The History And Art Of Abshalom’s Tomb
At the foot of the Mount of Olives, the Kidron Valley (the biblical Valley of Jehoshaphat) runs from the walls of the Old City of Jerusalem southeast down the Judean Desert to the Dead Sea, and a lone road leads down to the valley where three monumental stone tombs may be seen. Standing prominently among them to the farthest north is Yad Avshalom (“Absalom’s Tomb” or “Absalom’s Pillar”), a 66-foot high ancient and enigmatic monumental rock-cut tomb with a conical roof that has been a popular pilgrimage sites since the Late Roman period.
Taking the form of a square, rock-cut structure decorated with Ionic columns in relief and topped with a distinctive conical roof, it marks the shared border between the Valley of Jehoshaphat and the Kidron Valley. It has been compared to Petra in Jordan because of the rock-cut nature of the bottom segment and the style of the finial, with the upper section serving as a funeral monument, the lower section being the actual tomb, and the burial chamber itself accessible only through an entrance and staircase from the upper section.
While it is now known that Yad Avshalom was built about 1,000 years after the death of the Biblical Avshalom, it is not known who commissioned the monument – although the Biblical account in Shmuel Bet (2 Samuel) suggests that it was built by Avshalom himself, as discussed below. In any event, at some unknown point in history it became forever associated with Avshalom’s burial site.
Born in Chevron, Avshalom was the third son of King David. The arrogance and sense of entitlement that led to his undoing was due, in some part, to the fact that he was David’s only son with royal blood on both sides of his family: his mother, Maachah, was the daughter of Talmai, king of Geshur, north of the Sea of Galilee.
We first meet him in 2 Samuel 13 after David’s sin with Batsheva, where the text discusses the lust of David’s eldest son, Amnon, for Tamar, Avshalom’s sister. Amnon employs a devious scheme to isolate his half-sister with him in his private chambers, where he rapes her before casting her aside with vehement hatred. Although the king is furious with Amnon, he cannot bring himself to punish his beloved first-born. But two years later, Avshalom emerges as his sister’s avenger when, at a banquet attended by all the king’s sons, he orders his servants to kill Amnon, after which he flees to his grandfather Talmai in Geshur.
Aware of David’s longing to see Avshalom, Yoav, David’s nephew and general, convinces the king to recall his wayward son, who is restored to his house and family, but without any privilege or rank and without any access to his father. Avshalom repeatedly demands that Yoav go to the king to urge David to grant him an audience and, when Yoav refuses, Avshalom proceeds to burn his fields. (According to biblical commentators, Avshalom was childless at his death because all his children, his three sons and his daughter, predeceased him as a punishment for his having set fire to Yoav’s field. As discussed below, having no surviving children is what led him to build Yad Avshalom.)
Yoav does subsequently plead Avshalom’s case to King David, who fully reconciles with his son. However, Avshalom, a beautifully handsome man with royal pretensions and a love of pomp, was highly popular among the Jewish masses and, ever the unrepentant schemer, he took advantage of this popularity through various devious means to spread public dissatisfaction with David and foment mutiny. Avshalom asked David for leave to go to Chevron, where he promoted and facilitated a mutiny against his father. His backing and military support was such that David and his household, accompanied by the king’s supporters, were forced to flee Jerusalem and to seek refuge beyond the Jordan.
In the ensuing civil war, which the text describes in great detail along with the various military strategies that cost 20,000 lives, David encourages his generals “to deal gently with Avshalom.” However, when Avshalom’s mule becomes caught in the vegetation of a cashew/or pistachio tree and dies beneath its rider, his long and beautiful curly hair, a source of his vanity and pride, became entangled in the branches. When Yoav found him so trapped, he killed him, ending the already waning rebellion. The Davidic dynasty was restored, and the text goes on to describe in great detail the breadth and scope of David’s disconsolation and mourning.
As to Avshalom’s burial, 2 Samuel 18:17-18 provides that:
And they took Avshalom, and they cast him in the forest, into the great pit, and they placed over him as very large heap of stones; and all of Israel fled each to his tents. And Avshalom had taken and established for himself in his lifetime, the monument, which is in the king’s valley, for he said, “I have no son in order to cause (people) to remember my name”; and he called the monument after his own name, and they called it Yad Avshalom until this very day.
Significantly, the text provides only that the monument was erected by Avsalom during his lifetime as a tribute to himself, but there is no mention of his ever being buried there.
