The Secret Resting Place of King David

Actually, there is. If you go to Mount Zion, to the area of King David’s Tomb, you can see that the first floor, or part of the first floor, includes giant stones from the time of King Herod. And actually, not long ago, the Diaspora Yeshiva, together with the Ministry of Antiquities, performed a ground-penetrating survey to map out what’s under the ground, under that building.

A man named Armit Filiute (spelling uncertain), who was the architect of the municipality of Jerusalem in the time of the Turks, in 1863 wrote a book named The Jerusalem You Can Explore. In that book, he claimed that one day he walked to Mount Zion and there was a very strong rain, and he saw an opening, and he entered a very large cave, 67 meters long and 20 meters wide, and a lot of rooms on the side, which leads under the monument where the sarcophagus is today, at the site of King David’s Tomb, under the building.

For many years people thought that he was a charlatan and a faker. But he also wrote about what he found in the Cave of Machpelah (Me’arat HaMachpelah) — in Hevron (Chevron), where our forefathers Abraham (Avraham), Isaac (Yitzchak), and Jacob (Yaakov) are buried — and he describes it as an architect. And in 1967, when Moshe Dayan conquered Hevron and brought it back into Jewish hands, he entered the grave and they found exactly what this architect described. The way he described the cave under the ground was true. This caused the Ministry of Antiquities to consider that the architect might have also written truthfully about Mount Zion.

And so we made a ground penetrating radar survey and we found that what the architect wrote about this place is also true. There is an underground cave right below the sarcophagus where there is a giant, ancient building. We can see giant stones from the time of Herod, there is a tunnel going out of the building, and there is a huge cave under the ground, which is probably the cave that he’s talking about, where King David, King Solomon, and King Hezekiah are buried. Besides that, now it’s covered with many layers of Earth, and on top of it is the site of King David’s Tomb as it exists today.

Not only that, but about a month ago, together with one of the donors of Diaspora Yeshiva from Canada, we also drilled, together with the Ministry of Antiquities, in a room which is about three meters under the ground, adjacent to King David’s Tomb. We drilled in order to take a sample, a core, and sent it to a laboratory to identify the number of years, to see in between the plaster in between the stones. We found there are two layers of stones, and one of them is the giant stones we talked about, from the time of Herod, but beyond it is another meter or so of a giant marble stone—white marble.

If you look in the books of Flavius Josephus, he writes down that King Herod, because he felt bad that he had killed all of the Jewish Rabbis, he built monuments in three places: the Temple Mount, with the giant stones we see there today, the building around the Cave of Machpelah, in Hevron, and he built a big monument around King David’s Tomb, and it exists just under the ground. This building was destroyed and rebuilt at least eight times, which is why we can see different type of stones in the building, but the lower part, under the ground, still exists.

And you should know that, in general, one of the major reasons that Mount Zion was left alone is because at the beginning of the 1900s, the British dug the area of Jerusalem toward the south, and they thought that they had found the City of David. They never found the grave, the Tomb of King David, but they thought that the City of David was much smaller, and it’s near a fountain which they found down below the mountain, in the edge of the mountain below, next to the valley, or below the Temple Mount.

The problem was that they never found any tomb of King David, and they never followed the tradition. Furthermore, they did not find very old ruins from the time of the Jebusites (Yevusim). They thought that this was the Old Jerusalem, the City of David, but we know that the City of David was a Citadel—it was on top of the mountain, as I mentioned, according to Flavius Josephus.

Amazingly, they never dug the top of the mountain area, because it was held by a waqf. A waqf in Arabic is a sanctity; it was held by an Arab sanctity, a domain by the Dahudim. This area where King David’s Tomb is known in tradition to be was held by a particular Arab family, and as I mentioned before, there’s an old building and they never allowed anybody to dig in this area. So for 1,000s of years, this area has been untouched. Until today, nobody has dug in this area.