December 14, 1010—Tuesday
We awoke to water dripping in the hall this morning and standing water over by Logan’s bed that had leaked under the door. The water line in the attic had broken. We also had no power. Well, I wanted the OC (Old City) experience, and we have gotten it.
We walked to the Garden Tomb out the Damascus Gate and up Nablus Road about 8:30 am, the time their website said they opened. The workers there let us know it opened at nine, so we had a few minutes to wait and ponder. We also saw a souvenir seller back his car up the 15-foot-wide alley leading to the Garden, open up his trunk and set up his business.



We were the first in, so Logan and I went right to the Garden Tomb and spent a few minutes there alone. We stood in the Weeping Chamber on the left side and looked in where the Lord lay. We could hear horns honking out in the street and birds cawing out in the Garden. The peace of the Garden Tomb overwhelmed them.
We joined a group from Singapore for the tour. They all spoke English. We marveled that they traveled so far for their faith, and there were five kids or so in the group.
The guide said the garden was actually an agricultural garden, a vineyard, because there is a winepress area, a place to stomp grapes and a small vat for the juice. He also said there is a water system/cistern below the garden that can hold 1 million liters of water, and we saw a photo of people on ladders down in the cistern. We also saw the hole that goes down into the cistern. The guide said it is the third-largest water system in Jerusalem.
After we left the Garden, we walked back toward the Damascus Gate and walked east a little way. There is a cave under the wall of Jerusalem. It is Zedekiah’s Cave. It was through this that King Zedekiah escaped from the Chaldean siege of Jerusalem after Lehi left Jerusalem. He escaped for a while, that is, before he was captured and blinded. All his sons were killed but Mulek, who was taken to the New World. We just looked into the cave and did not pay the entry fee to go in.
We started to walk on down the wall to go to the Mount of Olives when a cab driver stopped and started asking us if we wanted a tour. I told him “no,” but he said he would give us a free ride there since he was going that way. Knowing there would be a price to pay, but not wanting to have to walk all the way over there because we had a lot to do today, I told him I would pay him to take us to the Dome of the Ascension.
To my surprise, the driver took us to another place. I didn’t recognize it as the place where I went before, which I found out was actually where Jesus cried over Jerusalem (Luke 19:41-44), the Dominus Flevitus. It cost 5 shekels each (about $1.35) for us to go into the Dome of Ascension. It’s funny that the Palestinians seem to be those who collect the entrance fees at the Christian sites. (The Garden Tomb was free; it is owned by a British nonprofit organization.) The dome was plain and unadorned, unimproved. It had four straight pieces of marble laid out in a rectangle to enclose a stone that was supposed to be where Jesus ascended.
The Dome is up on the Mount of Olives to the south of Gethsemane. From it, we walked down the hill along a road that went in between the Jewish cemetery that dominates most of the southeastern side of the hill. A green door in a wall down the hill opens to the Church of Mary Magdalene. It is a beautiful church with about seven golden onion tops, like Russian buildings. We walked up two flights of stone stairs in a garden area to get to the church. Upstairs was the shrine area. I had thought the church was build over her tomb, and in fact, there are two coffins on either side of the front of the altar area. But she is not in them. The coffins are glass covered, and we could see a short figure inside each, covered in a white cloth. As we looked at the coffin and a box with bones beside it, a nun came up and asked Logan to take his hand out of his pocket, to show respect for the relics. There were bones in the box of eight or ten saints or leaders from that orthodoxy, and a bone of Mary Magdalene’s, the nun said.
She spoke English and explained that the woman in one of the coffins was a sister of the Romanov Family, the rulers of Russia before the Revolution. She was an abbess at a church she started there in Russia. She was killed with the Romanovs.
She didn’t tell us about the other person in the second coffin.
We walked back to the OC through Stephen’s Gate. I asked a guy if the Temple Mount was open. (The cab driver said it was only open from 8 to 10 am.) He did not speak English, so he directed me to St. Anne’s Church, which it turns out is by the Bethesda Pool and near the traditional birthplace of the Virgin Mary. It was also the place where the Savior healed a man lame for 38 years who waited by the pool for the angel who troubled the waters. The first to get in was healed.

We paid the fee and went in. The BYU Jerusalem students were there doing a tour.
The Bethesda Pool is not like a swimming pool. It is more like a conglomeration of pools and a cistern. It looks like a complex; it has been added to, of course. It was very deep in some places and quite intricate with passageways and the remains of a building.
We went into the church, but saw no signs about where Mary was born. There was a sign saying, “No explanations,” so we left.




Logan and I went to the Temple Mount in the afternoon, and we could see that the Pool of Bethesda was about 200 yards west of where the temple once stood.
On the Mount, we walked where the Temple of Herod once stood. It would have been to the north of where the Dome of the Rock now stands. We also walked to the south wall and looked through the arrow port in the wall out on the ruins of the purification pools. At 1:30 pm, an Arab man directed us toward the exit because visiting time for non-Muslims is from 12:30 to 1:30. We went to the Western Wall and waited for our next tour. As we left, we asked a young Jewish man what he thought the temple was for. He was from New York and had recently moved back. He told us the temple was for the sacrifice of animals for forgiveness of sins, for thanksgiving, and for holy days. We asked why they did not sacrifice animals now, and he said it was because there was no temple. He did believe the temple would be rebuilt and that animal sacrifice would return. It was an interesting conversation.
Another mistake I made today was in thinking I bought tickets to Hezekiah’s Tunnel, when in fact, I bought tickets to the tour of the Western Wall below ground, which was actually what I also wanted to do.
The complete temple wall was actually 488 meters long. The wall there today is only part of what used to be there. The wall was about 190 feet high. The tour took us below the streets of Jerusalem near the wall. We went down a couple of levels and looked down even further through a window.
The tour showed us one stone that was 45 feet long by 12 feet high by 15 feet in depth. It weighed 680 tons. It was 30 feet above the base of the wall. The guide said that slab protected the base when an earthquake hit.
We walked for at least 200 yards along the wall, passing slab after slab of stones marked with Herod’s mark, a beveled edge around the perimeter of one face of the stone. We also saw a video of how the stones where quarried and laid, using just oxen, ropes, pulleys, rolling logs, and A frames. It was impressive.
On to Galilee tomorrow.