Tomb of King David

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Mt Zion’s Mystery Building

Today I want to tell you a little bit about a very ancient building that is visited by many and understood by very few. As you can see from this illustration it is a two storey building with a minaret. This little tower, added in the late Middle Ages, has protected it through many changes of government for centuries. The place is revered by Islam, Judaism and Christianity as the tomb of the Prophet David, but it probably was not his tomb, just a happy mistake.

Picture by Ermete Pierotti, artist and author,
 printed by Day and Son, printer of plates, 1864.

The upper level is a tourist highlight as the Cenacle or dining room of Jesus’ Last Supper, the room in which the Church was born on that first Pentecost when the disciples with Mary and the women gathered behind locked doors (Acts 2:1-4) and/or the home of John-Mark’s mother, Mary, in which a house-church, closely associated with or led by Peter, met (although the building itself is not that old).

Even the floor of this upper storey layer dates only back to the 12th century: to the Crusader period. After the European Crusaders departed from the Holy Land for the last time (when Acco fell in 1291) it became a Muslim mosque.

On the other hand, part of the ground floor dates back to the 1st or 2nd century CE and its external dimensions and floor plan have remained much as they were originally, moreover its original flagstones remain under two later layers of flooring. Three of its original walls are extant to a height of 11m and it is probably dates to before the Bar Kochba revolt but after the destruction of 70 CE.


The Crusaders installed a huge sarcophagus or cenotaph inside and it is now revered by observant Jews as the burial place of David.


The true identity of this little building was only revealed by accident after a shell went through a window during Israel’s War of Independence in 1948. Neither Moslems nor Jews would be anxious to publicise this fact but ancient, hidden inscriptions were revealed when an inspection for repair work was carried out in 1951 by J. Pinkerfeld. He discovered two Greek graffito scratched onto plaster, which were first published by the Franciscan archaeologist, Father Bagatti, in 1971.


They are translated as:
“Conquer, Savior, mercy”


and 
“O Jesus, that I may live. O Lord of the autocrat”.

If correctly dated to the late 1st to 2nd centrury AD these would be the oldest known Christian inscriptions in Israel and certainly the oldest to name Jesus.


This building has a niche in centre of the North-East wall: not a full-length apse like a church would have had, but perhaps a mihrab for a mosque or a niche for Torah scrolls. It was accepted as Christian in the 4th century and the Franciscan

Order, who are the Roman Catholic ‘Custodians of the Holy Land’ and who have conducted archaeological excavations there for a long time, follow Father Bagatti in his conclusions. As mentioned above, it is bound to be controversial. To all appearances it is a simple rectangular synagogue, but apparently it was a Early Judeo-Christian meeting place and it is shown on the famous Madaba Map beside a great 4th century church called Holy Sion. 

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