Although the sages at the time of the second Beit HaMikdash opposed the building of grand monuments, maintaining that the lives and teachings of the righteous speak for the departed, many wealthy Jewish citizens of Jerusalem would have monuments built adjacent to their family burial caves in accordance with the architectural fashions of the time, often with a pyramid on top – or, in the case of Yad Avshalom, a cone. Yad Avshalom miraculously survived the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 C.E., when the attacking Romans deliberately destroyed Judean monuments like the Tombs of the Kings, but the tomb was found empty when first researched by archaeologists.
According to a local legend, Yad Avshalom originally had the form of a hand at its peak. It is reputed that Napoleon Bonaparte shot it off with a cannon after commenting that “A son who raised his hand against his father deserves to have it shot off.” (Hence, we can render “Yad Avshalom” as, literally, “Avshalom’s hand.”) However, lovely as this story is, Napoleon never reached Jerusalem during his campaign in Eretz Yisrael, and the top of the monument is not broken but, rather, is carved to resemble a lotus flower.
The attribution of Yad Avshalom to the biblical son of King David was quite persistent although, as cited above, the Book of Samuel reports that Avshalom’s body was covered over with stones in a pit in the Wood of Ephraim. Two first century C.E. sources cite the existence of such a monument in Jerusalem. First, Flavius Josephus, the renowned Roman-Jewish historian and military leader best known for writing The Jewish War, refers in his Antiquities (circa 93 C.E.) to a “monument of Avshalom.” In a definitive 19th-century English translation of Josephus, Sigebertus (“Siwart”) Havercamp – a Dutch classicist who published a translation of the complete works of Josephus (one edition was owned by Thomas Jefferson) – states that the “monument of Avshalom” stood at a distance of two furlongs (equivalent to 440 yards, or a quarter of a mile) from Jerusalem. This account makes the location of Yad Avshalom as Avshalom’s true burial place at least geographically (if not architecturally) plausible.
Second, according to the “Copper Scroll” – one of the most important of the Dead Sea Scrolls, discovered in 1952 – during the time before the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 C.E., the Essenes amassed a collection of valuables of all kinds, including gold, silver, vessels, and tithes, and that the men selected as trustees of this communal wealth kept the common treasure hidden in scattered locations throughout Eretz Yisrael within reasonable distance of the Essenic settlements in Qumran. One of these secret hiding places, mentioned in paragraph 49, is described as containing eighty talents of silver buried at a depth of twelve cubits on the western side of the “monument of Absalom.” (None of the hidden treasures has ever been found.)
Yad Avshalom’s exterior design features a Doric frieze and Ionic columns, both being styles originating in ancient Greece and introduced into Judah during the Seleucid Empire, many centuries after Avshalom’s death. At the start of the 20th century, the monument was considered most likely to be that of Alexander Jannaeus, the Chashmonean king of Judea (103-76 B.C.E.), but contemporary archaeologists now date the tomb to the 1st century C.E. In the early 21st century, archaeologists who claim to have found the unknown burial site of Herod the Great observed remarkable similarities between Herod’s tomb at Herodium which, they argue, had to be intentional. They theorize that Yad Avshalom was most likely the tomb of Herod Agrippa, the grandson of Herod the Great and, according to this theory, the “miraculous” survival of Yad Avshalom in 70 C.E. may be because the Romans spared Herod Agrippa’s burial place because he was an ardent supporter of Rome.
Adding to the confusion and uncertainty was the discovery in 2003 of two mid-4th-century inscription on one of the monument walls. The first declared that “This is the tomb of Zachariah, the martyr, the holy priest, the father of John,” suggesting that the monument was considered to be the burial place of the Temple priest Zechariah. (This inscription led to confusion regarding what is today identified as the adjacent Tomb of Zechariah, which has historically been associated by local folklore with the Zechariah ben Yehodaya, a Kohen in the Beit HaMikdash). However, Zechariah lived about 400 years prior to the inscription date, meaning that the inscription was written centuries after the fact during the Byzantine era, when Christian monks in Jerusalem were engaged in attributing Christological meaning to historical figures, including Zechariah, whom they claim was the father of John the Baptist.
The second inscription identified it as “the tomb of Simeon, who was a very just man and a very devoted elder and who was waiting for the consolation of the people,” describing Simeon in the same language set out in a 4th-century manuscript of the Christian Bible.
