The Columbarium cave, so-called because its walls feature over 2,000 high-quality designed and carefully carved niches. The raising of doves was very common in the Judean lowlands during the Hellenistic period. Doves were apparently used intensively – their meat and eggs as food and their droppings as fertilizer. Doves were also sacrificed in rituals. After the raising of doves as a prosperous industry ceased in the 3rd century BCE, other purposes were found for this cave, like many others at Maresha. In Maresha alone, some 85 columbarium caves have been discovered, with tens of thousands of niches.
Maresha was one of the cities of Judah during the time of the First Temple and is mentioned among the conquests of the ancient Israelites, in the Book of Joshua, and later, in the Books of Chronicles, as one of King Rehoboam's fortifications. According to the Madaba Map, Maresha was the place "whence came Micah the Prophet." Soon after, in the early 9th century BCE, Shishak’s son sent an army to Judah under the command of his general Zerah the Ethiopian. However, King Asa of Judah defeated him near Maresha. During the Persian period, in the 6th century BCE, as result of Zedekiah's rebellion against Babylon, king Nebuchadnezzar II occupied the Judean kingdom. Idumeans who came from the Negev settled in southern Judah and Maresha became a major Edomite city, part of the area known as Idumea. In the 4th century BCE, Sidonians and Greeks joined them, bringing Hellenistic culture to the region.
The Apollophanes (Sidonian) cave. During the Hellenistic period the people of Maresha commonly buried their dead in caves with niches. In the Apollophanes Cave, an inscription was found mentioning Apollophanes son of Sesmaios, the leader of the Sidonian community in Maresha. The inscription, as well as the cave’s paintings, shed light on the art, mythology and ethnic affiliations of those interred in the cave (Idumeans, Sidonians and Greeks). They also reveal their family relationships and burial customs. The Apollophanes inscription clearly identifies Tel Maresha with biblical Maresha.
Hellenistic Maresha was a cosmopolitan center and an economic magnet and was also home to a few Egyptians and Jews. Some of the Jews were descendants of the local population from the time before the destruction of the First Temple and others came there from coastal plain cities. It was at this time that the lower city, below Tel Maresha, was built, and many of the caves were hewn at this time.
Tel Maresha; in Hellenistic times the city expanded at the base of the ancient tel.
The city began its decline during the Maccabean Revolt against the Seleucid Empire (2nd century BCE) when the city was used as base to combat the rebels. Following the successful rebellion, John Hyrcanus conquered the city in 112 BCE, forcibly converting its inhabitants. Hyrcanus also laid waste to the city. Maresha was eventually reinhabited, but its glory days were past and it remained a small settlement. In 63 BCE, as part of the arrangements made by Pompey in the region, Maresha once again became a part of Idumea, but it was again annexed to Judea in 47 BCE by Julius Caesar. Maresha was finally destroyed in 40 BCE by the Parthians.
And when Rehoboam was come to Jerusalem, he gathered of the house of Judah and Benjamin an hundred and fourscore thousand chosen men, which were warriors, to fight against Israel, that he might bring the kingdom again to Rehoboam. [...] And Rehoboam dwelt in Jerusalem, and built cities for defence in Judah. He built even Bethlehem, and Etam, and Tekoa, and Bethzur, and Shoco, and Adullam, and Gath, and Mareshah, and Ziph, and Adoraim, and Lachish, and Azekah, and Zorah, and Aijalon, and Hebron, which are in Judah and in Benjamin fenced cities.
2 Chronicles 11:1, 5-10
During the 8th century BCE, Bet Guvrin was part of the Kingdom of Judah, and after Maresha's destruction (a kilometre to the south) in 40 BCE, Bet Guvrin succeeded it as the main town of the area. At that time, Bet Guvrin straddled an important junction on the road from Lod and Ashkelon to Hebron and Jerusalem, just as today the route 35 bisects the site and, during the days of king Herod, the town was the administrative center for the district of Idumea. The name Bet Guvrin first appears in the writings of Josephus, who reported that the Romans, led by Vespasian, conquered Bet Guvrin in 68 CE.
