Today I had to drop Yonatan at the airport very early, so that by 7 am I was already back on the outskirts of Jerusalem. Since at that time it was still only 25 degrees Celcius, dropping to a hike-friendly 20 degrees in the Jerusalem hills, I made an on-the-spot decision to investigate Tel Tzova, a landmark on the Castel-Ein Kerem road, with it's curious slogan, "agriculture will prevail" made from crude 6 foot letters on the hillside.
The slogan, החקלאות תנצח ("agriculture will prevail") on the side of Tel Tzova
Immediately east of Kibbutz Tzova (צובה) is Mount Tzova, on which can be found the remains of Tel Tzova, 769 metres above sea level. The tel was the site of an ancient Jewish settlement in the days of King David. It is mentioned in the Second Book of Samuel (2 Samuel 23:36) in relation to a list of David’s mighty men, one of whom is “Yigal the son of Nathan of Tzova.” In 1 Samuel 14:47, Tzova is mentioned as one of the kingdoms against which Saul waged war along with the Philistines:
וְשָׁא֛וּל לָכַ֥ד הַמְּלוּכָ֖ה עַל־יִשְׂרָאֵ֑ל וַיִּלָּ֣חֶם סָבִ֣יב | בְּֽכָל־אֹיְבָ֡יו בְּמוֹאָ֣ב | וּבִבְנֵי־עַמּ֨וֹן וּבֶאֱד֜וֹם וּבְמַלְכֵ֚י צוֹבָה֙ וּבַפְּלִשְׁתִּ֔ים וּבְכֹ֥ל אֲשֶׁר־יִפְנֶ֖ה יַרְשִֽׁיעַ:
And Saul took the kingdom over Israel, and he waged war against his enemies on every side, against Moab, and against the children of Ammon, and against Edom, and against the kings of Tzova, and against the Philistines, and wherever he would turn, he would cause them to tremble.
Tel Tzova can be dated to the Canaanite period, and many agricultural installations from the First Temple period surround the site―including presses, water systems, and terraces. There are also tombs from the First Temple period. Since 1986, limited archaeological excavations have been conducted on the tel by the British School of Archaeology in Jerusalem, which indicate that the site was continuously occupied ever since, until 1948.
The site is thought to be the village referred to in Crusader times as Subahiet, one of twenty-one villages given by King Godfrey as a fief to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, and reconfirmed in 1114, by Baldwin I of Jerusalem. The Crusaders built a fortress known as Belmont (“beautiful mountain” atop the tel), to guard the route to Jerusalem. The Knights’ Hospitallers (the Order of Knights of the Hospital of Saint John of Jerusalem) built the fortress between 1140 and 1160, and a Brother William of Belmont―mentioned in Crusader sources from the years 1157 and 1162―is presumed to have been castellan. After the Battle of Hattin in 1187, during which the Crusaders were defeated, the inhabitants of Belmont surrendered to Saladin 's forces, who ordered its destruction. Although it is recorded that he destroyed it in 1191, no trace of deliberate destruction has been found to date.
Remains of the Crusader fortress of Belmont
The Arab village of Suba (صوبا, סובא) was built on the fortress’ remains during the Mamluk period, and is first mentioned in 1225 as “a village of Jerusalem” by the Greek-Arab biographer and geographer, Yāqūt Shihāb al-Dīn ibn-'Abdullāh al-Rūmī al-Hamawī (1179–1229). During the Ottoman period, tax registers from 1596 record that there were about sixty Muslim families and seven Christian families lived in the village, raising olives, grapes, wheat and barley. In 1834, after rebelling against the Egyptian rule of Ibrahim Pasha, the Abu Ghosh family fled to Suba together with those loyal to them. Ibrahim Pasha captured the site and destroyed the fortress once again.
Ottoman-era houses of the former Arab village of Suba, below the remains of the Belmont fortress
The French explorer, Victor Guérin, visited the village in 1863, and recorded what he saw in his book of 1869, Description Geographique, Historique et Archeologique de la Palestine. He describes the site and its history very accurately: “At 08.45 I reached the low hills of Jebel Souba…”
Extract from Guérin's Description Geographique, Historique et Archeologique de la Palestine [Public Domain]
By 1870 Suba had 33 houses and a male population of 112, and in 1896 the population was estimated to be about 360 persons. In the 1922 census of Palestine conducted by the British Mandate authorities, Suba had a population 307, all Muslims. During the Mandate period, the village again had a small fort to guard the road to Jerusalem.
