The Lost City of...Jerusalem?

For billions of people around the world, the word Jerusalem resonates and inspires.

When so many of these billions of people – from virtually every faith and background – think of Jerusalem, with her rich Biblical heritage dating back thousands of years; the place where King David and King Solomon ruled, and where prophets like Isaiah and Jeremiah preached; the place that most often comes to mind is the Old City of Jerusalem.

There’s only one catch. King David never walked through the Jewish Quarter of the Old City – or any other part of the Old City, for that matter; and he also never placed a note between the stones of the Western Wall.

Yet, the notion that the Old City was the location of Biblical Jerusalem remained as established fact until a British explorer named Charles Warren, sent on behalf of Queen Victoria of England to find the treasures of the Bible, turned conventional wisdom on its head and discovered the original location of Biblical Jerusalem – and it’s not found inside the walls of the Old City.

Simply put, the area is known today as the Old City of Jerusalem dates to nearly 1,000 years after King David lived. It is within the City of David, along with the Temple Mount – the Biblical Mount Moriah – where the vast majority of Biblical events in Jerusalem transpired. The Jerusalem of the (Hebrew) Bible, the City of David, can be found adjacent to the Western Wall and just south of the Temple Mount, and is one of Israel’s most visited sites – alongside the Western Wall and Masada. It is located right outside the present-day Old City of Jerusalem, whose iconic walls were built by Sultan Suleiman of the Ottoman Empire some 450 years ago – practically modern by Jerusalem standards.

Since 1867, the City of David has become one of the most archeologically excavated sites in the world, with British, French, German, Irish, American, and today, Israeli archeologists digging at the site, and (re)discovering the location of Biblical Jerusalem – the City of David.

It is in these ongoing archeological excavations where inscriptions affirming Biblical events, and seals bearing the names of Biblical figures, have been found. It is the place where the Pool of Siloam was recently discovered, and where the 2,000-year-old Pilgrimage Road that leads from the pool up to the footsteps of the Western Wall, with deep significance to Jews and Christians, is presently being unearthed.

Hardly a day goes by without discoveries being uncovered affirming the millennia-old connection of Jews and Christians to Jerusalem as not simply being a matter of faith, but a matter of fact.