For centuries, it was the custom among Jewish and other visitors and passers-by to throw stones at the rebellious Avshalom’s monument, and residents of Jerusalem would bring their unruly children to the site to teach them what became of a rebellious son. As a result, for centuries Yad Avshalom was almost completely covered by small rocks until 1925, when the stone piles were removed and the area around the tomb was cleaned.
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Ambroise Vollard (1866-1939), one of the most important dealers in French contemporary art of his time, commissioned Chagall to illustrate the Hebrew Bible. Although he could have completed the project in France, Chagall used the assignment as an excuse to travel to Eretz Yisrael, arriving there in February 1931. Feeling very much at home in a land of Yiddish and Russian speakers, he was impressed by the pioneering spirit of the kibbutzniks and he was deeply moved by the holy places. As he later told a friend, Eretz Yisrael gave him the most vivid impressions he had ever experienced and, immersing himself in his work, he became engrossed with the broad spectrum of Jewish history, the Jewish people, and the Jewish land. As he told Franz Meyer, a Jewish German-Mexican financier, photographer, collector, and Chagall biographer: “I did not see the Bible, I dreamed it. Ever since early childhood, I have been captivated by the Bible. It has always seemed to me and still seems today the greatest source of poetry of all time.”
Exhibited here are two Chagall works depicting King David’s inconsolable mourning for the loss of Avshalom. In the first, an etching, a weeping David is shown sitting on the ground in front of Migdal David (David’s Tower) and a setting sun, representing both the imminent descent of night upon Jerusalem and the descent of darkness upon the king’s soul. The inconsolable king sits in a classic mourning position with his crowned head thrust down, his right hand covering his face, and his left hand embracing himself in pain. In the second, a painting, the king’s garments and skin are painted bright reds and yellows, but a gloomy purple surrounds him in darkness and his closed eye is lined, his grief cutting through the saturated yellow like a rectangular bruise.
Some art historians, who try to understand why Chagall would depict the same story twice, conclude that Chagall’s biblical etchings were inescapably impacted by his personal reactions to contemporary events. They suggest that Chagall may have been thinking about the Holocaust, particularly his discussion of King David in For the Artist Martyrs, his 1950 memorial lamenting the persecution of his fellow Jewish artists during the Holocaust:
Did I know them? Did I go to their studio? Did I contemplate their art from close or from far? And now, I leave myself, my years and go towards their unknown graves. They call me. They pull me with them into their graves, me the innocent one. Me, the guilty one. They ask me: where were you? I ran away… Suddenly, he descends towards me, out of my paintings, the King David I have painted with his harp in his hand. He wants to help me cry, he wants to play the strophes of the Psalms.
Exhibited here is an original albumen photograph by Felix Bonfils, circa 1870-1880, signed and numbered by the photographer in the negative. Bonfils has captured a local walking along the road into the Valley of Kidron where, around the bend, Yad Avshalom points up to the gray Jerusalem sky.
The photographs of Bonfils (1831-1885), which constitute important historical records of people, places, and buildings in the Middle East, are considered comparable in beauty and documentary value to that of archaeologists. He took photographs in Lebanon, Egypt, Syria, Greece, and Turkey, but it is his prints of Eretz Yisrael that provide particularly valuable information to us about the land and people there toward the end of the nineteenth century. Bonfils deliberately selected his subjects to preserve a vast range of information for geographical, ethnographic, biblical, archeological, architectural, and historical studies, and his work was particularly important in that it spanned many decades and encompassed the period when the most momentous changes began to forever alter Middle Eastern landscapes and ways of life.
One of the most highly acclaimed landscape painters of the 19th century, David Roberts (1796-1894) was recognized as one of the great Victorian artist-travelers, and topographical painters whose work was characterized by a distinct exotic, atmospheric, and ethereal style. He became best known for his adventurous journey in 1838-1839 across the Sinai Peninsula to Petra, Jerusalem, and through Eretz Yisrael, and his prolific and faithful final works from that trip became immensely popular to the point that they entered the public consciousness as the definitive view of these biblical sites.
His magnum opus, Views in the Holy Land (six volumes 1842-1849), was considered at the time the most ambitious lithographic work ever published in England. For Jews devoted to Eretz Yisrael, particularly Orthodox Zionists, Roberts’s renderings are achingly beautiful and, although they were done about 200 years ago, they exhibit an antique quality and suggest how the landscapes of the Holy Land may have appeared during ancient biblical times.
