The Fountain Gate is a landmark critical for determining the site of the Solomonic Temple and for locating King David’s lost tomb. The critical question is “Where in the wall of the ancient City of David is the Fountain Gate?” The answer may surprise you!

by Bill Lavers

The Fountain Gate of Nehemiah 2:15 is a landmark crucial for determining the exact site of the Solomonic Temple and for the location of the lost tomb of King David. The Hebrew Scriptures, however, provide little if anything of a definitive nature that would precisely locate it. The common presumption is that the Fountain Gate was in the lower part of the Kidron Valley, near the reservoir into which the water of Hezekiah’s tunnel ran, based largely on the work of Bliss and Dickie (Bliss and Dickie 1898:327-28; Mare 1987:121-122; Mazar 1975:195). There is significant evidence, however, to suggest that this Fountain Gate was actually in area of the Gihon Spring.

The question to resolve first, of course, is why the location of the Fountain Gate is of any great relevance. There are many elusive geographical details and facts about the ancient south-east ridge of Jerusalem which are unknown. That may remain the case for the foreseeable future. Except for being of scholarly interest, however, such esoteric information is not necessarily of any critical significance. That is not the case with the Fountain Gate, however, for it is an important key in determining the location of King David’s Tomb.

Gary Arvidson, in his In search of King David’s Lost Tomb & Treasure (Arvidson 2001) argues that the David’s Tomb complex may not only contain the former tabernacle of David, wherein was the Ark of the Covenant, but wealth of such magnitude that fortune hunters, had they known of it, would have devoted their lives to locating it. If that be the case, and I believe it is, it is no wonder why King David acted to ensure that his royal tomb was so well hidden that it could not be easily violated. Of greater importance than the threat of these grave robbers, however, was its safeguarding from the successive ancient world powers who came to dominate Israel, and particularly Jerusalem — the Babylonians, the Persians, the Greeks and Seleucids, and finally the Romans. The precautions taken resulted in the tomb complex remaining untouched and undiscovered for nearly three millennia. Moreover, over time even the residents of Jerusalem lost all knowledge of the exact position of the Gate which held the key to the Tomb’s location. The David’s tomb complex and its contents became lost in antiquity.

Landmarks

Landmarks and conditions that Nehemiah reported in Nehemiah 2 and Nehemiah 3 were exact to the smallest detail. The enumeration of the builders, the relative positions of the gates, and the respective portions of the wall as they were rebuilt, are all correctly described in 32 verses of his third chapter. The account opens with the Sheep Gate and the portion of the wall adjoining it, as built by the priests, and concludes with the goldsmiths and merchants who built up to the Sheep Gate. Throughout, it is almost constantly said of the several parties of builders that they built by the side of, or next to, the party previously named. Hence, we are justified in inferring that the course of the wall is adhered to throughout, and that the gates are mentioned in the actual order in which they were found in the walls.

My main intention, however, is to establish the correct location of the Fountain Gate, and to show how the Hebrew Scriptures point to it as having been in the vicinity of the Gihon spring rather than at the south-eastern extremity of the south-east ridge. The very reason it was so named is, in itself, a sure indication that it had to have been the primary means of access to the one and only perennial spring or fountain of water servicing the ancient city of David.

The Persian Court of Artaxerxes

The passage of scripture with which we must begin this investigation, strange as it may at first appear, takes us not to that area of Jerusalem where the gates were to be found, but a thousand miles away to the east, to the Persian city of Shushan or Susa. There we find Nehemiah, who identifies himself as cupbearer to the king, obtaining permission from the Persian king to take a limited leave of absence, from his duties at Shushan, to go to Judah to rebuild Jerusalem. News had reached him of the desolate state of the city and its urgent need for a re-building program. The account begins in the second chapter of Nehemiah, where we see him privately before the Persian king Artaxerxes and his queen, displaying a sad and dejected look, obviously awaiting the king to ask him why so, in order to seek relief for Jerusalem. Seeing this, Artaxerxes demanded to know why Nehemiah would come before him sorrowful when he was not sick. The question terrified Nehemiah. He, knowing that he had violated a royal protocol by displaying an inappropriate emotion before the king and queen, carefully responded “Why should my face not be sad when the city, the place of my fathers’ tombs, lies desolate and its gates have been consumed by fire?” The king, recognizing that he wanted something, asked Nehemiah what it was? He requested for leave to go to Jerusalem to rebuild the city and for timber “to make beams for the gates of the fortress which is by the temple, for the wall of the city, and for the house” in which he would reside (Nehemiah 2:1-8).

