We continue to explore some of the gates of Jerusalem, as we share some our photos from our recent trip to Israel. Today’s post features Herod’s Gate.
Herod’s Gate in Jerusalem. Photo by Leon Mauldin.
Jerome Murphy-O’Connor writes:
The official name of this gate is Bab ez-Zahr, ‘the Flowered Gate’. It got its present name only in the C16 or C17 because pilgrims believed a Mamluk house inside near the Franciscan Monastery of the Flagellation to be the palace of Herod Antipas. The original entrance is in the east face of the tower. It was at this point that the Crusaders first established a bridgehead on the walls at noon on 15 July 1099. Just beside the west face of the first tower going towards Damascus Gate the channel of an aqueduct is marked by a series of irregular covering slabs. Pottery embedded in the plaster of the last repair show it to have been in use until the late C3AD or early C4. The ditch in which the present road runs must therefore be subsequent to this date, because it cuts the aqueduct. This suggests that the earliest wall on the present line at this point must be dated to the last years of Aelia Capitolina. Slightly further west the wall makes a curve inward and follows the rim of an ancient quarry which extended across the road into what is now the bus station; for details see SOLOMON’S QUARRIES (p. 162). The weight of the wall caused part of the roof of the quarry to cave in. The small walled section in the centre at ground level enshrines part of a sloping glacis of uncertain date. The wall of Herod Agrippa I (AD 41–4) linking Damascus Gate with the East Gate in the ECCE HOMO CONVENT (p. 35), must have turned south on the highest point to the west now occupied by the Spafford Hospital. (The Holy Land: An Oxford Archaeological Guide from Earliest Times to 1700, Oxford Archaeological Guides, p. 14).
We previously posted (in 2011) on Herod’s Gate here.
Sign pointing to Herod’s Gate. Photo by Leon Mauldin.
Click photo for larger view.
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