The Kidron brook, the Mount of Olives: who does not know these names? Already in childhood, when we first became acquainted with the life of the ancient God-chosen Jewish people, we heard them together with the names of the Jordan, the Dead Sea, Mount Carmel, and others.
Beside these names there was deeply impressed upon our consciousness the image of a locality adjacent to the center of Jewish life, Jerusalem.
Yet while from childhood we have been accustomed to picture the Kidron brook as a stream in the proper sense, rushing swiftly and noisily from north to south through a deep stony bed on the eastern side of Jerusalem, in reality it is only a dry and waterless channel.
It is a bed or valley of unequal depth and width in different places, bordering Jerusalem on the north, east, and partly on the south.
Among the various names of this valley, the oldest and most popular is unquestionably the biblical name of the Kidron brook, or Kidron valley, קדרין, meaning dark and gloomy.
In the time of the second temple an underground channel was led here from a reservoir built beneath the altar of burnt offerings. The blood of sacrificial animals flowed through this channel into another reservoir in the Kidron brook, where it was sold for fertilizing gardens.
The Talmudic tract Middoth says: “At the southwest corner of the altar of burnt offerings there were two openings like nostrils, by which the blood poured on the western and southern base of the altar flowed into a channel and from there into the Kidron brook.”
Under this name it is mentioned in the Old and New Testaments. Josephus, Eusebius, Jerome, and others call it by the same name.
Very early, however, Christian tradition calls it the valley of Jehoshaphat, perhaps applying to it Joel’s prophecy concerning the judgment of God upon the pagan nations in the valley of Jehoshaphat (Joel 3:12).
After this the name became as widespread as the name Kidron valley. “The valley called Jehoshaphat,” says the Bordeaux Pilgrim, the oldest guide to the Holy Land that has come down to us.
“There is the valley of Jehoshaphat,” we read in Theodosius, about 530, “there the Lord will judge the righteous and sinners.”
Beginning north of Jerusalem, not far from the Tombs of the Judges, the valley of Jehoshaphat turns eastward, passes north of the royal tombs, and opposite the northeastern corner of the city suddenly turns south.
It runs in this direction along the entire eastern side of the city, then joins the valley of Gihon, and finally continues its course toward the Dead Sea under the name Wady en-Nar.
In its northern part the valley forms a broad hollow. As it runs from north to south, it becomes narrower and deeper.
At Saint Stephen’s Gate its steep western side reaches a height of one hundred feet. Here one can notice the first regular traces of the flow of water, or the bed of a stream.
Perhaps this stream once filled the Kidron valley in great volume. Now, only in winters rich in rain, it runs for one day, or at most two, as a small brook. It has probably now taken an underground course.
Farther south, at the place of Absalom’s tomb, the valley is only a gorge between mountains, forty to fifty paces wide.
From the most remote times the valley of Jehoshaphat was a burial place. The dust of countless human generations, beginning with the oldest inhabitants of Jerusalem, the Jebusites, lies here.
The dust of the sacred city, destroyed so many times, has also fallen from the steep heights and completely filled the bottom of the valley.
The continuous layer of debris covering it is so thick that the English engineer Warren, excavating here, could not reach fresh soil at a depth of eighty feet.
Now Muslim graves cling to the western side, on the slope of Moriah, while on the east the slope of the Mount of Olives is strewn with Jewish tombs.
“The fantastic monument of Absalom and the severe tomb of Zechariah dominate these heaps of gravestones, covered with Hebrew inscriptions.”
Two bridges, or more precisely two stone embankments, have been built in the Kidron valley. The arched stone upper bridge, six paces wide and sixteen long, lies below Saint Stephen’s Gate.
The other, lower bridge is below Absalom’s tomb. It is built like the first, arched, several paces wide, and its surface rises above the valley floor by eleven feet on the north side and twenty and a half on the south.
Both bridges lead to the western slope of the Mount of Olives, whose outline is beautifully marked on the horizon.
At a Sabbath day’s journey from Jerusalem (Acts 1:12), it rises with three rounded summits, the middle of which dominates the other two like a head above the shoulders of a human body.
Rising one hundred seventy-five feet above Zion and six hundred feet above the floor of the Kidron valley, this middle summit is sanctified by tradition as the place of the Ascension of the Lord Jesus Christ.
Already Constantine the Great marked it with a special monument. Now there is an octagonal Muslim mosque and a monastery of dervishes, from whose minaret there is a beautiful view of Jerusalem and its environs.
Another summit to the north has long borne the name Galilee, or viri galilei. There the “men of Galilee” stood and long gazed into the heaven that had hidden from them their ascended Teacher and Lord (Acts 1:9-11).
South of the Mount of the Ascension, the third summit bears the name Mount of Offense, as the place with which tradition connects Solomon’s idolatry (3 Kgs 11:7-8).
The western slope of the Mount of Olives is covered here and there with olive and fig trees, bent by age and bare. At its foot, immediately beside the road that leads from Saint Stephen’s Gate over the upper bridge toward Bethany and Jericho, there is a quadrangular space surrounded by a high stone wall.
It is one hundred sixty feet long on the western side and one hundred fifty feet wide on the northern. The whole area inside this enclosure is divided by wooden trellises into several small gardens, with paths sprinkled with sand and symmetrically arranged flower beds.
