Archaeologists in Jerusalem have discovered a quarry, where stones paving a road Jesus walked would have been mined.
Stone from the site in southeast Jerusalem pave the 2000 year old ‘Pilgrim’s Road’, thought to lead to the pool of Siloam, where Jesus healed a blind man (John 9).
The Israel Antiquities Authority found several building stones at the site which matched those found at the Pilgrim’s Road site two miles away.
Researchers found that Pilgrim’s Road, which connected the City of David to the Temple, had paving slabs of the same size and depth as those at the building site.
Slabs from both sites bore identical markings, caused by from cutting trenches around the rock and extracting it from the ground.
The stones are estimated to weigh around 2.5 tons, and would have been used for projects ordered by King Herod in the first Century BCE.
The IAA's co-leaders Michael Chernin and Lara Shilov said: “It is reasonable to assume, with due caution, that at least some of the building stones extracted here were intended to be used as pavement slabs for Jerusalem's streets in that period.”
“Amazingly, it turns out that the paving stones of this street are exactly the same size and thickness, and share the identical geological signature as the stone slabs that were extracted from the quarry now being exposed in Har Hotzvim.”