Prepared by Taylor Halverson, Ph.D.
Beta. Wall lines, dates, elevations and identifications are still being reviewed. Where scholars disagree — the course of the Second Temple period’s First and Second Walls, how far the Western Hill was settled before Hezekiah, where the Antonia stood, the line of the city’s southern wall in each age — the map draws the reading most excavators have accepted, marks it as reconstructed, and the essay says so.
Thirteen phases of one city, drawn in a single set of real-world coordinates, so that each age sits over the others exactly as the archaeology does — and over the streets you are standing in today.
The Old City is almost impossible to read on the ground, and the reason is specific: the walls around it are Ottoman, finished in 1538, and they do not enclose the ancient city. They follow the Roman line, which cut off the ridge Jerusalem actually began on. So a visitor looking for the Jerusalem of the Gospels is standing inside a Turkish wall, on a Roman grid, under Mamluk façades, looking for a city that lies partly outside the gate and ten metres below the pavement.
No photograph can show that, and neither can a map of one period. What this tool does is hold the frame still and change the age: the Ottoman circuit stays drawn in blue on every phase, so every ancient wall, valley, pool and street can be read against the one boundary a visitor can actually see. Fade the modern city up and down beneath it; switch the base to satellite and watch the Herodian Upper City land on the rooftops of the Jewish Quarter. Each phase carries an essay written to be read straight through rather than consulted.
The Ottoman wall is not drawn by eye. It is anchored on published coordinates for all eight gates and the corner towers, and checked against the documented circuit length of about 4,018 m and enclosed area of about 0.9 km²; the fit at each gate is within roughly 20 m. Everything ancient is a reconstruction. Positions come from published excavation and survey work — Warren and Wilson’s surveys for the Palestine Exploration Fund, the Broad Wall and Israelite Tower in the Jewish Quarter, the Ophel and City of David excavations, the Western Wall tunnels and the Robinson’s Arch plaza, the Pool of Siloam and the Cardo — and are placed in the same coordinate frame as the modern map.
A dashed line always means reconstructed or disputed. A solid ancient line means a course confirmed by excavation. Ground levels are the least certain thing here: in much of the Old City the present pavement lies several metres above the Roman surface, and the Tyropoeon Valley — today’s Western Wall plaza and the street down to the Dung Gate — is filled to a depth the cross-section shows but no excavation has exposed continuously. The cross-section is a true-scale schematic cut, not a survey drawing.
Surveys and excavations: C. Warren and C. R. Wilson, Survey of Western Palestine and the Ordnance Survey of Jerusalem (1865–1884); N. Avigad, Jewish Quarter excavations (Broad Wall, Israelite Tower); B. Mazar and E. Mazar, Ophel and Temple Mount excavations; K. Kenyon and Y. Shiloh, City of David; R. Reich and E. Shukron, Pool of Siloam and the Gihon fortifications; the Madaba mosaic map (6th c.) for the Byzantine Cardo and Nea Church.
Ancient sources: 2 Samuel 5; 2 Kings 20 and 25; 2 Chronicles 32; Isaiah 22; Nehemiah 2–3 and 12; the Gospels; Josephus, Jewish War V (the three walls, the Temple, the Antonia); Eusebius, Onomasticon; the Bordeaux Pilgrim (333); Mujir al-Din (1495).
Study week sources: each week lists the excavation reports and ancient sources its specific claims rest on, in the panel and on the printed handout.
Relief: hillshade rendered by MapLibre from Mapzen terrain tiles on AWS Open Data (public-domain and open elevation sources).
Base imagery: © Mapbox © OpenStreetMap contributors, all four basemaps; Sentinel-2 cloudless — s2maps.eu by EOX IT Services GmbH, containing modified Copernicus Sentinel data 2016 (satellite). Full credits are under Attributions & licences.
Plans are schematic reconstructions in a common coordinate frame, not survey drawings. This is a teaching aid, not a measured record. Corrections are welcome — this is a Beta.