Here also grow eight olive trees, the oldest among the trees of the Mount of Olives. On their trunks, eighteen to twenty and even twenty-one feet in circumference, and on their countless roots, they bear the expressive seal of a thousand years of existence.
Their huge trunks consist of numerous thick branches, as though grown together under one bark into a single tree. They resemble a group of columns joined together.
Flowers and various shrubs grow at the very foot of the trees and shield their enormous roots from the heat of the sun. These roots stretch for several sazhen over the ground.
This is the garden of Gethsemane. In it they point out both the rock where the Lord’s disciples slept during their Teacher’s last prayer and the place of Judas’s treacherous kiss.
A few steps north of the enclosure of the garden of Gethsemane, separated from it only by the road, stands the burial cave of the Theotokos. To its right a small door leads into a cave where, according to tradition, the Savior spent the agonizing hours before Judas’s betrayal.
Now there is a chapel here, and the whole cave bears the name antrum agoniae, the grotto of agony.
This is the locality that, eighteen and a half centuries ago, on the night of Nisan 14 in the year 34 of our era, witnessed the beginning of an event to which there can be no equal in history.
Through this very Kidron valley, or valley of Jehoshaphat, on that great night from Thursday to Friday, the Lord Jesus Christ passed with His own feet, together with eleven of the Apostles, after the Paschal supper in the upper room on Zion.
On this same slope of the Mount of Olives was the garden of Gethsemane, which sheltered Him for several hours before the kiss of Judas Iscariot delivered Him into the hands of His enemies (Mt 26:30-36; Mk 14:26-32; Lk 22:39; Jn 18:1).
It is true that the present appearance of this locality does not correspond to the picture it presented in the days of the earthly life of the Lord Jesus Christ.
According to Josephus, Pompey had already destroyed many gardens near Jerusalem. Titus, finding no trees near the city for constructing embankments against the fortress Antonia, had to seek them already in the distant surroundings.
The Roman army stripped bare the space for ninety stadia around Jerusalem. On these same trees, and precisely on the Mount of Olives, thousands of defeated Jews were crucified.
After the new conquest under Hadrian, the trees were likewise little spared. It is not surprising that, after so many devastations, the Mount of Olives is now poor in vegetation.
It was not so on the great night of the Lord’s sufferings. The dark green of vineyards, mingling with the green of fig trees and, in places, mulberry trees, and often intertwined with the silvery gleam of olives, thickly covered both slopes of the mountain.
On the western side, flooded with soft moonlight, it resembled a wondrous fantastic carpet, which, beginning at the mountain’s summit, rolled down its slope and with its other edge was lost in shadowy Gethsemane.
One would be deeply mistaken if he judged the picture of the garden of Gethsemane on the night of the Lord’s sufferings by the place and the eight trees that now bear this name.
Gethsemane, a word meaning a press or oil-press for extracting oil from olives, then served as the name for those olive groves that densely covered the western foot of the Mount of Olives.
These groves were the property of the sanctuary. Yet, being enclosed by nothing, they were accessible to all and more than once gave shelter under their shade to poor pilgrims gathered from various places for the feast in the holy city.
But if the appearance of the locality has not remained the same, at least the place has. If the eight old olive trees among the flower beds of the present garden of Gethsemane cannot vividly awaken in our imagination the picture of the true Gethsemane on the night of the Lord’s sufferings, they still indicate its actual place approximately.
Tradition, marked by deep antiquity, never sought Gethsemane anywhere else, but always here, near these eight veterans.
The Bordeaux Pilgrim, without naming Gethsemane, nevertheless indicates the place of betrayal rather clearly. “If one goes from Jerusalem,” he says, “through the gate that is on the east, in order to ascend the Mount of Olives, there is a valley called Jehoshaphat.
On the left side, where the vineyards are, there is a stone where Judas Iscariot betrayed Christ. From there one ascends the Mount of Olives, where the Lord taught the disciples before His Passion.”
The place of betrayal is indicated here below, in the valley of Jehoshaphat, near the road leading from the eastern gate of the city to the Mount of Olives, that is, near the present garden of Gethsemane.
According to the noble pilgrim of the end of the fourth century, they come to the place of the prayer concerning the cup and then to Gethsemane after descending from the Imbomon, the place of the Lord’s Ascension on the Mount of Olives.
The place of betrayal “is at the beginning of the valley of Jehoshaphat.” Antoninus the Martyr also points out the place of betrayal in the valley of Gethsemane, “situated between Mount Zion and the Mount of Olives, and also called the valley of Jehoshaphat.”
There too, at the entrance to the burial cave of the Most Holy Theotokos, Bede saw on the right side “a stone set into the wall, on which the Lord prayed on the night when He was betrayed, and the marks of His knees were imprinted as though in wax.”
Willibald, speaking generally, places “the church where the Lord prayed before His sufferings” on the Mount of Olives.
In the Commemoratorium de casis Dei vel monasteriis, Gethsemane is called a village, villa, and is indicated in the same valley of Jehoshaphat.
In the same village of Gethsemane, in the valley of Jehoshaphat, the monk Bernard places, together with the church of the Most Holy Virgin Mary, “the church in which the Lord was betrayed.”
THEOSIS