The king granted his request which undoubtedly changed his countenance considerably. Notice the first of the two reasons that Nehemiah gave the king. It was obviously uppermost in his mind at the time, and undoubtedly the cause of the greater degree of the consternation that weighed so heavily upon him. The emphasis lay on the fact that: “the city, the place of my fathers’ tombs, lies desolate” (Nehemiah 2:3). Take note of these words, because this brief remark appears to have been the salient factor which led Nehemiah to make his secret midnight ride around a certain section of the wall of Jerusalem, just three days after his arrival in the city. With that brief, but necessary introduction, we can now quickly go forward and pick up the story with Nehemiah’s arrival in Jerusalem.

Nehemiah’s Secret Mission

Nehemiah records “So I came to Jerusalem and was there three days. And I arose in the night, I and a few men with me. I did not tell any one what my God was putting into my mind to do for Jerusalem” (Nehemiah 2:11-12). Why did he wait three days within the city before visiting the wall at night? Was it to lessen any undue attention owing to his arrival from the Persian capital? Obviously he did not want anyone to know what he was up to that night. The sense of the text is that God gave Nehemiah a mission to carry out “at” or “in” Jerusalem far more important than the rebuilding of the city wall and putting up some buildings. He records a rather surprising disclosure concerning an important mission, which he reports that God was giving him to carry out, obviously with the minimum amount of delay. I find it strange that biblical writers and researchers give so little consideration to this important charge laid upon Nehemiah. They either ignore it completely, or consider it to mean that he had been commanded to make a covert inspection of the state of the walls and gates of the city, as his actions recorded in verse 13 appear to indicate. Yet in context that conclusion makes absolutely no sense when the specific purpose for which Nehemiah came to Jerusalem is thoroughly appreciated, which was to rebuild the wall together with the many gates that had been consumed with fire. If that task was his sole purpose then there was no need for such secrecy.

Such a task could in no way be undertaken, or even planned, without first making a public and open, totally objective, and comprehensive assessment of the damage that the wall had sustained. Only then could the necessary stone, as well as the timber for the gates and their doors, be made available. Then, of course, capable and respected leaders had to be selected who, together with their respective working parties, became responsible for the rebuilding of the many sections and varying lengths of the wall according to the degree of damage those sections had suffered in the siege.

All these, and many other responsibilities could not even have been countenanced by Nehemiah without engaging himself in open and lengthy discussions with both the priests and principal men of the Jews. From the first day of his arrival in the city, he would have called them together and told them of the commission he had been given and the authority that had been vested in him by the Persian king; of the letters he had been given to the governors of the provinces west of the Euphrates, and to Asaph, the keeper of the royal forest, showing the authority that had been given him to secure timber for the many gates that had to be made.

We are speaking here not only of the strong frameworks and doors required for the city’s defenses, but the large defensive gates for the citadel that formerly pertained to, and acted as the fortress that protected the Temple. One further structure that Nehemiah had been given permission to build, and for which the king had ordered timber to be provided, was a house for himself, which would have been of the nature of a governor’s residence from which he could govern and conduct the administration of the city (Nehemiah 2:8). All these and many other details would have been considered in frank and open discussion with both the priests and the recognized leaders of the Jews who dwelt in and around Jerusalem.

In his opening verses, Nehemiah describes the report he was given concerning Jerusalem by certain men of Judah who had recently arrived in Shushan. There is little doubt that they had set out from Judea with the specific intention of speaking with Nehemiah, because the one who appears to have been the leader of the group was either a brother or a near relative to him. Look at what Nehemiah tells us in Verse 23 of his opening chapter: “That Hanani, one of my brethren, came, he and certain men of Judah; and I asked them concerning the Jews that had escaped, which were left of the captivity, and concerning Jerusalem. And they said unto me, ‘The remnant that is left of the captivity there in the Province (of Judah) are in great affliction and reproach: the wall of Jerusalem also is broken down, and the gates thereof are burned with fire’” (Nehemiah 1:2-3).

