Kotel Tunnel Tour

Good Evening!

So the other day we had an evening outing to tour the tunnels under the Western Wall. The Hebrew term for the Western Wall is the Kotel. When we arrived at the Kotel, we discovered that there was a problem with our reservation and somehow there was a mixup that ended in us not having a guide for our tour... Sister Judd (my Old Testament teacher's wife) was with us, and since she had been on the tour before, she was our makeshift guide, and she actually did a really good job. I love Sister Judd- she is so sweet! :-)

So basically, when Herod the so-called Great reconstructed the second temple, he built the temple mount by putting a large platform on the mount (which is the platform that is still there today). So if you go underneath the platform, there are tunnels that are excavated and that at one point in time were street level.

This is Sister Judd showing us the model of how the temple mount was added on to in different time periods (it was hard to get a good picture because it was dark down there...

This giant slab of rock has been there since the Savior's time. It is so big and heavy that even modern technology would not be able to move it. It was initially moved into place by a mixture of careful aim and gravity. It has been chipped away at in different time periods by people trying to move it but has never been moved since it was placed here. 

This pillar was put into place (on street level) but was not finished. The little nob on the side would have been used to put it into place and then smoothed off later, but it was clearly never taken off.

This is a rock that was meant to be a paving stone but the street was never finished. I believe this street was built around the time the Savior was in Jerusalem, but the street was not finished.

Cool story, these steps are from Jesus' day :-)

After we walked through the tunnels, we had a few moments at the Western Wall

I put a prayer in a crack of the wall, which was really cool... A while ago, I found out that in the Jewish culture, you do not burn or destroy books (ESPECIALLY if they contain the name of God or are religious in nature) and when a book or piece of writing gets old (including the written prayers that are stuck into the Kotel), they reverently bury them in the ground in a book cemetery. I thought that was a really neat tradition! 

This was a really neat outing!

-E