Border Police officers searching homes in Jerusalem on Monday were looking for suspects involved in a violent feud between local families. Instead, beneath one of the buildings, they found a roughly 2,000-year-old burial cave.
The discovery came during a multiday Israel Police operation in Silwan, a neighborhood just south of Jerusalem’s Old City walls. The area has been the site of an escalating conflict between rival extended families, including several shootings, and police said they were working to reach the homes of everyone involved. As part of the operation, Border Police officers searched a compound where several of the main suspects live while escorting representatives from other government agencies.
During the search, officers noticed an opening beneath one of the buildings that led into a deliberately carved underground chamber. It turned out to be a tomb.
Specialists from the Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA) were called to the scene. Their initial on-site assessment was that the graves date to the Second Temple period, which ended with the Roman destruction of Jerusalem in 70 CE. Additional archaeological artifacts were also recovered inside the cave.
The IAA has not yet released further information about the cave. Police and Border Police officers are securing the compound so archaeologists can document and excavate the site without interference from either side of the family conflict or anyone else in the neighborhood.
The hillside that used to be the whole city
To a Jerusalem archaeologist, a burial cave under a house is much less surprising than it sounds.
Today, Jerusalem’s Old City sits mostly west and north of the Temple Mount. But the capital’s oldest city center was actually on a ridge to the south, in the area where Silwan is today.
The reason was water. The Gihon Spring, at the base of the ridge, was the area’s only reliable water source. Fortifications were built around it as early as the Canaanite period, centuries before King David is said to have conquered Jerusalem.
This area, known today as the City of David, remained the heart of the capital throughout most of the First Temple period — the stretch running from the construction of Solomon’s Temple, dated by the biblical account in the 10th century BCE, until the Babylonians destroyed Jerusalem and exiled most of the population of the Kingdom of Judah in 586 BCE.
Most Jerusalemites lived on these southern slopes, although the city expanded westward near the end of the First Temple Period. The kings of Judah built their palaces here. When the Assyrian Empire stormed through the region and threatened the kingdom’s capital, the Gihon once again became crucial. King Hezekiah had a tunnel cut through solid rock to divert the spring’s water from the Kidron Valley, outside the city walls, to the Pool of Siloam inside them, so the city could not be cut off from its water under siege. More than 2,500 years later, the tunnel is still there, and visitors can still wade through the waters of the Gihon.
While the tunnel is among the more famous remnants of the period’s archaeological finds, archaeologists have also discovered dozens of burial sites beyond the ancient walls.
An ancient necropolis and a pilgrim’s road
In Judaism, contact with a corpse is treated as the most severe form of ritual impurity. Numbers 19 rules that anyone who touches a corpse, human bone, or grave becomes impure for seven days and prescribes an elaborate purification rite using the ashes of a red heifer. Numbers 5 instructs that those defiled by a corpse be sent outside the camp, and Leviticus 21 tells priests to avoid such contact altogether except in the case of their closest relatives.
These rules shaped where families buried their dead in both the First and Second Temple periods. Rabbinic texts from the end of the Second Temple period record the practices that developed around it. The Mishnah requires graves, along with animal carcasses and tanneries, to be kept 50 cubits from a town, while the Talmud lists a Jerusalem-specific prohibition against leaving a corpse within the city overnight.
The kings were the exception, but not one that everyone was happy about. The books of Kings repeatedly state that Judah’s monarchs were buried “in the City of David,” inside the city rather than outside it. Ezekiel, prophesying near the end of the First Temple period, condemned the practice.
Much of modern-day Silwan lies right outside the ancient walls of Jerusalem, meaning much of the neighborhood is built atop a sweeping necropolis. Dozens of tombs from the ninth through seventh centuries BCE are carved into the eastern slope of the Kidron Valley, directly facing the ancient city center. Archaeologists call it the Silwan necropolis, the most significant known cemetery of the First Temple period, apparently used by Jerusalem’s highest-ranking officials.
After the Babylonian exile, the Persian king Cyrus allowed the exiled Jews to return and rebuild. The Second Temple was completed around 516 BCE and stood until the Romans destroyed it in 70 AD. Throughout this period, the city’s center of gravity shifted west and north, but the southern slopes still served an important role as a central route for pilgrims headed to the Temple.
In 2004, a burst sewage pipe in Silwan led to the rediscovery of the Pool of Siloam, a monumental stepped pool from the Herodian period where pilgrims are believed to have immersed themselves. From there, a wide stepped street — now called the Pilgrimage Road — ran roughly 600 meters up toward the Temple Mount. Water drawn from the site was also central to a libation ceremony poured on the Temple altar during the festival of Sukkot.
During the Second Temple period, another network of tombs developed around Jerusalem, extending several kilometers in every direction, with the more prestigious ones closest to the city walls. The typical layout was a rock-cut chamber with narrow shelves called kokhim cut into the walls to hold bodies. In the century or so before the Temple’s destruction, it became common to return to the chamber after the bodies had decayed to gather the bones into a carved stone box known as an ossuary.
