The Burnt Beams of Jerusalem

Commentary ^ | September 2026 | Meir Y. Soloveichik

[Twotone]

Of all Jewish observances, the commemoration of the ninth day of the month of Av is the saddest—and one that reflects the passage of sadness through time. On this day, Tisha B’Av, Jews mourn not only the destruction of Jerusalem by Rome in 70 C.E., but also the even more ancient destruction by Babylon in 586 B.C.E. It was therefore all the more striking that this year, mere days before Tisha B’Av, Israelis unearthed a remnant of that earlier event. The Times of Israel reported:

Archaeologists have discovered wooden beams believed to have been burned during the destruction of the First Temple in 586 BCE….The beams, made of sycamore wood, were unearthed during a recent dig at the Jerusalem Walls National Park in the City of David….Researchers posited that they served as the roof of an inner courtyard in a building from the First Temple period.

During the destruction of the Temple, the beams likely collapsed onto the floor and were covered by the plaster cladding of the building’s walls, melted by the fire, excavation co-director Efrat Bocher said….

“We are just before Tisha B’Av,” Bocher said. “This discovery makes you feel that you are witnessing the very moment of destruction, the moment when it all happened. It’s deeply moving.”

That the wood survived the events of 586 B.C.E. is interesting. What is more interesting is that the beams are still there: that Jews who returned from Babylon 40 years later to rebuild the city left them there deliberately. The official website of Ir David, the City of David excavation project, continues the story:

The excavation directors note that Jerusalem’s returning residents, as they began to rebuild the city, probably made a deliberate decision to preserve the memory of the destruction….“The concept of a landscape of memory is familiar from many cultures around the world,” explains Dr. Yiftah Shalev.…“Preserving memory is a human need, seeking to preserve what once existed. Here we see it in its clearest form: a deliberate choice to leave ruins in place as a testament to the destruction and build the new layer over them.”

In other words, as a resurrection of Jerusalem was occurring, a choice was made to leave a charred, scarred remnant of the Jerusalem that was. Or as the reporter Amit Segal put it, “When Jerusalem’s residents returned from the Babylonian exile…they left the ruins deliberately in place, laying the new city over the scars of the old.”

With the return from Babylon, a new Jerusalem arose: but the scars remained. This is itself a symbol of the Jewish capacity for memory; but it is also something else. The Ninth of Av is also a reminder of the fragility of Jewish history. To build a city over these burnt sycamore beams of Jewish homes was a way of reminding those Jews that Jewish homes could burn again.

And so they did. The Jewish-turncoat historian Josephus describes what occurred to Jerusalem 600 years later, when Rome set the city on fire:

But when they went in numbers into the lanes of the city, with their swords drawn, they slew those whom they overtook without mercy; and set fire to the houses whither the Jews were fled, and burnt every soul in them…and made the whole city run down with blood, to such a degree indeed, that the fire of many of the houses was quenched with these men’s blood.

In 1970, Israeli archeologists came face to face with what Josephus had described when they excavated what is now called the “Burnt House”—a charred remnant of Second Temple Jerusalem that was found with burned skeletons inside, dead Jews from millennia ago. Nahman Avigad, who had overseen that excavation, described how “something amazing occurred in the hearts of all who witnessed the progress of excavations here.” The burning of ancient Jerusalem “suddenly took on a new and horrible significance. Persons who had previously regarded this catastrophe as stirring but abstract and remote, having occurred two millennia ago, were so visibly moved by the sight that they occasionally would beg permission to take a fistful of soil or a bit of charred wood ‘in memory of the destruction.’”

Is the story of Jewish homes set aflame by their enemies truly a thing of the past? Have we not seen men and wo-men and children burned alive in the past three years? And have we not seen those very acts of destruction defended, celebrated, by parts of the so-called civilized world?