After the turmoil of the First Jewish-Roman War and the Bar Kokhba revolt the town became a thriving Roman colony and a major administrative center, when in 200 CE, mperor Septimus Severus granted Bet Guvrin the status of a city and changed its name to Eleutheropolis (“city of the freedmen”). The city controlled the area between the coastal plain and the Dead Sea and between Bet Shemesh and the Be’er Sheva Valley. Bet Guvrin became an important junction; five roads, along which milestones have been found, led to the city. Besides dwellings, the city boasted an amphitheatre and other public structures. There are no springs at Bet Guvrin, but during the Roman period two aqueducts were built, bringing water to the city from springs in the Judean Mountains. Slowly the city’s Jewish population was renewed, and by the 3rd and 4th centuries CE the city was mentioned in the Talmud and the Midrash. Renowned sages lived there, including Rabbi Yonatan and Rabbi Yehuda Ben-Ya‘akov. Additional evidence of the growing Jewish population in the region comes from the remains of a large Jewish cemetery and a synagogue inscription. During the Byzantine period Bet Guvrin became an important Christian center and churches were built there. Sources from the Byzantine Period mention both Christian and Jewish personalities living in the city.
The amphitheatre at Bet Guvrin had 3,500 seats and spaces for wild animals beneath the arena.
In the early 7th century CE, Bet Guvrin was conquered by Muslim forces led by 'Amr ibn al-'As and renamed Bayt Jibrin. It was in this period that most of the famous so-called Bell Caves were hewn.
The Bell Caves, which are within the city limits of Bet Guvrin, were apparently hewn during the Byzantine and Early Muslim periods. The caves were used mainly as quarries and provided building material for cities on the coastal plain and for Bet Guvrin itself. The 10th-century Arab traveler Al Muqaddasi wrote of Bet Guvrin: “It is a land of richness and plenty, and in it are many marble quarries…” Two of the pictures show inscriptions and engravings inside the caves - hover over them to see the explanatory captions.
Under the Crusaders in the 12th century, Bethgibelin, as it was then called, was fortified, and had a population of 1,500. The Church of St. Anne was restored at that time, during which small farming villages surrounded the city.
The remaining apse of St Anne's church, seen from Tel Maresha.
The Crusader fortress is located east of and adjacent to the amphitheatre, and includes the remains of a basilica, built in 1136 by King Foulk d’Anjou of Jerusalem. This Romanesque church served the people living in and around the fortress. It was adorned with Roman and Byzantine stone bases, columns and capitals that had been taken from the remains of ancient Bet Guvrin, and was built atop the Roman bathhouse. Hover over the images in the slide show to see detailed captions.
The town fell to the Mamluks and then the Ottoman Turks. Under the Ottomans, the Arab village of Bet Jibrin stood here until Israel’s War of Independence in 1948. In June of that year, the Egyptian army took over the British police station built here at the beginning of World War II. The area was taken by the Israel Defense Forces on October 27, 1948. Kibbutz Beit Guvrin was founded immediately to the north of ancient Bet Guvrin in May 1949.
Archaeological research began at Bet Guvrin-Maresha in 1900 when P.G. Bliss and A.S. Macalister headed an expedition sponsored by the Palestine Exploration Fund. In 1902, J.P. Peters and H. Thiersch excavated the two Sidonian burial caves. In the 1960s and 1970s the site was surveyed by the geographer Y. Ben-Arieh and archaeologists E. Oren, Y. Dagan, A. Kloner and others. Since 1989 the Israel Antiquities Authority has been excavating the site under Prof. A. Kloner and M. Cohen.
Now a 5,000 dunam (1,250 acre) national park, Bet Guvrin-Maresha is famed for its numerous man-made caves which served as quarries, cisterns, storerooms, dovecotes, tombs, storage chambers for produce and shelters for farm animals. Hewn caves are common in the Judean lowlands because the light chalk rocks are easy to quarry. Once cut, a harder crust, known as nari, some 1.5–3.0 m thick, often forms on the chalk surface. The following slide show displays some of the other caves not shown above; hover over the pictures for captions.
Finally, a beautiful picture of a huge wheat field outside Netiv Ha Lamed Hey, north east of Bet Guvrin, which was attracting drivers to stop in droves for photographs and "selfies" owing to its incredible profusion of spring meadow flowers.
