On the eighth day of the Hebrew month of Elul (August 18, 1983), the Israeli authorities opened to the public a building that had been closed for 1,913 years to the day. The building, in ancient Jerusalem’s Upper City, was a workshop that was stormed by Roman soldiers on the eighth of Elul, 70 A.D., the year the Romans destroyed Jerusalem and burned the Jewish Temple. Now,.after ten years of digging in the Upper City, the eminent Israeli archaeologist Nahman Avigad, who directed the excavations that uncovered the workshop, has published his dramatic and often heart-rending finds of the human […]
