Archaeologist uncovers Scriptures famed wall 

Emergency dig finds tower built by Bible's Nehemiah

WorldNetDaily.com 
November 11, 2007

Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad may want to see
Israel wiped off the map and its Jews sent to Europe
or Alaska, but an archaeological discovery announced
this week marks an event recorded in the Bible when
his country - Persia, at the time - literally helped
put the Jewish people back on the map in their capital
city of Jerusalem.

Dr. Eilat Mazar, one of Israel's top archaeologists,
ended her presentation Wednesday to the 13th Annual
Conference of the Ingeborg Rennert Center for
Jerusalem Studies on "New Studies on Jerusalem," with
a surprise announcement. She had discovered remnants
of the fifth century B.C. wall built by Nehemiah, the
account recorded in the Old Testament book of the same
name.

According to the biblical account, Nehemiah served as
cupbearer for the Persian King Artaxerxes in the city
of Susa. The Persians had conquered the Babylonian
empire that had destroyed Jerusalem in 586 B.C. and
taken most of the inhabitants of Judah into captivity
in what is now modern Iraq.

The account reads:

In the month of Nisan, in the twentieth year of King
Artaxerxes, when wine was before him, I took up the
wine and gave it to the king. Now I had not been sad
in his presence.

And the king said to me, "Why is your face sad, seeing
you are not sick? This is nothing but sadness of the
heart."

Then I was very much afraid. I said to the king, "Let
the king live forever! Why should not my face be sad,
when the city, the place of my fathers' graves, lies
in ruins, and its gates have been destroyed by fire?"

Then the king said to me, "What are you requesting?"

So I prayed to the God of heaven. And I said to the
king, "If it pleases the king, and if your servant has
found favor in your sight, that you send me to Judah,
to the city of my fathers' graves, that I may rebuild
it." 

Nehemiah's rebuilding of the city began with its
walls, a project that was resisted by hostile
neighbors who had occupied the area around Jerusalem
in the Jews' absence.

But when Sanballat and Tobiah and the Arabs and the
Ammonites and the Ashdodites heard that the repairing
of the walls of Jerusalem was going forward and that
the breaches were beginning to be closed, they were
very angry. And they all plotted together to come and
fight against Jerusalem and to cause confusion in it.
And we prayed to our God and set a guard as a
protection against them day and night. 

With tools in one hand and weapons in the other,
Nehemiah's workmen toiled dawn to dusk, completing the
wall in a record 52 days.

Archaeological evidence for Nehemiah's project has
been lacking. Jerusalem has been rebuilt, destroyed
and rebuilt in the almost 2,500 years since.

Mazar, who is perhaps best known for her recent
excavation that many believe has revealed the palace
of King David, was working on an emergency project to
shore up remains of a tower long believed to date from
the Hasmonean period, 142-37 B.C., that was in danger
of collapsing.

According to an account of the conference in "The
Trumpet," Mazar said, "Under the tower, we found the
bones of two large dogs - and under those bones a rich
assemblage of pottery and finds from the Persian
period. No later finds from that period were found
under the tower."

Had the tower been built during the Hasmonean dynasty,
the Persian-era artifacts would represent an
unexplained chronological gap of several hundred
years. The tower, said Mazar, had to have been built
much earlier than previously thought and the pottery
data placed it at the time the Bible says Nehemiah was
building it.

Todd Bolen, of BiblePlaces.com, noted that excavations
in the Philistine city of Ashkelon during the same
Persian era, found 800 dog burials like those
uncovered by Mazar.

Nehemiah described 10 gates in the wall around
Jerusalem as well as several towers designed to
protect the entrances to the city, among them the
Tower of the Hundred, the Tower of Hananel, the Tower
of the Ovens, and an unnamed tower "projecting from
the upper house of the king at the court of the guard"
in the vicinity of Mazar's most recent dig.

WND reported Mazar's confirmation that what appeared
to be chopped-up carved stone, unearthed by recent
trenching on the Temple Mount by the holy site's
Islamic custodians, were indeed antiquities with
attributes of the Second Temple-era during the
ministry of Jesus.

Mazar has urged Christians to help save the holy site.

"The Christian world and all those who care about
safeguarding the Temple Mount must immediately join us
in our efforts to protect the holy site and demand
that the Israeli government stop the Waqf
construction," she said.

"The Temple Mount is important to people of all
religions. Now is the time to act before more
antiquities are erased."

END