One city, thirteen phases, always in the same frame at the same scale unless you move it. Everything else here is a way of asking a question about that frame — what changed, what survived, what is buried, and where it sits on the ground today.
The timeline along the bottom is the main control: thirteen phases in date order. Click any tick, or drag the scrubber through them. The left and right arrow keys step one phase at a time, and the right-hand panel changes to that period’s essay as you go.
The blue circuit is today’s wall — Suleiman’s, 1538 — and it is drawn on every single phase, whether or not it existed yet. That is deliberate: it is the one line your group can see with their own eyes, so it works as the ruler against which every older city is measured. Watch the Canaanite city sit almost entirely outside it to the south, and the Herodian city spill past it in the same direction.
Fades the present-day street map up and down beneath the reconstruction. All the way down and you have a clean historical plan; all the way up and you can see which modern alley runs along a Roman colonnade. Sweeping it slowly is the single most useful gesture in the tool.
The panel at the bottom right of the map lets you show and hide each wall circuit independently, which is the fastest way to settle the question learners actually have. In the broader Late Second Temple view, all four comparison circuits appear: the First Wall, Hasmonean and kept by Herod, running from the Citadel along the Broad Wall line and down to the Pool of Siloam; the Second Wall, standing by AD 33, from the Gennath Gate north-east to the Antonia — the line that leaves Golgotha outside the city at the crucifixion; the Third Wall, begun by Agrippa I in AD 41–44 to enclose Bezetha far to the north and finished barely in time for the siege of AD 70, after Jesus’ ministry; and today’s wall of 1538. Select “Jesus’ ministry only” in the panel to hide the Third Wall. Turn off all but two and the comparison your group needs is on the screen by itself. Click the panel heading to collapse it.
Street map is today’s street layout from Mapbox, on OpenStreetMap data, drawn in sepia so it stays quiet under this map’s labels — use it when the question is which modern lane runs along an ancient line. Satellite is Copernicus Sentinel-2 imagery at ten metres to the pixel. That resolution is the trade: it will show a group the ridge, the two ravines and the olive terraces on the Mount of Olives, and it will not show them individual rooftops — it softens as the view closes in past the whole city. Street names are as signposted locally; every coloured label on the map is the project’s own, in English.
The wide tan bands running down the map are the valley floors — Kidron on the east, Hinnom to the south and west, Tyropoeon through the middle, each labelled on the map. The Tyropoeon is the one to point out: it is no longer visible at all, because the centuries filled it in and paved over it.
Shades the map with real terrain hillshading, so the ravines that made the city defensible stop reading as flat ground. It draws over the street map: relief and satellite are two pictures of the same hillside, so turning one on turns the other off. With it on you can see the saddle between the City of David ridge and the Temple Mount, the Kidron cutting away to the east, the Hinnom curving round the south and west, and the shallow Tyropoeon dividing the Western Hill from the Eastern — the single fact that explains why the city sits exactly where it does. Relief applies to the two street maps; the satellite view has its own shadows.
Forces the stacked one-column layout at any window size: map full width, essay beneath it, timeline pinned to the bottom. Phones and small tablets get that layout automatically — this button is for checking what your group will see before you send them the link, and for using the same layout in a narrow window on a laptop. To leave it, press the same button (it reads Exit phone view while on) or the dark chip at the top right of the map.
One search box over everything: all sixty-odd sites, the thirteen era layers, and every study week. Type Bethesda and you get the pool; type Luke 10 and you get the week; type Herod and you get the era. Choosing a site flies the map to it and opens a note with its confidence tag, the one-line reason where there is one, and which weeks read it — so a site is reachable whether or not a week happens to include it.
Each week shows how far its sites are apart in the order the reading names them, with the total descent and climb and the highest and lowest points. This is the physical fact people most often get wrong about the Gospels: “going up to Jerusalem” from Jericho is a real thousand-metre ascent, and the walk from the Upper Room to Gethsemane drops into a ravine and climbs out of it. Elevations are approximate and the figures are straight-line distances between sites, not street routes.
Opens a note with the current era, the open week, the selected site, the map position and a link back to the exact view already filled in, so a correction arrives with the context needed to act on it. Write what is wrong, press Copy report, and paste it into an email. Nothing is sent anywhere by the app itself.
Three steps — normal, large, larger — applied to the essay, the panels and the buttons, and remembered between visits. On touch screens the buttons, list rows and map pins are enlarged automatically.
Opening a week encodes it into the address bar, so copying the link and sending it to a class opens that week, on the right era, framed and numbered. An era on its own shares the same way as #era=herod.
Between Nehemiah’s small city and the one Jesus saw sit four centuries most timelines skip, and the shape of the later city was decided in them. This layer draws the First Wall — the Hasmonean circuit that ran from the citadel by Jaffa Gate east along the line of David Street and Chain Street to the Temple, then round the City of David ridge and back up the Hinnom side. Herod inherited that wall rather than building it, which is why his layer shows the same southern and western line with the Second Wall added north. It also draws the viaduct over the Tyropoeon Valley whose successor is Wilson’s Arch, and the Baris fortress that Herod rebuilt as the Antonia. The Temple rededicated in 164 BC is the Hanukkah temple, and the feast Jesus attends in John 10:22 is its anniversary. The Akra of 1 and 2 Maccabees is deliberately not drawn: its location is genuinely unsettled, and a guess would look like knowledge.
Two tools that are needed rarely live behind the More button, so the bar stays readable: Text size and Report a correction.
Opens a panel of the study weeks that have real Jerusalem geography — the New Testament and Old Testament years carry most of them, with a shorter honest list for the Book of Mormon and the Doctrine and Covenants. The weeks that have nothing on this ground are left out rather than padded. Choose a week and the map moves to the right era, frames the sites named in the reading and numbers them in the order you meet them; each pin carries its passage and one line of on-the-ground detail. Every week also prints as a one-page handout with the site list, the passages and the discussion questions.
Five walks the Gospels describe, each drawn on the map and cut as a schematic elevation profile in the strip below: the ascent from Jericho, Bethany over Olivet to the Temple, the Upper Room to Gethsemane, the night of the trials, and Hezekiah’s Tunnel. Each gives distance in kilometres, miles and stadia, with total climb and descent. This is where topography becomes teaching: Jericho lies 250 m below sea level and Jerusalem some 740 m above it, so “going up to Jerusalem” is a literal thousand-metre climb, and the tunnel — 533 m of rock cut from both ends at once — falls barely 30 cm end to end. Elevations are approximate; the profiles are teaching graphics, not survey data.
Opens the panel at the top right of the map. It explains every line style and colour on the overlay, every symbol on the street map — gates, churches, mosques, synagogues, museums, viewpoints, restaurants, cafés, toilets, playgrounds — and the key to the cross-section. It also carries the longer history of the phase you are looking at, so you can read the period in depth without leaving the map.
Closed when the map first opens, so the map gets the whole window. Once you open or close it the map remembers your choice.
The strip beneath the map is a cut through the city, with heights drawn at ×1.9 so the ravines read as the obstacles they were, from the Hinnom Valley on the west, across the Western Hill, down through the Tyropoeon Valley, over the Temple Mount and out to the Kidron. It redraws for every phase, so you can see the valley being filled in, the ridges built over, and the present ground surface floating above the ancient one. This is the answer to “why do we walk down so many steps to the Western Wall?” The Section button hides it if you want the map full height.
On the right: the period’s title and dates, an essay written for reading aloud or reading alone, a what to look for on the ground list of things a visitor can actually stand next to, and — where it matters — a note on what is disputed rather than a quiet decision.
Drag to pan, scroll or pinch to zoom, and the ⌂ button returns to the framing that shows the whole Old City with the City of David ridge below it. Zoom in far enough on the satellite view and you can pick out individual doorways.
