Ancient Jewish Community Revealed as New Light Rail Is Planned for Jerusalem

(An artist's rendering of what Jerusalem's new light rail cars will look like is pictured above. An ancient Jewish community has been discovered in the process of planning for the new light rail)

Archaeologists have discovered the remains of an ancient Jewish village that existed in northeast Jerusalem after the destruction of the Second Temple in the first century.

This discovery was made when an area of the Jerusalem neighborhood of Shu’afat was being explored in advance of constructing the infrastructure for the revolutionary light rail that will wind through the city.

An excavated 1,300-foot-long strip in Shu’afat now exposes an amazing network of streets and alleys, residential and public buildings. One of the most important finds was the mikveh, the Jewish ritual bath, as well as utensils made of stone, therefore non-absorbent, and thus free of impurities and considered typical of Jewish life in that era.

The community was located east of the Early Roman road that led from Jerusalem to Nablus, and is the largest Jewish settlement to be discovered in the vicinity of Jerusalem of this period. Archaeological evidence reveals its inhabitants to have been a fairly sizeable and affluent Jewish population that continued to exist under Roman military rule.

The director of the excavations, Rachel Bar-Natan, on behalf of the Antiquities Authority, reports finding numerous stone vessels and collections of coins, one of which is a rare gold coin bearing the likeness of the Roman Emperor Trajan who lived from 53-117 CE and was considered the second of the “five good emperors.”

Trajan’s fame was eclipsed by that of his successor, the Emperor Hadrian, although it was under the Trajan’s rule that the Empire expanded to its greatest geographical mass.

To know more about this dig as well as others in Israel, visit www.antiquities.org.il. To know more about visiting Israel, go to www.goisrael.com.