It is obvious, therefore, from what we have so far discussed, that Nehemiah, having then arrived in Jerusalem with the full authorization of the Persian king to restore the strong defensive walls and gates of Jerusalem, would have lost no time in calling all the leading men of the area together. He needed to gain their full support and participation in the massive program of reconstruction that faced them. I have shown that, in doing this, there would have been no conceivable reason for Nehemiah to have made a secret inspection of the walls to assess the damage they had sustained in the siege. All those details would have already been well known to the men who had lived in the midst of that desolation for so long. The secrecy, therefore, with which he made his midnight ride around the southern half of Jerusalem, as we find recorded in Nehemiah 2:12-14, had to have related to an altogether different matter. As Nehemiah says in verse 12, it was a mission that “God had put in my heart to do,” a matter which he would have divulged only to those few men he had chosen to accompany him. They would have been the same men, no doubt, who had come with him from the king’s palace in Shushan, because it is clear from the wording of that verse that God had made this known to Nehemiah before he left Persia.

The Secret Excursion

Let’s continue now, then, with the details of that secret excursion, as related in verses 13-15. “And I went out by night by the gate of the valley, even before the dragon well, and to the dung port, and viewed the walls of Jerusalem, which were broken down, and the gates thereof were consumed with fire”. Nehemiah left by the Valley Gate on the western side of the city and made his way to the Dung Gate a thousand cubits (about 1/3 of a mile) away at its southern point. He viewed the state of the wall, and saw how the gates had been burned. On this half of the journey, he did nothing that could not have been done during the hours of daylight, and with the full approval of the Jews. There was no need for secrecy.

But now notice what he did next. “Then I went on to the gate of the fountain, and to the king’s pool: but there was no place for the beast that was under me to pass” (Nehemiah 2:14). It is generally understood through a simple reading of this verse, that Nehemiah succeeded in reaching the Fountain Gate, but was hindered from going further by some obstruction. By assigning this meaning to his words, the reader immediately loses sight of the specific purpose for which Nehemiah made this midnight journey. Here is the problem. This was a matter altogether different from an assessment of the damage to the walls. He was carrying out a commission he said God had put within his heart to do when he got to Jerusalem. That directive had to be done without divulging the fact to anyone other than those whom he chose to accompany him in its execution.

There is no doubt, considering the manner in which the verse is worded in the King James and certain other versions, that Nehemiah succeeded in completing his mission. How, then, is verse 14 to be understood? Are we expected to be gifted with special insight to see beyond the simple meaning of the words used? Of course not! We need to be sufficiently perceptive and astute enough to understand that a simple preposition like the word to can also be translated as towards. That was the sense in which Nehemiah used the word, and the way he expected it to be read. At least the translators of the New International Version of the Bible recognized that as being the case and correctly translated it as such.

By giving the preposition its intended meaning, we are left in no doubt of what Nehemiah is saying. The fact that someone went to a specified location is usually read with the sense that the action was, in fact, completed. But by using the preposition in the sense of going towards an objective, one naturally understands it as an on-going intention that is still to be accomplished. So let us read that verse as we find it translated in the NIV: “Then I moved on towards the Fountain Gate and the King’s Pool, but there was not enough room for my mount to get through.”

Nehemiah, then, having reached the Dung Gate, also translated the Refuse Gate, and viewed the state of the walls thus far, continued on with the specific intention of going on to the Fountain Gate and the King’s Pool, but was hindered from reaching them by an unforeseen obstacle that he and his small party encountered enroute. This shows in a clearer way, that the specific purpose of Nehemiah’s night journey was not to make a covert assessment of the damage to the wall and the gates, but to make a careful inspection either of the Fountain Gate and the King’s Pool, or of some undisclosed feature in that immediate vicinity. Exactly what it was, we are not told, but it had to have been of vital importance, and of such a nature that it was neither to be made known at that time, nor mention made of the fact that Nehemiah had carried out his God given assignment. When Nehemiah traveled along the southeastern section of city wall by night he found the route impassable as the terraces known as the Millo had collapsed covering the old Jebusite-Davidic wall making the route along it impassible. The debris impeded Nehemiah’s further progress along the old wall as he followed its course northward from the Dung Gate. Writing about her work in the city of David, Kathleen Kenyon reported what Nehemiah encountered:

Our excavations on the eastern slopes have revealed the tumbled mass of stones that blocked the way of Nehemiah’s donkey. We also know why the ruins were so much worse on the east side than the west, for it was only here that the buildings were terraced down into the valley in such a way that damage to the walls would result in wholesale devastation. A breach in the city wall at the base would bring down the structures supported against its rear, and it would need only a few winter’s rains for the chain of collapse to spread up to the summit and far to either side.

Kenyon 1967:108.

This nature of the debris, in terms of both its mass and composition, on a steep slope has continued to frustrate the work of archaeologists along this section. They have to excavate through it to reach the level of the original city and its walls.^F11 The latter part of verse 14 clearly says that it was an obstruction to the beast only, not to Nehemiah and his companions. The men would have had to clamber over the rocks and debris; but it would have proved impossible for the animal that Nehemiah was riding.

