By Jon Brown, Christian Post. (Image credit: Screengrab/Assaf Perry/City of David/Israel Antiquities Authority)
Archaeologists recently unearthed charred wooden remains from Solomon’s Temple in Jerusalem, according to a Monday report.
The Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA) announced that IAA and Tel Aviv University archaeologists discovered large wooden beams during an excavation that showed evidence of fire damage, presumably from the First Temple’s destruction by the Babylonians in 586 B.C., The Jerusalem Post reports.
The dig at the Jerusalem Walls National Park in the City of David found the beams in the remains of a building that had collapsed during the fire, and the plaster that melted from the temple’s walls reportedly sealed the wood and preserved it for more than two-and-a-half millennia.
“The beams appear to have served as the roof of an inner courtyard in a building from the First Temple period,” IAA excavation director Efrat Bocher told The Jerusalem Post.
Bocher noted the poignance of the ancient find taking place shortly before Tisha B’Av, which falls this year from the evening of July 22 to July 23. The day of fasting and mourning is commemorated annually in rabbinic Judaism to lament the destruction of both the First Temple by the Babylonians in 586 B.C. and the destruction of the Second Temple by the Romans in A.D. 70.
“We are just before Tisha B’Av. This discovery makes you feel that you are witnessing the very moment of destruction, the moment when it all happened. It’s deeply moving,” she said.
Johanna Regev, another archaeologist with the IAA, told the Israeli outlet that such a find is unusual, and that the growth rings of the wood helped them date it.