Broad Wall

Also called Hezekiah's Wall

Seven metres of wall thickness laid straight across the foundations of the houses it demolished — and a fortification that has just been redated out from under the king it is named for.

Object: Fortification wall about 7 m thick, 65 m exposed, of large roughly dressed limestone blocks
Found at: Jewish Quarter of the Old City, on Jerusalem's western hill
Found in: 1970
Found by: N. Avigad, in the Jewish Quarter excavations he directed from 1969 for the Hebrew University, the Israel Exploration Society and the Department of Antiquities
Dates from: Eighth century BC. Traditionally Hezekiah, late in the century; a 2024 radiocarbon study reassigns the city's eighth-century fortification programme to Uzziah, mid-century Disputed dating
Now held at: In situ and open to the public in the Jewish Quarter, Jerusalem

Found Under the Jewish Quarter

After 1967 the Jewish Quarter of the Old City was rebuilt, and N. Avigad was invited to excavate ahead of the builders. His dig ran from 1969 into the early 1980s and produced a series of finds that between them rewrote how big Iron Age Jerusalem was: the Israelite Tower, the Burnt House, the Herodian mansions, the Byzantine Cardo. The wall came out in 1970.

It is about seven metres thick. Roughly 65 metres of it are exposed, standing up to about 3.3 metres high, built of large roughly dressed stones, and it runs across the western hill — ground that, on the older reconstruction of the city, was supposed to be empty countryside in the Iron Age. It was not. The wall proves a fortified western quarter, and with it a city several times larger than the narrow ridge of the City of David.

The detail that made the find famous is what lies beneath it. The builders did not clear a line and start; they drove the foundation straight across houses that were already standing, cutting through them and building over their walls. Those cut-off house foundations are still visible under the wall's course.

The Houses They Broke Down

Isaiah 22:9-11 describes a fortification panic in Jerusalem in almost these terms: the breaches of David's city were many, the waters of the lower pool were gathered, a reservoir was made between the two walls — and, in verse 10, "You counted the houses of Jerusalem, and you broke down the houses to fortify the wall." N. Avigad read the demolished foundations under his wall against that sentence, and it is a genuinely close fit: a specific, slightly odd, easily-checkable detail of construction practice, described in a text and then found in the ground.

The wall is also a strong candidate for the fortification Nehemiah's rebuilders reached three centuries later. The World English Bible renders it "the wide wall" rather than "the broad wall" at Nehemiah 3:8 and 12:38, but it is the same Hebrew phrase, and the traditional English name of this excavated wall comes from it. If the identification holds, the wall was still standing, and still a landmark, when the returned exiles built along its line.

What the wall carries at full strength, independent of any king's name, is the scale of the city. A seven-metre wall enclosing the western hill is a state project, and the Judah that built it was not a village.

Whose Wall? The 2024 Redating, Stated Carefully

For fifty years this was Hezekiah's wall: built in the late eighth century BC, in the emergency that produced the tunnel, against Sennacherib. In 2024 that attribution was unsettled. J. Regev, E. Boaretto and colleagues published a radiocarbon chronology of Iron Age Jerusalem in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences — 103 measurements, using a calibration correction the paper itself establishes — and concluded that the city's major eighth-century fortification programme belongs to the later years of Uzziah, in the middle of the century, rather than to Hezekiah at its end. Uzziah is credited in 2 Chronicles 26:9 with building towers in Jerusalem and fortifying them, and a devastating earthquake around 760 BC, remembered in Amos 1:1 and Zechariah 14:5, gives a reason to rebuild.

Now the caution, because the popular reporting has run ahead of the paper. That study did not date the Broad Wall. Its samples come from excavation areas on the south-eastern ridge and the Giv'ati parking lot — the City of David — and neither the Jewish Quarter nor the western hill was sampled. The wall's redating is an inference: if the city's eighth-century fortification effort as a whole sits a few decades earlier than assumed, the wall built in that effort moves with it. That is a reasonable inference from good data. It is not the same thing as a date measured on this wall, and an article that reported it as one would be overstating a real result.

So the honest position is that the wall's attribution is currently open between two Judahite kings roughly forty years apart, that the case for Uzziah rests on radiocarbon from elsewhere in the city and the case for Hezekiah on the fit with Isaiah 22 and 2 Chronicles 32:5, and that neither is presently decisive. Nothing in the dispute touches the two things the wall actually demonstrates: that Jerusalem's western hill was fortified in the eighth century BC, and that houses were demolished to do it.

Scripture references

Isaiah 22:10 — "You broke down the houses to fortify the wall" — the demolished foundations under the wall's course
Nehemiah 3:8 — The rebuilders fortify Jerusalem "even to the wide wall"
Nehemiah 12:38 — The wall named again as a landmark on the procession route
2 Chronicles 32:5 — Hezekiah builds up the broken wall and raises towers
2 Chronicles 26:9 — Uzziah builds and fortifies towers in Jerusalem — the alternative attribution
Amos 1:1 — "Two years before the earthquake" — the mid-eighth-century event now proposed as the trigger

Sources

Holding institutionIsrael Exploration Society — The Israel Exploration Society, Jerusalem · One of the three bodies under which N. Avigad's Jewish Quarter excavation ran, and the publisher of its final reports in the Qedem seriesSupports: The excavating body and the publication of the dig
ScholarshipJ. Regev et al., "Radiocarbon chronology of Iron Age Jerusalem reveals calibration offsets and architectural developments" — Johanna Regev, Yuval Gadot, Joe Uziel, Elisabetta Boaretto and colleagues · PNAS 121:19 (29 April 2024), e2321024121, doi:10.1073/pnas.2321024121. Open access. Note that its sampled areas are on the south-eastern ridge, not the Jewish QuarterSupports: The redating of the eighth-century fortification programme to Uzziah, and the limit of what the study sampled
ScholarshipN. Avigad, Discovering Jerusalem — Nahman Avigad, Hebrew University of Jerusalem · Nashville, 1983 — the excavator's own account of the Jewish Quarter dig, including the wall and the demolished house foundations beneath it. Print onlySupports: The find, the dimensions and the demolished houses
EncyclopediaWikipedia: Broad Wall (Jerusalem)

Reflect

Someone's house was pulled down so the city could survive. What have you been asked to give up for something larger than your own plans?