Now Nehemiah could well have turned back at this point, had he simply been assessing the damage to the walls. But that was not the purpose for which he had made this secret midnight excursion. He had to fulfil the mission that God had put within his heart to do, and that required him to reach the area wherein lay the Fountain Gate and the King’s Pool. This required him to backtrack, therefore, and find a different approach by which he could reach his destination. The alternative route he took is briefly described in verse 15: Then went I up in the night by the brook and viewed the wall, and turned back, and entered by the gate of the valley, and so returned. There is no hint that he made a complete circuit about the old city wall. The sense is that he visited the area of the wall near the Gihon and simply went back by the route he came.

The path which Nehemiah followed was along the outside of the city wall some way up the eastern side of the ridge. The sharply sloping manner in which the ground would have fallen away to the valley floor below, would therefore have required him and his party to have returned some appreciable distance back along the path to a point that gave safe and easy access down into the valley of the Kidron. This could well have meant retracing their steps as far back as the Dung Gate, which is why I said above that, had Nehemiah’s intention simply been the viewing of the wall, he would no doubt have discontinued the assessment and made his way back to the Valley Gate. There is one other point worth considering here.

What particular significance is there in learning that the path was blocked and further progress by the beast carrying Nehemiah thereby rendered impracticable? None whatsoever if Nehemiah was simply intent on viewing the wall; but meaningful if it related to his mission. Those few additional words show us how wholly committed Nehemiah was to the task he had to perform. No obstacle was going to prevent him from doing it no matter how much of a detour he had to make to circumvent it. So here we see him intent on making his way down into the Kidron Valley so as to follow its course back towards his objective. He is said, in verse 15, to have done that by the brook―then went I up in the night by the brook. The Hebrew word used here can also be rendered as stream, or river. Kenyon explains that “before it was choked with debris, [the Kidron] ran with water, but only during winter storms” (Kenyon 1974:38). Since the valley to the north of the area of the Gihon spring was dry but for the rainy season when runoff from the higher elevations was present, the verse is effectively telling us that Nehemiah could not have continued on by this brook itself any further than the Gihon itself because that was where the brook began. So, from the point where he was obliged to continue his journey by this stream, he could have done so only as far as the Gihon spring. Above that point there was only the dry bed evidencing seasonal runoff.

The King’s Pool

Now, as I have said before, the Fountain Gate has long been thought to have been located a little to the north of the Dung Gate on the lower south-eastern side of the city of David. In consequence, the King’s Pool which Nehemiah closely associates with it has naturally come to be identified with the reservoir that Hezekiah constructed on the west side of the city of David specifically to receive the waters from the Gihon via the tunnel his engineers made beneath the city.

The locations thus assigned to these two important features, however, immediately raise a problem, because it places them on opposite sides of the city. To be closely associated, as Nehemiah leads us to understand, the Fountain Gate should have been in the western wall of the city, not the eastern one. Furthermore, Nehemiah would have reached the area of the reservoir, or pool, even before he arrived at the Dung Gate, yet we do not find him stopping at that point in the western wall which would have been directly adjacent to it. Instead, having reached the Dung Gate, his intention was to press on toward the pool. These two considerations demonstrate that those who would place the Fountain Gate and the King’s pool at the southern end of the city have a theory that just does not hold water, to use an appropriate pun. The one detail which we are not able to learn from these scriptures, is the reason why Nehemiah went and made a secret inspection of that area around the Fountain Gate and the King’s Pool. From the emphasis that Nehemiah laid on the place of his fathers’ sepulchers, when Artaxerxes sought the reason for his dejection as he stood before him in the palace of Shushan, there seems little doubt that his commission related in some way to the David’s Tomb complex.

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About the Author

After a sixteen-year career in the Royal Air Force, which included a three-year stint in Egypt and an assignment in Germany throughout the Berlin Airlift, Bill Lavers returned to university in the United Kingdom and graduated in 1966. There he pursued the study of the Bible and theology. Following university, he worked in England as a theological writer for about a decade and then elected to pursue a career in the electronics industry. His continuing interest in the Hebrew Scriptures, however, led him to the study and research of the lost tomb and treasure of King David. He devoted much of his time to biblical exegesis. His research venue in the early 2000s was the location of the Fountain Gate in the City of David. This post is an updated reprint from bibarch.com.