Yaakov Ben-Dov (1882-1968), known as “The Father of Hebrew Film,” is broadly credited with establishing the aesthetics of Zionist photography, as he became the pioneering film chronicler of Zionist work in Eretz Yisrael and was among the first to identify the propaganda potential of photography and film. His documentary films and photographs, which uniquely portray the unfolding achievements of Zionism in “real time,” were widely used as propaganda to promote Jewish immigration to Eretz Yisrael, for fundraising among Jewish communities in the Diaspora, and for political worldwide lobbying.
Born in Amsterdam and baptized in the Lutheran Church, Olfert Dapper (1636-1689) was a Dutch geographer, polyglot, classical scholar, and historian. Although he never traveled – in fact, he never set foot out of Amsterdam throughout his entire life – he dedicated himself to geographical studies, documenting his wealth of knowledge by citing the numerous sources in his works. He directed a team of collaborators, publishing voluminous historical and geographical works on China, Asia, Africa, America, and Amsterdam. Dapper’s books are recognized for their illustrations, maps, and engravings of rare beauty, and he is perhaps best known for his publication of Description of Africa (1668), which includes the Yad Avshalom plate exhibited here.
William Henry Bartlett (1809-1854) was a British landscape artist who became one of the foremost illustrators of topography of his generation and is perhaps best known for his numerous drawings rendered into steel engravings. An extensive traveler, he created remarkable images that appeared in a series of travel volumes. In particular, he traveled through the Middle East (1839-1840) and published Walks about the City and Environs of Jerusalem (1840), which included image of Yad Avshalom exhibited here.
Richard Pococke (1704-1765), an English-born churchman, inveterate traveler, and travel writer who served as a bishop for various dioceses of the Church of Ireland, is best known for his travel writings and diaries. As one of the more scholarly grand tourists of his day, he visited Eretz Yisrael during a trip through the Middle East (1737-1741), which were later published in his Description of the East and Some Other Countries (1743).
Born a Jew, Peter Bergheim (1813-1895) emigrated to England in 1834, where he converted to Christianity. Arriving in Eretz Yisrael in 1838, became one of the first resident photographers of Jerusalem and he established a successful photography shop in the Old City. He purchased the land around Tel Gezer and the village of Abu Shusha and established a modern agricultural farm, one of the first in Eretz Yisrael to use modern agricultural methods and mechanical tools (1872). He also established in Jerusalem near the Damascus Gate the first industrial flour mill in Israel operated by steam (1877), which became renowned for its quality, and he built a new house in Jerusalem (1880), which bears his name to this day (1880).
Sadly, his son was murdered by local Arabs, who had been attacking the agricultural farm during its entire existence (1885). He died bankrupt, leaving behind only a series of photographs of Jerusalem, including this photo of Yad Avshalom.
Ephraim Moshe Lilien (1874-1925), an art nouveau illustrator, master printmaker, and award-winning photographer, was the greatest contributor to the early visual vocabulary of the Zionist movement. His etchings, executed mainly in India ink, show a crisp, elegant line and a strong contrast between black and white areas, and many have entered the collective Jewish consciousness, even while the artist remains generally unrecognized. For example, he took the photograph of Herzl, where he stands on the Rhine Bridge in Basel, Switzerland in 1901, which has become the definitive pictorial representation of the Father of Modern Zionism. Along with Boris Schatz and others, he was a member of the committee formed to establish the Bezalel School of Art in Jerusalem (1905).
Born in Prussia, Charles Bierstadt (1819-1903) was an American photographer who specialized in stereoscopic views, particularly of Niagara Falls and Yosemite. In 1873, he traveled for five months to Europe, Eretz Yisrael, Egypt, and Tripoli to take photographs published the next year, including the stereoscope photograph of Yad Avshalom shown here.
The Chocolat Pupier brand was created in Saint-Étienne, France, in the 1860s by Jean-Louis Pupier. The company included trade cards with its products and collectors could redeem a full set for a gift. In 1938, the company issued a series of chocolate trade cards featuring countries of the world, and the Eretz Yisrael series included religious sites, a map, a Zionist flag, the youth camp and agricultural school at Ben Shemen, and views of Jerusalem, including the Yad Avshalom card exhibited here.
From left to right: Bernea Islands, Scotland; Gambia; Jerusalem Pilgermarke (“pilgrim’s tokens” labels, JNF label, Guyana, JNF label.
