Ketef Hinnom

It’s been my custom for years now to begin each year of writing by focusing on something that we experienced during our stay in Jerusalem. Some years, I’ve written about an archeological site we hadn’t ever visited before. Last year, for example, I reported on our excursion to Tzipori, an ancient town now almost fully excavated and visitable in the central Galilee. (Click here to revisit that account. And definitely go if you can!) In other years, I’ve written about visiting Tel Hazor or exploring the excavations at Gezer. Both were fascinating excursions that no visitor to Israel should miss. But all of the above tiyyulim required some getting to: either on public transportation utilizing a combination of buses and taxis, or in a private car. (Unlike most American cities, Israel really is one of those places that you really can get from basically anywhere to anywhere else on the bus.) But this year I wish to report on a visit to a place that, although we could have gotten there on the 38 bus that stops across the street from our building in about twelve minutes, we actually walked over to from our apartment, which took about a twenty minutes.

So, you might wonder, how could a place of such marvels and such romance be so close to our apartment and yet someplace we’d never ventured into over these decades of spending our summers in Jerusalem? That is actually an excellent question. Part of the answer has to do with the signage: although Ketef Hinnom is one of the most interesting archeological sites in the city, anyone could easily walk right by without even taking note of the entrance. In later times, the site was occupied by a huge Byzantine Church, the remains of which are still present (and also interesting to visit)…and a large sign on the street directs visitors to the location of those remains. In our day, the site is flanked on one side by a large Scottish church, the Church of St. Andrew, built as a memorial to the Scottish soldiers who died fighting the Turkish Armies during the Sinai and Palestine Campaigns of World War I and on the other by the Menachem Begin Heritage Center, which we also hadn’t ever quite gotten to and finally visited this summer.

So those are two interesting sites (the latter more engaging to me personally, but both of historic importance and worth)…and between them is the actual site I want to write about: Ketef Hinnom. Anyone could miss it easily. We missed it easily for decades. It’s across the street from the First Train Station, once an actual train terminus and now a huge event space, and up the hill from the Cinematheque, so a site in the heart of the city walked past daily by hundreds of locals and tourists. Maybe thousands.

The importance of the site lies in two specific things: what it has to say about First Temple times in Jerusalem and the amazing find there of what is generally understood to be the oldest extant biblical text of any sort. It’s also a place of magic, regarding which aspect see below.

First, the site itself.  Mostly, the place as it now exists is occupied by burial chambers from the 7^th and 6^th centuries BCE. These are not graves precisely and were almost definitely not anyone’s final resting place. Instead, the bodies of deceased individuals were lay to rest in long stone troughs, the possessions with which they would eventually be buried stored for safekeeping in underground chambers adjacent to their (temporary) resting places. Then, when all that was left of the decedent was his or her bones, those bones would be laid to rest in burial niches set into underground caves and corridors. The bones of wealthy and important types were stored in stone boxes called ossuaries (literally, “bone holders”), but the system itself of only interring in a final resting place the bones of the deceased seems to have been the normal custom for all. Or at least for most.

So there I was, wandering around a site at which an ancestor might well have attended a funeral or two. It’s a place of great strategic importance, located at the confluence of two deep valleys that respectively protect the southern and western walls of ancient Jerusalem. It must have been used militarily too, although no remains of that kind of activity were found. But it’s one of those places in Israel—and they are legion—in which time falls quickly away. You are ten feet from one of Jerusalem’s busiest intersections, but the regular noise of urban life is barely audible, the honking of an endless line of cars hardly noticeable. The other people visiting the site are almost fully invisible as you stand there. And there you are, magically in the moment, standing where a citizen of Judah stood in the time, say, of King Josiah (who reigned as the sixteenth king of Judah from about 640 to 609 BCE) might have stood, taking note of a wild ibex or two wandering the Hinnom Valley or the Valley of the Ghosts, listening with one ear to the eulogy while simultaneously worrying about this Jeremiah guy and his endless predictions of disaster and wondering if the Babylonians will ever make good on their threat to invade and make Judah a vassal state or, worse, a province of their own empire. It must sound crazy, but I was in that place a few weeks ago and I was that guy! The moment didn’t last for long. (What moment really ever does?) But the sense of history, of being present fully and really, of the ephemeral nature of time itself: it was all real to me as I stood there in the middle of one of Jerusalem’s busiest neighborhoods surrounded by tourists and locals, by movie-goers and church-worshipers, by teenagers eating ice cream at the First Station and foreign tourists getting the bus at the Begin Center for the next stop on their tour…and also all alone in the bracing river of history in a place that existed long ago and always will exist. When people ask me what the whole concept of Jerusalem as a holy city is all about, it’s that kind of experience precisely that I wish I could invite the questioner to share with me. For just a moment!

And then there’s the scroll. During the course of the excavations in 1979, one of the teenaged diggers working under the supervision of archeologist Gabriel Barkay (a member, incidentally, of the shul we attend in our own Jerusalem neighborhood) found something that almost anyone would not have noticed at all, that I surely would not have noticed: two tiny silver amulets that looked mostly like discarded shreds of tin foil. The thirteen-year-old finder brought them to Barkay, who appears instantly to have realized that these were ancient pieces of text. But even he could not have guessed what he was holding in his hand.

It took a long time to figure out how even to begin to unfold the scrolls without destroying them. This was eventually done and the results were astounding: two amulet texts probably meant to be worn around the neck and then deposited in one of the “possessions’ chambers” in Keter Hinnom for safe keeping before eventually accompanying their owner to his or her final resting place, these “scrolls” contained almost a word-for-word citation of the Priestly Blessing that we still, even to this day, pronounce from the bimah and with which parents bless their children the world (or at least the Jewish world) over: May the Lord bless you and keep you, etc.

As far as is known, these two scrolls, one tiny and the other tinier, are the oldest known biblical text extant. After our visit at Ketef Hinnom, we drove to the Israel Museum with the friend who was acting as our unofficial guide that day (and who was the principal of the JTS High School program when I taught there during my Graduate School years) and there we saw the actual scrolls on display.

And that was our day at Ketef Hinnom.

The magical part of Jerusalem is the place’s uncanny ability to make time fall away, to allow you to step out of your own life into the greater life of the Jewish people, to feel the centuries not as impenetrable walls but as shimmering scrims that anyone can easily transcend given the right moment, enough imagination, and a deep enough sense of the holiness of the place. There is no fee for admission. There are no guides, no gift shop, and no snack bar. The Scottish Church is to the right. The Begin Center is to the left. The remains of the Byzantine church are towards the entranceway from the street. But if you walk past them, the present will vanish into the mist for just a few minutes and the possibility of true growth—intellectual, emotional, and spiritual—will become real. The experience won’t last long. But you will be changed permanently by it. And, to speak personally, for the better!