing, the second partner told the first partner, “I’m selling my half to the Palestinians, and you can sell your half to whomever you want.” He added, “That is my final decision.”
The first partner told us that he told his friend and partner of many years that he simply wouldn’t allow the property to be sold to the Palestinian Authority. “This will haunt us for all of our days,” he told his friend. “We betrayed the state of Israel and the Jewish people.” Then, looking his partner directly in the eyes, he said, “Over my dead body. I will not let this happen.” The implication was clear: it wasn’t just over one dead body, but over both of theirs. He told us it was at that point that his old friend and partner realized how serious he was, and at last relented.
When we bought the parking lot, we thought we were just buying a very expensive piece of property to ensure the connection between the City of David and the Old City. The site, while never excavated, was thought to be outside the original boundaries of the biblical city, and probably would not contain any major discoveries. Once the deal was made and word got out that it was owned on behalf of the City of David, a group of friendly archaeologists visited the site and said that they believed the parking lot was not outside the boundaries of the biblical city, but rather that it was the northwest corner of the city, possibly very near the site where the people would have walked from the City of David to the Temple Mount.
“If you dig down,” they said, “you’re likely going to find an incredible amount of archaeology.”
Around a year later, a Russian team came and did the first MRI underground-radar study of an archaeological site in Jerusalem. They came up with a digital scan that showed numerous ancient walls beneath the ground, and other surprising and significant findings. Most importantly, the scan showed ancient bodies of water trapped beneath the ground in what we understood were ancient cisterns that had been buried over the millennia.
Based on what they told us, we were able to ascertain that approximately six different civilizations had inhabited the site at different times. Hebrew University launched a full dig in 2008 led by the archaeologist Doron ben Ami. The excavation continues today, and to date, has demonstrated the existence of more than eleven civilizational layers located beneath what was once just a parking lot. The findings begin with the more recent late Muslim period and extend back through history all the way to the biblical era, where a clay seal was discovered bearing the name of a servant of King Josiah, mentioned in the book of Kings. The entire timeline of Jerusalem can be seen, preserved beneath the Givati Parking Lot—yet another example of how the stones themselves are setting the historical record straight.
Can we imagine what would have become of these archaeological treasures had the Palestinian Authority discovered what lay beneath the ground?
The site would have been reduced to piles of rubble, much like the wreckage left over from the 1999 removal of part of the Temple Mount, when the Waqf (the Islamic authority responsible for the Muslim holy sites in the area) bulldozed a massive crater to build a mosque large enough for 10,000 worshippers. We were able to uncover these treasures—this rich slice of Jewish history—only because, in their greed, the Palestinian Authority built their fence too soon.
When the Supreme Court handed down its decision allowing the excavations to go ahead in September 2009, only a handful of people knew that the diggers along the drainage channel had already reached the northern edge of the Givati Parking Lot, directly in front of the Old City walls of today.
The decision was made to excavate an entrance down into the drainage channel from the corner of the parking lot. In an effort to keep politics and sensational media away from the excavation, the entrance into the underground water system was hidden inside a storage shed at the site. From the outside, the shed simply looked like a place where the diggers collected their tools at the beginning of the day and deposited them at the end of their shifts. Inside, however, was a staircase that descended deep beneath the parking lot excavation to the drainage channel. Only someone with a trained eye could see that more than twenty people went into the shed in the morning, only to emerge hours later covered with archaeological dirt.
Over the next two months following the decision, the excavators entered the tunnel via the tool shed and continued clearing the tunnel north underneath the Ophel Road that separates the Givati Parking Lot from the Old City walls.
It was a digger from the evening crew who discovered the tunnel opening—the same one we crawled through with Eli Shukron that brought us face‑to‑face with the two diamond-shaped stones that Charles Warren had uncovered and depicted in his drawing. Before turning back and crawling out, we noticed what appeared to be a small tunnel branching off to the side. Warren had likely dug it as a last-ditch effort to uncover treasure before climbing out of the excavation. We decided to explore just a little farther on.
After around twenty feet, the tunnel abruptly ended. Disappointed, we were about to turn around when Davidleh put out his hand and began to lightly brush some of the silt away with his fingers. Within seconds, he revealed a rough limestone texture. As he revealed more, we could see that we had reached a wall.
Davidleh turned to me with a smile. “This,” he said, “is the Western Wall.” We had reached the foundation stones—the lowest row of the iconic Western Wall, anchored in the bedrock of Mount Moriah, where Jewish history began. The same mountain where Abraham bound Isaac 3,800 years earlier. In that moment, we knew: the tunnel we had unearthed, and the pilgrimage road above it, would change Jerusalem forever.
This essay is an edited excerpt from Doron Spielman’s forthcoming book, When the Stones Speak: The Remarkable Discovery of the City of David and What Israel’s Enemies Dont Want You To Know, which will be published by Center Street on May 13, 2025.