Six months ago, Segal reported on a contemporary story that is, in its own way, eerily parallel. In December 2025, the survivors of Kibbutz Be’eri debated what to preserve from the burnt homes that remained from the conflagrations of October 7: “By a vote of 196 to 146, they decided to preserve one house and demolish the rest.” Some asked how they could raise children at a location where the remains of destroyed Jewish families still stand. As one Israeli put it to Segal, “I don’t want to live in Yad Vashem.” But Segal also noted that the choice of what to preserve and what to efface may lie, according to Israeli law, with Israel’s Antiquities Authorities, because of the historic importance of the site. As Segal reflects, “It is hard to think of late-20th-century kibbutz homes as ‘antiquities,’ but on the other hand, there is no doubt that even hundreds of years from now the events of that Simchat Torah morning will be remembered.”

Thus, in the past six months, Israelis have pondered remnants of burnt Jewish homes from 2,500 years ago and remnants of burnt Jewish homes from 2023 that will be remembered hundreds of years from now. To discover beams from 586 B.C.E., remnants of Jewish homes destroyed, is to encounter ancient history but not only ancient history.

These stories of destruction and preservation, ancient and modern, are sobering but also inspiring. They embody tales of catastrophe and destruction but also memory and resurrection. The scars that remain of Tisha B’Av thousands of years ago are not only a source of mourning; what survives the fire embodies the miracle of Jewish history.

After the destruction of the Second Temple, pondering how Judaism could endure, Rabbi Akiva cited the verse in Isaiah calling God the mikveh Yisrael, the Hope of Israel. He used the word mikveh, or hope, as an implicit reference to a mikveh, a ritual bath, one of the central sources of purifying power in Jewish law. Perhaps Rabbi Akiva selected this simile, in part, as a response to the flames that engulfed Jerusalem. The water defeats the fire. There remains a mikveh within Jews, a reservoir of hope and strength, that the fires of history could not overcome.

There is another story from recent Israeli archaeology that parallels the story of the burnt beams of ancient Jerusalem. In the Jewish quarter of Jerusalem’s Old City, two domed synagogues crowned the skyline: the Hurva, and the Tiferet Yisrael. Both were blown up by the Jordanians in 1948. The Hurva was recently rebuilt, and then the Tiferet Yisrael was resurrected.

Before the work on Tiferet Yisrael began, Israeli law required that excavations be carried out first. Archeologist Oren Gutfeld told the Jerusalem Post, “After we cleared all the ruins from 1948, we started in the basement of the synagogue and uncovered its mikve.” Beneath the mikveh of 1948, they then found remains of the previous 1,700 years, “a building from the Mamluk Period in the 13th-14th centuries, which turned out to be a Byzantine structure in secondary use, probably for public purposes.” And then, beneath all that, from 2,000 years before, they discovered ash from Jerusalem when it was burnt by the Romans: “Immediately after we took out the floors we arrived to a very, very massive and deep conflagration layer from the year 70 AD, when the city was burned to the ground.” And then, beneath the remnant of the fire that brought Jerusalem to ashes, they found…another mikveh, from the time of the Second Temple, that like the sycamore beams had survived the flames:

Upon removing the burned layer of debris, Gutfeld said a mikve from the Second Temple period was found next to a storage facility filled with fragments of pottery, stone vessels, animal bones and ancient coins. “During the fire and destruction, something blocked it, and it stayed frozen in time for 2,000 years,” he said.

The earth of Israel contains what outlasted the destruction by the Jordanians of the 20th century and by the Romans of the first century: One mikveh separated by another, separated by soot and ash and thousands of years of conquest. No people, and no land, tells a story like this, with the same site of ritual faith several feet apart in the same earth, but thousands of years apart. The land is filled with ashes, but through those ashes we can see also a story of resurrection. The burnt beams of ancient Jerusalem are eerily relevant, summoning images of families burnt alive yesteryear and today. But these scars from the past can, counterintuitively, also help heal, providing evidence of a people that no fire could defeat, and assurances of a people whose capacity for hope could never be extinguished.

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TOPICS: History; Religion
KEYWORDS: jerusalem

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