Strata: In Their Own Words

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From 1978 to 1985, Hebrew University professor Yigal Shiloh led the largest excavation ever undertaken in the area south of Jerusalem’s Temple Mount known as the City of David, the location of the city at the time of David and Solomon.

How that dig was started with the help of the firm hand of legendary Jerusalem mayor Teddy Kollekis related in a tribute to him by South African philanthropist and community leader Mendel Kaplan, recently published in a memorial volume to Kollek, who died in 2007 at the age of 90.¹ Unfortunately, Kollek did not live to see the publication of the volume.

In Kaplan’s words:

In February 1977, I walked across the hillside of the City of David with Hershel Shanks’s The City of David: A Guide to Biblical Jerusalem in hand. It shocked me that walls uncovered by Kathleen Kenyon, the Spring of Gihon and the Pool of Siloam had been allowed to become a cesspool and rubbish heap.