Yesterday, I read a fascinating article about a new archaeological discovery in Jerusalem.

Archaeologists excavating in the City of David uncovered enormous wooden roof beams, blackened by fire and still lying where they had crashed down when the Babylonians burned Jerusalem in 586 BCE.

Not ashes or tiny fragments. Actual wooden beams from the First Temple period.

Wood almost never survives that long in Israel. Normally, it rots and disappears. But in this building, the fire burned so fiercely that the plaster coating the walls melted over the collapsed beams and sealed them beneath the ruins.

The beams are so thick that researchers can still see many of the trees’ growth rings. Those rings allow them to determine with unusual precision when the trees were cut down, and when the building stood.

Incredibly, the fire that destroyed the building also preserved its remains.

But that was not the part that fascinated me most.

In that same Givati Parking Lot excavation are many other buildings from the end of the Second Temple period, above and around these earlier First Temple-era remains.

This has led archaeologists to believe that when the Jewish people eventually returned to Jerusalem and began rebuilding a new life there, they deliberately left some of the burned ruins in place.

This is unusual, since normally when you build, you first clear the site of its previous ruins before beginning new construction. But these Jews did not clear away the destruction to which they were returning. Instead, they built the new city directly over it.

It seems they wanted the burnt ruins to stay.

Not because they wanted Jerusalem to remain a city of mourning. Quite the opposite. They were building new homes, restoring Jewish life and creating a future. But beneath the new walls, they left evidence of what had happened.

They built over the destruction without erasing it.

Yesterday, I also studied a passage in the Talmud that seemed to speak about the........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)