nformation about the Great Bridge Route, the Western Wall, Jerusalemy itself will be provided after this announcement
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Two thousand years ago, the Western Wall tunnels were streets and living spaces of Second Temple times. A new public section is now shedding more light on Jewish life in Jerusalem during the time of Jesus.
The Western Wall itself originally served as a support for the plaza of the Second Biblical Temple. For years visitors could walk the length of the Wall underground. Now, the Great Bridge Tour of the Western Wall Tunnels takes visitors even deeper into history.
“Basically, we're digging the roots of Jerusalem that connected everyone. Every room is connected to a different story, to a different paragraph that we find in the text,” said Tour Guide Yishai Salomon.
The Western Wall Heritage Foundation sees the Great Bridge story combining the glory and destruction of all Jerusalem.
Salomon describes the excavations as putting together a puzzle.
“We have the frame, and we have other archeological digs. Opening up this place helps us to connect to the most holy sites, and that's the Temple Mount and the Western Wall. Hopefully also, connecting the people that come and visit the place to the big idea behind it,”
“We're starting with the main mountain of Jerusalem. It's called the Temple Mount and Mount Moriah -- the Temple that was built later on by Solomon and Herod. One of the key stories in the Bible, the binding of Isaac, happens over here. It happened 3,800 years ago,” Salomon explained.
Beneath people praying at the Western Wall, visitors enter rooms less than 100 feet from the Temple Mount.
The Hasmoneans, also known the Maccabees and associated with the story of Hanukkah and the cleansing of the Temple, built the first bridge dating back 2,150 years. Above it was an aqueduct that brought water to the Temple Mount.
“When Herod comes to Jerusalem, he builds a beautiful building next to the bridge,” Salomon said.
From sacrifices to cleansing needed to enter the Temple Mount, water was vital to worship.
Standing in a mikveh, a ritual bath, Salomon said when archaeologists first came to the Holy Land in the 1800’s they discovered something they couldn’t explain.
“This isn't the cistern filled up with water for drinking. This isn't a bathhouse because we know how bathhouse looks like. So, they write, we found a room with steps going in and plaster on the wall,” he said.
Only in the 1950’s when Israel’s second chief of staff turned archaeologist, Yigal Yadin, was digging at Masada, he discovered a mikveh and realized what it was.
Since then, they’ve discovered 300 ritual baths in Jerusalem and 900 around Israel from the Second Temple times – four of them in the Western Wall Tunnels. They would have been used by worshippers to cleanse themselves before ascending the mount.
Salomon said everything you see on the tour is original. “We understand that we're not speaking about history, we're walking through history.”
A model with moving parts shows how Jerusalem would have looked throughout the ages. Plus, visitors get a unique view of the wall’s largest stone, weighing hundreds of tons.
Lower still is the ancient business level.
“We found shops in the beginning of the Western Wall, Salomon said. “You can see remains of the destruction of the Western Wall. These stone that are lying over here on the left were covering the whole excavation, and these were thrown down by the Romans [in] 70 CE.”
The people of that day had no idea it would take 2,000 years to come back home.
“They thought that as the First Temple was destroyed and the Second Temple was built 70 years later, [the] same thing will happen over here,” he said.
