March 29, 2025

—It’s quite normal to flee from danger like the time my family evacuated our Louisiana home at the news that Hurricane Rita had it in her crosshairs or that time we heard the unmistakable sound of a rattlesnake while hiking in one of our favorite state parks in Texas. Likewise when the people of Israel learned that the army of the king of Assyria was headed their way in the late 8th century B.C., thousands fled south to find safety inside the stone walls of Judah’s capital city, Jerusalem. Before long, however, innkeepers and relatives had no more room for the displaced, forcing the king of Judah to expand the city walls of Jerusalem to accommodate the panicked newcomers.

—But imagine their excitement when archaeologists in the early 1970s uncovered part of this wall which takes its name, “the Broad Wall,” from a presumed reference to it in Nehemiah 3:8. What archaeologists unearthed matches an historical reference to the King of Judah’s expansion prophet, described poetically by the prophet Isaiah, “You numbered the houses of Jerusalem, and the houses you broke down to fortify the wall” (Isaiah 22:20), for the archaeological evidence points to a systematic demolition of houses in order to make room for this wall that measures twenty-three feet in width and over twenty-six feet in height, constructed to protect a new residential area that evidently came to be known as the “Second Quarter.”

—To many who today visit the modern Jewish Quarter in the Old City of Jerusalem the “Broad Wall” is perhaps just another ancient wall that they feel compelled to photograph since they’re there, but which is later overlooked in conversations with their friends back home in favor of pictures of their group at the Western Wall or in their favorite coffee shop on Jaffa Road, yet for those who fled to Jerusalem so long ago, the Broad Wall represented life and safety, echoing the words of Jerusalem’s greatest king and to which we as Christians can happily relate, “The LORD also will be a refuge for the oppressed, a refuge in times of trouble” (Psalm 9:9).

—Daniel McCabe