The neighborhood has produced a long list of other finds over the past century and a half. Excavators have turned up clay seal impressions, called bullae, bearing the names of officials mentioned in the Bible. More recently, archaeologists discovered burnt wooden beams dating from the destruction of the First Temple, a physical snapshot of one of Jerusalem’s darkest days.
Over the past few centuries, the living have returned to the slopes of Silwan. Villages and, eventually, urban neighborhoods were built over the cemeteries, while the old tombs were repurposed as cellars, storerooms, and animal pens. Travel guides from the early 20th century describe homes in Silwan that were themselves rock-cut tombs. Some of the neighborhood’s buildings sit directly on top of, or inside, tombs that are close to 3,000 years old.
From a Yemenite village to a political flashpoint
The neighborhood’s history, ancient and recent alike, has made it a hotspot for tensions between Israelis and Palestinians.
In 1881 and 1882, Jewish families began arriving in Jerusalem from Yemen, some interpreting the Hebrew year 5642 as a messianic sign. They arrived destitute and found no room in the Old City. Their first shelter, according to multiple accounts, was tents outside the walls. When the rainy season came, they moved inside the ancient burial caves on the eastern side of the Kidron Valley. For an entire winter, the tombs of Judah’s officials housed Yemenite refugees.
Yisrael Dov Frumkin, editor of the newspaper Havatzelet, noticed the situation and founded an association called Ezrat Nidahim to raise funds and purchase land at the edge of Silwan. From 1884 onward, stone houses went up in what became known as Kfar Hashiloah, or simply the Yemenite Village, Harat al-Yaman in Arabic. Roughly 45 houses were built over the following years; the community grew to a few hundred residents, and a synagogue was completed around 1890.
After anti-Jewish riots erupted across the region in 1929, the community gradually began to leave. As conditions deteriorated during another wave of violence in the late 1930s, the last Jewish residents were evacuated on the advice of the police.
After the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, Silwan came under Jordanian control along with the rest of what became East Jerusalem. Property left behind by Jewish residents was transferred to the Jordanian Custodian of Enemy Property and assigned to new occupants, many of them Palestinian refugees from the western side of the city.
In 1967, after the Six-Day War, Israel captured the area and annexed it along with the rest of East Jerusalem. Properties held by the Jordanian custodian passed to Israel’s General Custodian, a department of the Justice Ministry. Then, in 1970, the Knesset passed the Legal and Administrative Matters Law, allowing Jews who lost property in East Jerusalem in 1948 — or their heirs — to reclaim it from the General Custodian.
That law is the basis of the eviction litigation that has made Silwan a recurring flashpoint. In several high-profile cases, organizations holding deeds to the homes of Yemenite Jewish families who lived in the neighborhood before the late 1930s have filed eviction suits against Arab families who moved into those homes after 1948. Israeli courts, including the Supreme Court, have often ruled in favor of the organizations.
Supporters describe the claims as the enforcement of ordinary property rights and the restoration of a Jewish community driven out by violence. Critics, including Israeli organizations such as Peace Now and Ir Amim, argue that the arrangement is inherently unequal. The 1970 law lets Jewish claimants recover pre-1948 property in East Jerusalem, while the Absentee Property Law bars Palestinians from making equivalent claims on property they lost in West Jerusalem. Critics also contend that many of the original Jewish owners were already compensated by the state.
Why police are sticking around to secure the site
Accidental archaeological discoveries are all too common in Israel. The country has tens of thousands of known antiquities sites, with an increased density in and around Jerusalem. Finds surface during roadwork, when a sinkhole opens, when a farmer plows a field, and, as here, when police search a building.
Israeli law is built around that expectation of the unexpected. Under the 1978 Antiquities Law, anything found in the ground is state property, any antiquity discovered must be reported, and excavation requires a license from the IAA. The law defines an “ancient find” as essentially anything predating 1700 CE. Development on or near a known archaeological site triggers an archaeological survey first, and the IAA can require a salvage excavation, paid for by the developer, before a building permit is issued. A great deal of what is known about ancient Israel comes not from research digs but from these excavations conducted ahead of the bulldozers.
In a place like Silwan, these measures have frequently become a flashpoint for tensions. The Pilgrimage Road runs directly beneath Arab homes, and residents have complained of cracks and structural damage from the tunneling, although excavators and the IAA have rejected these claims. The City of David national park is operated by the Ir David Foundation, known as Elad, an organization that also helps Jewish families buy property in the neighborhood, an arrangement critics say fuses archaeology with a political project. Groups like Emek Shaveh argue that digs in the area have served to establish Israeli presence on the ground, while Israeli officials and archaeologists respond that the finds are real, the science is sound, and the Jewish history of the site is not up for debate.
Those tensions mean that whenever finds like these are discovered, there are concerns that someone could intentionally damage them. Because of such concerns and the recent violence in the neighborhood, police are sticking around to keep the site secured.
