3,000-Year-Old Temple and Sacred Vessels Unearthed Near Jerusalem
A temple and sacred vessels from the First Temple period were discovered near Jerusalem.
The nearly 3,000-year-old temple was unearthed by the Israel Antiquities Authority during excavations at the Tel Motza archaeological site west of Jerusalem, prior to work being carried out on a planned expansion of Highway 1.
“The ritual building at Tel Motza is an unusual and striking find, in light of the fact that there are hardly any remains of ritual buildings of the period in Judea at the time of the First Temple. The uniqueness of the structure is even more remarkable because of the vicinity of the site’s proximity to the capital city of Jerusalem, which acted as the Kingdom’s main sacred center at the time,” Anna Eirikh, Dr. Hamoudi Khalaily and Shua Kisilevitz, directors of the excavation on behalf of the Israel Antiquities Authority, said in a statement.
Many finds have previously been uncovered at the Tel Motza site, from a variety of different periods.
Among the vessels unearthed in this recent find are ritual pottery vessels, with fragments of chalices (bowls on a high base which were used in sacred rituals), decorated ritual pedestals, and a number of pottery figurines of humans with a flat headdress and curling hair; and figurines of harnessed animals.
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO