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Southeastern ridge of Jerusalem · Gihon Spring to the Pool of Siloam · c. 4500 BC – today
Colour = era
The base map is deliberately grey. Colour belongs to time: each of the five eras has its own hue, and the phases inside an era are shades of it. The blue thread — spring, tunnel, pool — is drawn in every phase, because the water is the one thing that never changed.
Line = how sure we are
Solid means excavated and not seriously disputed. Long dashes mean the line is partly reconstructed between excavated points. Short dashes mean scholars disagree about its date or identification. Dotted means it is drawn only to help you read the map. Hatching marks destruction and collapse.
Four ways to look
Plan looks straight down and numbers each element to the list on the right. Section cuts straight across the ridge at a station you choose, so you can see how far the spring sits below the crest. Elevation is the honest one: the whole ridge across the top, and a true-scale window below it that you move by clicking the strip. 3D lets you orbit the landform.
Moving around
Drag the timeline, or press the left and right arrow keys to step one phase at a time. The sentence under the slider says what changed. Everything an expert might want — opacities, height exaggeration, x-ray, satellite alignment — sits behind Expert controls in the left column.
This is a reading of published excavation, not a photograph of the past. Where the evidence is contested — the date of the Stepped Stone Structure, the Large Stone Structure as a Davidic palace, Nehemiah's wall, the Seleucid Akra — the disagreement is shown rather than resolved, and the essay for each phase sets out both sides.
Prepared by Taylor Halverson, Ph.D. · Beta
Thirteen phases of the southeastern ridge of Jerusalem, from the first spring-side settlement to the archaeological park standing there now, drawn on one fixed footprint so that every period can be laid over every other. Each phase carries the same four views — plan, section, elevation, 3D — and an essay setting out what was found, who found it, and what remains argued.
Beta
Phase dates, structure footprints and the identification of individual buildings are the least settled parts of this reconstruction. Where the published evidence is itself unsettled, the drawing says so through its line weight rather than quietly choosing a side.
On the terrain
The landform is built from measured points: the Gihon Spring at 636 m, the Pool of Siloam at 635.7 m, the ridge crest falling from about 725 m at the north to 624 m at the south end. Hezekiah's Tunnel drops roughly 30 cm over its 533 m, and the model holds that. Slopes between those anchors are reasoned, not surveyed.
On vertical exaggeration
The ridge is genuinely subtle, so the 3D view exaggerates height — ×1.6 by default — to make it legible. The factor is stated on screen at all times and the slider will return it to true 1:1. Plan distances are never exaggerated.
Sources
Published excavation from Warren, Parker and Vincent, Weill, Macalister, Kenyon, Shiloh, Avigad, Reich and Shukron, Mazar, and the current Givati Parking Lot and Pilgrimage Road work; elevations from published spot heights; gradients from the tunnel surveys. The full list, and who is responsible for the confidence tags, is under Credits.
Scripture text
Scripture quotations are from the American Standard Version (ASV, 1901), a public-domain translation — no permission from a Bible publisher is needed. The commentary beside each reference is the author's own, and the identification of a verse with a feature on the ground is an argument, not a fact — 2 Samuel 5:8 and the Spring Tower being the clearest case.
The flanks are modelled
The Kidron and Tyropoeon valley sides are interpolated between a few published spot heights. The crest line and the water system are reliable; the flanks are an informed sketch, and the cross-ridge cut is a reconstruction rather than a measured section.
Your own imagery
A satellite photograph from your own device can be loaded into the plan view and aligned to the ridge with scale, rotation, stretch and pan. It is held on this device.
Corrections are welcome — particularly measured elevations for the eastern and western flanks, which are the weakest part of the landform.
Sources, attributions and terms
These drawings are a reading of published excavation. This page records who found and published the material they rest on, which parts of the landform are measured and which are modelled, and the terms of use.
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Scripture is quoted from the American Standard Version (ASV, 1901), public domain. Project Created by Taylor Halverson, Ph.D. (Beta mode)
City of David — an interactive atlas
1. What you're getting
This product is a Beta: an interactive model of the City of David's building phases, with accompanying essays and reference material, published by Taylor Halverson, Ph.D. ("Publisher"). It is a teaching aid and reconstruction, not a survey document — see the "How to read this" and "The model" tabs for what that means.
2. License to use
Publisher grants the purchaser or recipient a personal, non-exclusive, non-transferable license to view and use this product for personal study, teaching, and classroom use. Redistribution of the product file itself, or extraction of its model, essays, or illustrations for republication, requires Publisher's prior written permission. Third-party components (typefaces, code libraries) remain under their own licenses — see the Credits tab and THIRD_PARTY_NOTICES.md.
3. Scripture text
Scripture quotations are from the American Standard Version (1901), a translation whose U.S. copyright has expired. Its public-domain status is claimed for the United States only and has not been separately verified for every distribution territory.
4. Refunds
If this product was purchased through a store or platform, that platform's refund policy governs first. Where Publisher sells directly, a full refund is available on request within 14 days of purchase, provided the product has not been redistributed; request a refund via the contact below.
5. No warranty of scholarly conclusion
Because this is a Beta reconstruction of a disputed archaeological site, Publisher makes no warranty that any specific dating, identification, or interpretation shown will not be revised in a later edition. The product is provided "as is" for its stated teaching purpose.
6. Limitation of liability
To the extent permitted by law, Publisher's liability for any claim arising from this product is limited to the amount paid for it.
7. Governing law & contact
Contact for licensing, refunds, or rights questions: insights.taylorhalverson.com. The user agrees that any legal action, dispute, or proceeding arising out of or relating to this product must be brought exclusively in the state or federal courts located in Utah County, Utah. Both parties irrevocably consent to the personal jurisdiction of these courts and waive any objection based on improper venue or inconvenient forum.
Author · Teacher · Tour leader · Scripture scholar
Taylor Halverson is a scholar of scripture and a teacher of learners — an entrepreneurship professor in the BYU Marriott School of Business who spends his working life helping people find and act on the best ideas and tools available to them.
He is the author and editor of more than fifty books and nearly a thousand articles and blog posts, and a builder of scripture study resources: the ScripturePlus app with Scripture Central, whose scripture YouTube channel he co-hosted to more than fifty million views, and BYU's Virtual Scripture Group, whose team spent more than five years reconstructing New Testament Jerusalem in three dimensions. This visualization of the City of David belongs to that same body of work — tools made so that ordinary readers can see what specialists see.
He leads tours to Israel and the Middle East, China, India, Central America, Europe, and the national parks of the American West, where he unfolds how geology, geography, civilization, and scriptural texts created our beautiful present day.
Academic training
Two doctorates in two separate fields — the ancient world, and the design of learning. Both of them are in this tool.
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What you can see
Hover any row to find it on the drawing. The tag says how certain archaeologists are. This list is the full, screen-reader-accessible record of everything drawn on the map for this phase.
Why the drawing looks empty
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In scripture
Passages that name what is drawn here, or that happen on this ground. Turn them off in the controls at left.
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You have reached today
Everything you have just scrolled through is buried under a working village and an archaeological park roughly six hundred metres long. People still live above it, water still runs through the tunnel, and the digging is not finished.
What is still argued about
Whether the Large Stone Structure is a tenth-century palace, a later building, or several buildings of different dates read as one.
How big tenth-century Jerusalem actually was — a capital, or a modest highland town.
Who cut the Middle Bronze pool and shaft system, and how much of it was ever a secret passage at all.
If you want to go further
Read the excavation reports rather than the summaries — Shiloh, Reich and Shukron, Mazar. They disagree with each other in print, which is the most useful thing about them.
Walk the tunnel if you ever get the chance. Five hundred and thirty-three metres of rock, cut by two teams working towards each other, is a different fact once your shoulders have touched both walls.
Then run the slider again from the beginning and watch only the water. The whole city is an argument about one spring.
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