At holy site, even trash holds treasures

Relics amid the rubble
Zachi Zweig, a 27-year-old archaeology undergraduate at Bar Ilan University near Tel Aviv, showed up at the dump a few days later. Though Israel’s archaeological establishment had shown no interest in the rubble, Zweig was sure it was important, especially after a Waqf representative told him to leave.

Zweig returned surreptitiously with friends, gathered samples of the rubble and discovered a high concentration of ancient pottery shards. He was charged by the Israel Antiquities Authority with stealing relics — charges that were later dropped — and finally convinced Barkay, his lecturer at the university, that the rubble needed to be studied.

In 2004, after five years spent getting a dig license and raising funds, they had 75 truckloads of rubble moved to a lot on the slopes of Jerusalem’s Mount Scopus.

The first coin they found, Barkay said, was one issued during the Jewish revolt that preceded the Roman destruction of the temple in Jerusalem in 70 A.D., imprinted with the Hebrew words “Freedom of Zion.”

Jumbled contents
The most valuable find so far, Barkay believes, is a clay seal impression discovered last year. Its incomplete Hebrew lettering appears to name Ge’aliyahu, son of Immer. Immer is the name of a family of temple officials mentioned in Jeremiah 20:1.

Another important discovery is the many relics from the early Christian era, which seem to disprove the notion that the site was abandoned in those years as a symbol of God’s abandonment of the Jews.

Stephen Pfann of the University of the Holy Land in Jerusalem, best known for his work on the Dead Sea Scrolls, said moving the rubble around has jumbled its contents and diminished its scholarly value.

But even so, “This is an insight into the life of Jerusalem, and whatever they find will be very exciting,” he said.

Archaeology here, however, is rarely just about providing insight into the past.

Funded by hard-liners
Barkay’s dig is funded by the City of David Foundation, a hard-line religious group which spends most of its money settling Jewish families in Arab neighborhoods in East Jerusalem. It’s part of a broader attempt by groups affiliated with the settler movement to make the point that Jerusalem is Jewish.

When it removed the rubble, the Waqf was trying to destroy evidence of Jewish history on the Temple Mount, said Uri Ragones, a foundation spokesman. “We are going back to Jerusalem physically, learning about it and uncovering our past. We’re touching our deepest roots as a people.”

For its part, the Waqf says it wasn’t destroying any evidence of Jewish presence — because there isn’t any.

“I have seen no evidence of a temple,” said the Waqf’s director, Adnan Husseini. He had heard “stories,” he acknowledged, “but these are an attempt to change the situation here today, and any change would be very dangerous.”

Such reactions don’t surprise Israeli Historian Gershom Gorenberg, whose book “The End of Days” documents the fight over the holy site.

“Dig a centimeter beneath the debate over antiquities,” he said, “and you hit the debate over whom the Mount belongs to, and a centimeter beneath that is the war over whom the entire country belongs to.”

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