March 1, 2025

—Ask almost any Israeli tour guide to take you to the tomb of King David and he’ll lead you straight to the wrong place, to a building just outside the Old City of Jerusalem’s Zion Gate. Why wouldn’t he take you to the correct location, the City of David, when it’s only a five-minute’s walk away? Because Kathleen Kenyon scared everyone away.

—In 1913 Edmond Rothschild, a wealthy, Jewish banker and philanthropist, purchased a large tract of land in the City of David and asked archaeologist Raymond Weill to excavate the site. There they hoped to locate King David’s tomb. Being Jewish, Weill knew exactly where to start digging—in the pages of the Bible. He quickly unearthed 1 Kings 2:10, “So David rested with his fathers and was buried in the City of David.” But where in the City of David should Weill look for the tomb? He then discovered Nehemiah 3:15-16 that describes the Jews’ efforts to rebuild the walls of Jerusalem after their return from Babylonian captivity, particularly their detailed reconstruction of the eastern wall of the city. Suddenly the following words jumped off the page at Weill, “[They] made repairs as far as the place in front of the tombs of David.” By then tracing Nehemiah’s catalog of repairs as they worked their way along the eastern wall and by mapping out each gate, pool and landmark listed in the passage, Weill located the general area where one would expect to find the tomb of David and those of Judah’s subsequent kings.

—So, in January of 1914 Weill hired two hundred men and thirty donkeys to begin his work, and digging down to bedrock he predictably found a group of tombs from the Judean royal period, including one in particular that stood out from the rest. Could this be the final resting place of Judah’s greatest king? It certainly seemed plausible. But if not, then at least the biblical evidence suggested to Weill that he was in the general vicinity.

—Preaching on the day of Pentecost, the apostle Paul reminded a gathered crowd that David’s “tomb is with us to this day” (Acts 2:23). Evidently it was still in reasonably good condition after the passing of one thousand years. Sadly, however, only one hundred years later, Emperor Hadrian, legendary for his shameless disregard for the holy sites of both Jews and Christians, quarried rock from the City of David during his extensive expansion of Jerusalem, badly damaging the existing, stately tomb structures there. Subsequent generations soon lost all memory of David’s tomb until a Medieval tale surfaced, purporting to have discovered King David’s scepter and crown in a cave on Mount Zion, west of the City of David. Pilgrims subsequently visited Mount Zion to visit David’s tomb until 1914 when Weill’s findings and argumentation resonated with the majority of biblical archaeologists.

—For the next forty-seven years tourists were routinely shown Weill’s site as the correct location of King David’s tomb until Kathleen Kenyon arrived in 1961 to lead an excavation of her own. She overturned Weill’s conclusions, so meticulously researched from the Bible, and reinterpreted the tombs as cisterns despite acknowledging that they were “not like any observed cisterns” she had ever previously encountered. Following Kenyon’s tenuous reversal of Weill, the tour guides once again returned to Mount Zion with their groups in disregard for the biblical evidence that clearly points to the City of David, unwittingly giving credence to an unverified and fanciful Medieval tale.

—To this day almost no one visits the tombs of David’s royal house in the City of David. Admittedly there’s not much left to see after a millennium of abuse at the site by expansion-minded kings and caliphs, but there’s even less to see of the legacy of King David atop Mount Zion.

-Daniel McCabe