David’s Tower

Jerusalem has always been a city of towers: 

“Go round about Zion and count her towers”. Psalms 48:13

About 3000 years ago David was king over Israel and we are told that he conquered a fortress known as the Fortress of Zion which is the city of David (IISam5:7, IChr 11:5)

This expression appears twice in the Bible, in the second book of Samuel and in the first book of Chronicles, and each time in conjunction with Jerusalem. The commentators say that this is because the fortress of Zion was the original name of Jerusalem.

Most scholars doubt that these references refer to the old building of today, known as “David’s Tower”.

However deep down at the base of David’s Tower, archaeologists have found, massive stones, cut rather than being natural boulders and laid in the form of “headers and stretchers”, a kind of strong building method used in the days of Solomon, about 50 years after David.

So it seems clear that the Bible is referring to another fortress, not David’s Tower, even though this tower was built soon after David’s time, as the presence of the stones indicate, but it is quite exciting to think that David’s Tower which we see today is actually so ancient, although the stones that meet the eye of a modern day visitor entering the Old City by the Jaffa Gate are not so old; they are only from the Macabean period, i.e. 100 before the Christian Era.

Herod the Great conquered David’s Tower in 40 Before the Christian Era, when the Romans appointed him king of Judea and sent him to take over the city with the assistance of a company of soldiers from the 3rd Legion, which crushed the ruling Macabean household and their Parthian allies.

Being at the highest point of Mt. Zion overlooking the temple and the entire city, It’s easy to see how David’s Tower was strategic for the control of Jerusalem. Here, according to the historian Josephus Flavius, Herod created one of the most magnificent palaces in the world, with great courtyards surrounded by hundreds of marble pillars, spacious pools with sculptured animals spouting fountains, shimmering marble stairs to walk on as one entered the pools, hundreds of guest rooms and dining halls.

One can still walk down the pool steps and imagine Herod in his gold fringed toga strolling along the edge of the pool ordering the death of people, who in his Paranoiac state, he suspected of plotting against him.

The beauty of this palace hardly fell short of the beauty of the temple, also built by Herod and renowned for its beauty and magnificence, which he, not being a priest was not allowed to enter and built an observation platform on one of the palace towers so that he and his important guests from all over the Roman Empire could watch the beautiful ceremonies taking place there.

Jerusalem always had towers from which she was defended: The advice of the Psalmist in 48:13

“Go round about Zion and count her towers.”

A description of Herod's palace. (from Josephus Flavius, History of the Destruction of Jerusalem, trans. William Whiston, Book V, Chapt. 4, Verse 4)

 

The largeness also of the stones was wonderful; they were of white marble, cut out of the rock; each stone was twenty cubits in length, and ten in breadth, and five in depth. 

They were so exactly united to one another, that each tower looked like one entire rock of stone, the king had a palace inwardly thereto adjoined, was entirely walled about to the height of thirty cubits, and was adorned with towers at equal distances. 

With large bed-chambers, that would contain beds for a hundred guests a-piece, in which the variety of the stones is not to be expressed; for a large quantity of those that were rare of that kind was collected together.  

The number of the rooms was also very great, and the variety of the figures that were about them was prodigious; their furniture was complete, and the greatest part of the vessels that were put in them was of silver and gold.  

There were besides many porticoes, one beyond another, round about, and in each of those porticoes curious pillars;  

There were, moreover, several groves of trees, and long walks through them, with deep canals, and cisterns, that in several parts were filled with brazen statues, through which the water ran out. There were withal many dove-courts of tame pigeons about the canals.