Next we have the Throne of the Governor-beyond-the-River. This, like
the preceding, is some structure occurring in the course of the wall.
In chap. ii. 7, 9, the phrase “beyond the river” seems to mean westward
of the Jordan, where the district was governed by a viceroy of the
king of Assyria. The viceroy lived or had lived in Jerusalem,[30] and
his castle appears to have come into the line of the second wall, in
the part which is south-east of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, and
perhaps exactly at the re-entering angle.
The Broad Wall, which is named next, was not necessarily broad in
itself. Open spaces, such as we should name Squares, were in Jerusalem
called Broads. There was one such broad space south of the Temple water
gate, on Ophel, in which the people sometimes assembled (Neh. viii.
1; Ezra x. 9). There seems to have been another near one of the city
gates, where Hezekiah addressed the people, alarmed at the approach of
Sennacherib (2 Chron. xxxii. 6). Sennacherib would approach the city
on the north-west, and the people were very likely gathered by the
Valley Gate discussing the matter, in an open space afterwards utilised
by the construction of the “Pool of Hezekiah.” The “Broad” wall might
be so called from running along one side of this broad space. It
perhaps started from the second wall at the point which Nehemiah’s
description has now reached, and extended southward to the wall of the
high town, and so constituted an inner line of defence. Nothing is said
of repairing it: perhaps it had not been thrown down; or, as an inner
wall, Nehemiah neglects it for the present, as he does also the north
wall of the Upper City. At any rate the description carries us beyond
it. At the north-west angle of the second wall there was a Corner Gate
(2 Kings xiv. 13; 2 Chron. xxv. 23), which is called also the Gate that
Looketh. A gate here would command a view of the city walls as far as
the Fish Gate on the one hand and the Valley Gate on the other. But
this gate also is passed over in the present description.
We have next the Tower of the Furnaces, probably west of the “Pool of
Hezekiah.” The word may mean hearths furnaces, ovens, or altars; but we
cannot say to what it related.
And then we come to the Valley Gate, which we have already seen must
have been near the present Jaffa Gate, and probably was exactly where
the present David Street passes the end of the wall discovered, by the
Greek Bazaar, in 1885. Unless a gate existed there, the street would
lose half its use. Yet there is Herr Schick’s alternative, that the
name was given to a gate south-west of the Citadel, and opening on to
the Valley of Hinnom.
In verse 13, from the Valley Gate it is “1000 cubits on the wall to the
Dung Gate.” This forbids any identification with the present dung gate,
in the Tyropœon, and fixes within a little the position of _Bethso_.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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