The Arab village of Suba and the remains of the Belmont Crusader Fortress, 1948 [Palmach archive, unknown artist, Public Domain]
During the War of Independence, Suba―like the nearby village of Castel―served as a base for the Arab forces that tried to block the road to Jerusalem, and saw fierce fighting. In late 1947 and early 1948, irregular forces of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood stationed in Suba took part in the fighting, attacking Jewish traffic on the Tel Aviv-Jerusalem road. The threat posed by Suba had to be neutralized, and the villagers were offered money peacefully to evacuate their homes, but they were afraid they would be branded as traitors, so suggested that a mock battle take place on 15 July 1948, after which they would leave the village. However when, during Operation Danny, the Harel Brigade of the Palmach approached Suba on 13 July 1948―unaware of this agreement―they fired several rounds from an unstable Davidka mortar. Terrified by the horrific noise, Suba residents panicked and fled. Benny Morris confirms that most of the inhabitants had fled during the fighting, and those who remained were expelled (The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited, 2004).
Left to right: A Harel Brigade lookout post at Tzova, 1948; Soldiers from the Harel Brigade in Tzova, 1948; Suba, October 1948, after partial demolition [Palmach Archive, Public Domain, unknown artist except right: David Shavit]
In October 1948, the Ameilim group of Palmach veterans established Kibbutz Misgav Palmach―later renamed Palmach Tzova for the ancient tel―adjacent to the Arab village.
"The Day of Aliyah to Tzuba" [Palmach Archive, unknown artist, Public Domain]
Today Tel Tzova is a national park and the remains of the Arab village of Suba can be seen, along with the remains of the Crusader fortress of Belmont, including its octagonal outer wall. In the centre of the fortress are the remains of a tower which served as the residence of the commander and his soldiers. On the ground floor there are storerooms and a plastered winepress. The fortress is surrounded by a moat, as well as an inner wall with several gates, an escape tunnel, a church, and water cisterns―some pre-dating the Crusader period.
Sheikh's tomb
There are several other interesting geological, natural and archaeological sites of interest around Tzova. One such is apparently the grave of a sheikh, in the midst of an Arab cemetery whose grave markers are long gone, replaced with a picturesque picnic area. The two-room double-domed structure has windows and niches that make it look more like a house―or, perhaps, a shrine―than a tomb. It has two large holes in its walls, perhaps dating from 1948.
A Sheikh's tomb, Har Tzova
Ein Tzova
Another site, about a kilometre south-east of Tel Tzova, is Ein Tzova (Ein Suba)―Tzova spring. In its original, natural state, the spring flowed out of a rock outcrop where the water table was exposed. It was a slow, seasonal flow and, with the water table receding and lowering through biblical times, a canal was dug to renew and increase the flow, gradually being lengthened as the water table receded. To keep out debris and mud the local settlers lined the sides of the canal with ashlars, eventually enclosing it with a vaulted roof to form a “flow gallery”. Several openings built into the roof were blocked up with stones that could be removed for on-going maintenance. One of the longest and largest of its type in the region, Ein Tzova had at this stage become a sealed spring typical of the Judean Hills during biblical times, as it is written in the Song of Songs (4:12), “You are a garden locked up, my sister, my bride; you are a spring enclosed, a sealed fountain.”
But the spring was to be developed further. The far end of this flow gallery was enlarged into a “flow hall” whose purpose was to expose a greater surface area of the rock outcrop of the saturated aquifer. This hall is constructed in typical Herodian style. As the water table continued to recede, a further flow tunnel and flow gallery were added, branching off the flow hall of this complex system. The system has been cleaned out and access installed, though it is only open by appointment except on Shabbat, so I didn't have the opportunity to see it this time.
Cross sections and plan of Ein Suba system [signboard on site, Zvi Ron and Kinnutz Tzova]
The system―which was mapped by geographer, Zvi Ron, of Tel Aviv University, in 1964―opens up into a small, shallow pool of about nine cubic metres’ capacity which he exposed in 1993, prior to which it was lost in dense vegetation. There is no correlation between the discharge rate of the spring and this pool, implying the existence of a reservoir downstream of the pool. A former inhabitant of the Arab village of Suba informed Ron of its location, again submerged in decades of undergrowth resulting from the saturated overflow of the spring’s pool. Cut in the low cliff 25 metres south of the pool, in the cliff-edge of the valley, is a hewn and plastered reservoir of 235 cubic metre capacity, fed―from the pool above―by an open channel hewn into the cliffside. The water flow no longer follows this route, and has not been restored, but now fills a modern, constantly-overflowing, concrete reservoir on the other side of the small valley, saturating the valley floor.
