Tuesday 9 June 2015

history - What are the oldest known Jewish graves/tombs?



I was thinking about old Jewish graves.


Certainly there's Ma'aras HaMachpeila in Chevron (was that continuously identified by Jews, or did our identification rely on Arabs' identification) and the like.


Moving much later, people can (and do) visit the graveyard in Safed, which contains the graves and tombstones of R' Yosef Karo and his colleagues, as they've been there for the past 400+ years.


But in between those: what are the oldest continuously-marked Jewish graves? I was told that several graves of Talmudic figures were re-identified by Arizal in the 1500s.



Answer



Some that I know of:





  • There is a grave in Silwan (the old City of David), with an inscription in ancient Hebrew script identifying it as the tomb of "יהו אשר על הבית...". It's definitely from First Temple times, and it is speculated to have been built for Shevna, King Chizkiyahu's faithless chief of staff (Isaiah 22:15ff, Sanhedrin 26a-b).




  • The tombs in the Kidron Valley (Zechariah's tomb, Yad Avshalom, the graves of Bnei Chezir) go back at least to Second Temple times, and perhaps earlier.




  • The tombs of the Sanhedrin, in Sanhedriah (north Jerusalem), are also from the Second Temple period, or maybe shortly thereafter.





  • There are some Jewish catacombs in Rome, with burials and inscriptions dating from the 1st century BCE to the fourth century CE.




  • R' M.M. Kasher, in the appendix to Torah Shleimah on Parshas Bo (vol. 12, I think), discusses some graves from Tzoar, near the Dead Sea, dated 434 or 435 since the Destruction (503 or 504 CE).






And of course, I've forgotten the ones mentioned explicitly in Tanach (aside from the Cave of Machpelah): Rachel's tomb in Beis Lechem, and Yosef's tomb in Shechem (now, unfortunately, destroyed). As far as I know, those have always been known and identified as such.


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