City of David

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The City of David, also known as the Ophel (Hebrew: העופל‎, perhaps meaning "fortified hill") is the name of the narrow promontory beyond the southern edge of Jerusalem's Temple Mount and Old City, with the Tyropoeon Valley (valley of the cheesemakers) on its west, the Hinnom valley to the south, and the Kidron Valley on the east. The previously deep valley (the Tyropoeon) separating the Ophel from what is now referred to as the Old City of Jerusalem currently lies hidden beneath the debris of centuries. Despite the name, the Old City of Jerusalem dates from a much later time than the settlement in the City of David, which is generally considered to have been the original Jerusalem. Traditionally, the name City of David, applied to the area inside the ancient fortifications, while the name Ophel, applied to the area between the end of the city wall and the Temple Mount.

Securely-dated archaeological remains establish that there was a substantial, fortified city on this hill in the Middle Bronze Age, 1800-1550 BCE. It is equally certain that there was a large, prosperous, fortified city on this site in the late Iron Age, eighth and seventh centuries BCE. This is the period that corresponds to the biblical Kings Hezekiah through Josiah and the destruction of the Kingdom of Judah by Nebuchadnezzar II.

The period of the tenth and ninth century, corresponding to the biblical Kings David and Solomon is the subject of an intense scholarly dispute, and of ongoing archaeological investigations.

A city wall dating to no later than the twelfth century BCE has been uncovered, neither its existence nor the existence of a fortified city at that date are in dispute. On one side of the controversy are those who maintain the plausibility or validity of the Biblical account of a conquest by troops under King David who, as in the Bible, capture the city not by breaching the walls, but by climbing upwards through the ancient water system at the Gihon Spring. The supposition is that the Israelites continued to use the intact Jebusite walls. On the other side of the controversy are those who maintain that insufficient artefacts have been found to establish an Israelite presence before the late ninth century, and that the Israelite presence, if there was one, was a small settlement in an unfortified place.

The 2005 discovery by Eilat Mazar of a Large Stone Structure associated with tenth century pottery and with foundation walls of such great size that it can only have been a government building has been accepted by most archaeologists and historians of ancient Israel as evidence that Jerusalem in the tenth century was a city with the buildings of a size appropriate to the capital of a centralized kingdom.

[edit] Modern period

Mid-nineteenth-century photographs by Scotsman James Graham (1853-57) show the ridge of Ir David is shown as being void of housing. It is terraced and planted, apparently, to olive trees.^[1]

Modern settlement on the ridge began in the City of David began in 1873-74 when the Meyuchas family, a Jewish rabbinical and merchant family that had lived in Jerusalem since their expulsion from Spain, moved a short distance outside the city walls to a house on the ridge. During the latter stages of the Mandate era the nearby Arab village of Silwan expanded up the ridge of the City of David. Palestinian families continued to live on the ridge of the City of David and to build new housing after 1967. In recent years, Jews purchased the former Meyuchas family home and other properties in the city which now has a mixed Palestinian and Israeli population. The right of each group to live in this place is hotly contested by the other.

Archaeological exploration of the area began in the nineteenth century. The area includes several sites of archaeological interest, notably Hezekiah's tunnel (a water supply system, where the Siloam inscription was found), Warren's shaft (an earlier structure, postulated by some to have been a water supply system), and the Pool of Siloam (the presently extant Byzantine-era pool, and the recently discovered Second Temple-period pool). All these water supply systems drew their water from the Gihon Spring which lies on the Ophel's eastern slope, and is generally considered the original reason that the City was built at this location.

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