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In front of a Hellenistic tomb with Dr. Barkay
(Photo Credit to Liz Schrotenboer)
I have enjoyed taking Archaeology class under Dr. Gabby Barchay. He is famous in Archaeology, he excavated Ketef Hinnom, where silver amulets with text from the book of Numbers written on them. They date to around 700-650 BC, and may be the oldest text from the Bible we have. These are the sort of things I learned about in class, and now I get to study under the guy who excavated them! Currently he is in charge of a sifting project at the Temple Mt. There has been some illegal building that happened there, (The Muslim Waqf are in charge of the Temple Mount, and are supposed to consult antiquities authorities before constructing or excavating), and as a result a lot of dirt with archaeological remains was dumped. Dr. Barchay is having it sifted, so even if it's not in context, we can still recover some of the finds from Temple Mount.
All that to say, it is really an honor to be his student. We went on a field study this past Sunday, and as we walked through the Old City we ran into lots of people who knew him.
Jason's Tomb
My favorite thing we saw that day was a huge gate which is probably the "Middle Gate" where the Babylonians set up their garrison after taking Jerusalem in 586 (Jeremiah 39). We learned about it in class, and I wondered why we didn't see it, when we did our tour of Jerusalem in Physical settings. The answer is, although the tower/gate is still standing up to a height of three stories, it is also three stories underground, and is closed to the public. We only got to see it because of Dr. Barkay's connections. After we were lead three stories down, we entered the basement which was built over these awesome remains of Iron age walls and tower, and also Hellenistic walls. Apparently it's closed to the public because there is radon from bombings, but we were only there for about half an hour and I'm sure it didn't hurt us. I'm really glad we got to see it.
We also saw lots of Hellenistic tombs.


Here you can see that the bedrock was quarried. Some think that this is where Herod got the stones he used to build the Temple Mount, and other structures. After stone was removed, they built tombs in the faces of rock. 
This is the entrance to one of the burial chambers
And this is one of the plugs used to seal them.
It would be really hard to remove, if this
is the sort of tomb Jesus had, no wonder
they wondered how they'd remove the stone!



The Middle Gate

Me at the Middle Gate

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