Left to right: The pool at the end of the "flow gallery"; the aqueduct following th line of the cliff to the hewn reservoir (whose entrance is closed by the gate); the interior of the 235 cunic metre reservoir
This type of reservoir―at the outlet of a spring―is unique in Judea and Samaria, the only similar one being at the northern bank of the Tzova stream valley. Both resemble strikingly the hewn and plastered reservoirs found at Herodian Masada. Though the system was apparently developed gradually over a long period of time, it was mainly constructed during the first century BCE to the first century CE.
Today railway sleepers (railroad ties) can be seen supporting the roof of the flow gallery. In 1924 the British, after dismantling the Turkish railway tracks of the Jaffa-Jerusalem railway―the Turkish tracks were only a meter apart and the new trains required wider tracks―used them to repair several springs in the Judaean Hills. Ein Tzova―which had remained virtually untouched for two millennia and whose roof had completely collapsed―was one of those springs which benefited from these Turkish timbers!
Cave of Saint John the Baptist
Another site, about a kilometre south of Kibbutz Tzova, is today known as the "Cave of Saint John the Baptist". A member of Kibbutz Tzova, Reuven Kalifon, knew of the existence of a cave in the community's nectarine orchards, which was filled with soil almost to the ceiling. In 1999, Kalifon asked Dr Shimon Gibson―a British-born archaeologist working in Jerusalem, Senior Associate Fellow at the WF Albright Institute of Archaeological Research and Visiting Professor in the History Department at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte―to inspect the cave more closely. Crawling into the narrow entrance of the cave, Gibson was immediately impressed by engraved drawings he found, and a possible association with St John the Baptist which occurred to him. The site was exposed and excavated from 2000-2004 by Gibson, together with James Tabor, of the University of North Carolina at Charlotte.
The entrance to the "Cave of St John the Baptist"
The cave is actually a very large, hewn water cistern―26 metres by four metres with an average height of five metres, and one of the most sophisticated of its kind―which changed its function over the years. It was carved in the iron age, somewhere between 800 and 500 BCE― the whitewash covering the cave walls and steps dates from the eighth-sixth centuries BCE, a finding confirmed in tests by both the Weizmann and Geological Institutes―by Israelite monks who apparently used it as an immersion pool, prior to the Jewish tradition of the mikva (ritual bath). Twenty-eight steps lead to the bottom of the cave with a niche carved into the wall—typical of those used in Jewish ritual baths for discarding the clothes before immersion. Near the foot of the stairs is an oval stone with a foot-shaped indentation with a bowl-like indentation just above it, which apparently held ritual oil that would flow through a small channel onto the believer’s right foot.
The lower steps of the cistern with the foot-shaped indentation and ritual oil receptacle to the right
During the First Temple period the cistern was used to store water for agricultural purposes and for the pottery industry. Structures outside the cave date to the Hellenistic period (2nd century BCE) and indicate that the cave was used as both a water reservoir and a place for bathing. Water was collected from the valley and channelled into the cave via a water-filtering basin. A sluice allowed some of the water to be taken into the fields for irrigation.
The various water-filtering basins which channelled water into the cave
In the 4th and 5th century CE, the cave was sanctified and used by Byzantine monks as a Christian holy place and a site of pilgrimage and worship, apparently associating the it with John the Baptist, following local folklore. On its walls are some of the earliest drawings known in local Christian art, including a crude visage of a man, with an unruly head of hair, wearing a tunic with dots, apparently meant to suggest an animal hide. The man grasps a staff and holds up his other hand in a gesture of proclamation. Tabor believes there is little doubt this is John the Baptist, described in the Gospels as a member of the Nazarites―a sect whose followers didn’t cut their hair―and as adopting the dress of the ancient prophets, including a garment woven of camel’s hair. On the opposite wall is a carving of a face that could be meant to symbolize John’s severed head―Herod Antipas cut off John’s head after he dared take the ruler to task over an illicit affair. There are also carved Christian crosses, but no inscriptions have been found to confirm what is merely circumstantial evidence of a link to John the Baptist.
When the area was occupied by the Muslims, the place was abandoned and turned into a landfill for farmers in the area. The excavations revealed some 250,000 pottery shards, many apparently remnants of small water jugs used in baptismal ritual. However the oldest shards―from the mid-second century BCE―may related to the earlier pottery industry nearby for which the water was used.
A general view of the water-filtering basins, with the entrance to the cave bottom left, obscured by brush
You can see a short video showing the interior of the cave, including the carved pictures, below.
In 2005 the site was opened to the public and to pilgrims, and the kibbutz was excited at the prospect of attracting visitors, but since then it has been closed off with razor wire and is not easily accessible; neither is it signposted.