They Paved Paradise

 All readers my age and older (and many younger too, I’m sure) know Joni Mitchell’s terrific song, “Big Yellow Taxi,” and its most famous quatrain: “They paved paradise, put up a parking lot / with a pink hotel, a boutique, and a swingin’ hot spot / Don’t it always seem to go / that you don’t know what you’ve got ’til it’s gone.” (For Joni’s own comments on her 1970 song, click here.) And she’s surely right that the sites of most parking lots would be more beautiful if they were verdant squares of natural growth filled with wildflowers, leafy trees, and babbling brooks. But sometimes the asphalt of parking lots is actually more like the top of a treasure box that has the most interesting things hiding just beneath its spongy surface. It was, for example, just a decade ago that the remains of King Richard III were discovered beneath the Leicester City Council parking lot in Leicester, England, which at the time of his 1485 death in the Battle of Bosworth Field was the site of a church’s burial ground. (The king was later reburied in the Leicester Cathedral.) For more about this whole fascinating episode, I recommend Morris Mathew and Richard Buckley’s Richard III: The King Under the Car Park. Riveting!

But I have my mind on a different parking lot today, one connected to Jewish rather than English history. And also to the Fast of the Tenth of Tevet, a minor fast day ignored by most that fell just this last Tuesday. And the story of that parking lot, the Givati Parking Lot near the City of David excavations just outside the walls of Jerusalem’s Old City, is also fascinating, its surface too more like the top of a treasure chest than its status as a municipal parking lot would suggest.

 What we know about the siege of Jerusalem in the sixth century BCE comes mostly, but not entirely, from the Bible. (The siege is one of the few events in biblical history with corroborative sources from the other side, in this case the Babylonians.) And we know a lot, actually. We know that Babylonia—more specifically, the Neo-Babylonian Empire over which Nebuchadnezzar II (c. 642 BCE–562 BCE) ruled—became the most powerful nation in the world after soundly defeating the Egyptians at the Battle of Carchemish in 605 BCE. But we also know that that was only the beginning—and that in the years that followed Carchemish, the Babylonians were able decisively to extend their empire either by overrunning smaller nations and making them provinces of the Babylonian empire or, as in the case of Judah, by making less powerful nations into vassal states headed by servile kings set in place by their Babylonian masters. And, indeed, the last king of Judah, a man named Mataniah who took the name Tzidkiyahu when he was put on the throne by the Babylonians, was a mere twenty-one years when his nephew Yehoyachin (who was even younger—just eighteen—when he came to the throne and reigned for all of three months) was deposed and exiled to the east.

For a while, things were calm. But then Zedekiah was somehow convinced to rebel against his Babylonian masters. This is a terrible idea, not merely a quixotic one. He was warned by none other than the prophet Jeremiah that this course of action was sheer folly, that there simply was no way to win. And yet he persevered, entering into an alliance with Pharaoh Hophra of Egypt and choosing to ignore the prophet’s warnings and hope instead for some sort of military miracle. And it was this foolhardy act of national suicide dressed up as patriotic bravado that led to the Babylonians’ decision no longer to tolerate Judah as a vassal state but instead to make it a mere province of their empire. The siege began in the winter of 589 BCE and lasted almost thirty months. And the end, the city was overrun, its king and surviving citizens (or at least thousands of them) taken off into exile in Babylon, and the Temple razed. And the day that siege began was precisely the Tenth of Tevet, the day we to this day commemorate as a fast in memory of the disaster that befell Judah when its kind decided that putting his trust in the king of Egypt would be a better plan than heading the word of God as conveyed to him over and over by God’s prophet in that place.

So that’s the background. And now we get to the part about the Givati Parking Lot. Or rather to the part about the parking lot as described in a remarkable scientific paper published by a team of six Israeli archeologists headed by Yoav Vaknin that came out in the online scientific journal PLOS One. It turns out that beneath the parking lot are the remains—not of a medieval English king—but of a large, two-story building that dates back to the siege of Jerusalem and which was apparently destroyed as part of the Babylonian campaign to bring Judah to its knees. Vaknin and his team found fifty-four fragments of stone flooring and were able to analyze them with respect to the coded information about the magnetic field of the earth in their day that they somehow preserved.

This is the part you need to be more of a scientist than myself (which is really not saying much) to understand. But the basic principle seems to be that when these buildings were burnt to the ground, the fantastic heat that consumed them—more than 900 degrees Fahrenheit—somehow locked into them data concerning the magnetic field of the world in their day—some 2600 years in the past. Maybe I should let Vaknin himself explain: “The floor of the structure,” he is quoted as saying in a Times of Israel article about his discovery, “is filled with magnetized minerals that absorbed the [magnetic] field that was on Earth at the time. Since the magnetic field changes all the time we’re trying to reconstruct it. Here, we have a little peephole, accurate to the day, of the ancient magnetic field from 2,600 years ago.”

This is important for several different reasons. First, it will allow archeologists to date artifacts from antiquity by measuring their magnetic field—a method that is far more accurate than carbon dating, but which until now lacked a secure baseline against which to measure new finds. But far more important are the implications here for future study with respect to climate change because the earth’s magnetic field serves as a kind of a shield that protects us from radiation and charged particles from the sun. The problem is that this magnetic field is in a state of constant flux, endlessly strengthening and weakening. Modern studies began only in the 1830s, when the initial research into the topic was undertaken by Carl Friedrich Gauss, a German mathematician and physicist, and lots remains to be understood. But the basic principle is clear and the NASA website says there are known to have been 170 of these reversals over the last seventy-six million years. (Click here for more details.) As a result, understanding the specific measure of the magnetic shield before detailed calculations began in 1830 has always been a wished-for but unattainable goal. And now these six Israeli archeologists have made a great stride forward towards saying what the shield was like in the sixth century BCE…which detail will provide scientists with the framework for trying to chart the vagaries of the earth’s magnetic shield into the future.

The upshot is that the next time someone speaks dismissively about the Tenth of Tevet as a fast commemorating something obscure that once happened two dozen and a half centuries ago, you can tell them that not only was the destruction of Jerusalem a seminal event in Jewish history the reverberations of which continue to influence the Jewish worldview heavily and meaningfully, but that the surviving remnants of that siege are providing scientists with the kind of data that could conceivably lead to understanding how the magnetic field that protects all life on earth functions.

The reasons I fast every year on the Tenth of Tevet are not specifically related to the earth’s magnetic field. But the thought that data from the siege that fast day commemorates could be crucial to the survival of human life on earth—that certainly makes me feel more, not less, committed to sticking with it, and with the other fasts that go with it: the Seventeenth of Tammuz (the day the walls of the city were finally breached), the Ninth of Av (the day the Temple was razed), and the Fast of Gedaliah on the third of Tishrei (the day the last flickering ember of Jewish autonomy in the Land of Israel when Gedaliah ben Ahikam, the governor of destroyed Judah set in place by the Babylonians, was assassinated by vigilantes convinced that his death would serve the future of the Jewish people more ably than his efforts to hold onto something where there would otherwise have been nothing at all).