The sequence that works: start on Today so everyone recognises where they are. Step back to Jesus’ time and hold the blue line steady while you point out that the Temple Mount is the same platform and almost nothing else is. Then jump to Canaanite to show them that the original city is out of sight, downhill, outside the gate they walked in through. Then walk forward through the phases and let them watch the wall migrate north onto the line they know.
Escape closes this panel and the key. On a phone the map, section and timeline stack vertically and the essay panel sits below the map.
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 map 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.
Two doctorates in two separate fields — the ancient world, and the design of learning. Both of them are in this tool.
Credits and licences for the material this map is built on.
The thirteen era layers — wall circuits, gates, valley floors, pools, towers, temple platforms and street lines — were drawn from published coordinates and excavation descriptions into the project’s own data files. The era essays, the fifty-five weekly study units, the site notes, the location-confidence ratings, the discussion questions, the cross-section profiles and the printed handouts were written for this tool.
© Taylor Halverson, Ph.D. All rights reserved.
Mapbox serves all four basemaps — Street map and Standard map (Mapbox Streets) and Satellite (Mapbox Satellite, imagery only, no modern road overlay) — as raster tiles, on OpenStreetMap data.
© Mapbox © OpenStreetMap contributors
The Relief hillshade is computed from elevation data.
Elevation: Mapzen terrain tiles on AWS Open Data (public-domain and open elevation sources).
All four typefaces are released under the SIL Open Font License 1.1.
Scripture is cited by chapter and verse, in the World English Bible (public domain worldwide, dedicated freely for any use including commercial).
The geometry of the historical layers rests on the following published survey and excavation.
Each weekly study unit lists the specific excavation reports and ancient sources its own claims rest on, in the panel and on the printed handout.
This map is independently produced. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, nor by any university, excavation, publisher or mapping service named here.
Halverson, Taylor. Jerusalem Then and Now: The City Under the City. Interactive historical map. Beta.
Corrections to these credits are welcome, through Report a correction in the More menu on the toolbar below the map.
Plans are schematic reconstructions in a common coordinate frame, not survey drawings. This is a teaching aid, not a measured record.
Project Created by Taylor Halverson, Ph.D. (Beta mode)
Terms of Use, Refund Policy & Licence
This product is a Beta: an interactive atlas of thirteen historical phases of Jerusalem's Old City, with accompanying essays, weekly study units, 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 use it” tab's sourcing note for what that means.
Publisher grants the user a personal, non-exclusive, non-transferable licence to view and use this product for personal study, teaching, and classroom use. Redistribution of the product file itself, or extraction of its map data, essays, or illustrations for republication, requires Publisher's prior written permission. Third-party components (typefaces, code libraries, map tiles) remain under their own licences; see the Attributions & licences tab and THIRD_PARTY_NOTICES.txt.
Scripture quotations are from the World English Bible, which is dedicated to the public domain worldwide; no permission is required to reproduce it, and none is claimed here beyond what this licence already grants for the product as a whole.
If this product was obtained through a store or platform, that platform's refund policy governs first. Where Publisher distributes directly, a full refund is available on request within 14 days, provided the product has not been redistributed; request a refund via the contact in Section 7, including your name, purchase email, order number if available, and purchase date.
Because this is a Beta reconstruction of a disputed archaeological and historical record, 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.
To the extent permitted by law, Publisher's liability for any claim arising from this product is limited to the amount, if any, paid for it.
Contact for licensing, refunds, or rights questions: insights.taylorhalverson.com/contact. Include your name, purchase email, order number if available, and purchase date so the request can be located. 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, and both parties consent to the personal jurisdiction of those courts.
This product is independent and not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by any religious, governmental, or academic institution named or depicted in it, unless explicitly stated.
These are paid-beta terms; they have not yet received attorney review. The full document, including revision history, is distributed as “Terms of Service and Non-Affiliation Notice.md” alongside this product.