The brook Kidron and the Mount of Olives: who does not know these names? In childhood, when we first learned the life of the ancient Jewish people chosen by God, we heard them with Jordan, the Dead Sea, Mount Carmel, and others. Beside those names, the image of a region adjoining Jerusalem, the center of Jewish life, was deeply impressed upon our consciousness.
Yet from childhood we were accustomed to picture the brook Kidron as a stream in the strict sense. We imagined it rushing swiftly and noisily through a deep, stony bed from north to south on the eastern side of Jerusalem. In reality it is only a dry, waterless bed, or valley, unequal in depth and width at different points. It borders 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 brook Kidron, or the valley of Kidron, קדרין, meaning dark or gloomy. In the time of the Second Temple, an underground channel was led here from the reservoir beneath the altar of burnt offering. Through this channel the blood of the sacrificial animals flowed into another reservoir in the brook Kidron, where it was sold for fertilizing gardens.
The Talmudic tractate Middoth says: "At the southwest corner of the altar of burnt offering there were two holes like nostrils. Through them the blood poured out at the western and southern base of the altar flowed into a channel, and from there into the brook Kidron."
Under this name the valley is mentioned in the Old and New Testaments. Josephus, Eusebius, Jerome, and others call it by the same name: 2 Kgs 15:23; 1 Kgs 2:37; ϕάραγξ Κεδρών; Cedron appellatur torrens sive vallis Cedron juxta Ierusalem. It is also so called in the recently discovered Peregrinatio ad loca sancta of the late fourth century.
Yet very early Christian tradition calls it the Valley of Jehoshaphat. Perhaps it applied to this valley Joel's prophecy concerning God's judgment upon the pagan nations in the Valley of Jehoshaphat: Joel 3:12. Later this name became as widespread as the name Valley of Kidron.
"The valley called Jehoshaphat," says the Bordeaux Pilgrim, the earliest guide to the Holy Land that has come down to us. "There is the Valley of Jehoshaphat," we read in Theodosius, about A.D. 530. "There the Lord will judge the righteous and sinners." Similar expressions occur in Arculf, Bede, Willibald, Bernard, and others.
Beginning north of Jerusalem, not far from the Tombs of the Judges, the Valley of Jehoshaphat turns eastward. It passes north of the Tombs of the Kings, and opposite the northeastern corner of the city it turns sharply south. In this direction it runs along the whole eastern side of the city. Then it joins the Valley of Gihon and, under the name Wady en-Nar, continues its course toward the Dead Sea.
In its northern part the valley forms a broad basin. As it runs from north to south, it becomes narrower and deeper. At the gate of St. Stephen, its steep western side reaches a height of one hundred feet. Here one can notice the first regular traces of watercourse, or the bed of a stream. Perhaps it once filled the valley of Kidron in great volume. Now, only in rainy winters, it runs for a day, at most two, as a small brook. Probably it has now taken an underground course.
Farther south, at the place of Absalom's tomb, the valley is only a ravine between mountains, forty to fifty paces wide.
From the most ancient times the Valley of Jehoshaphat was a burial place. The dust of countless human generations, beginning with the earliest inhabitants of Jerusalem, the Jebusites, has filled it. The dust of the sacred city, destroyed so many times, has also fallen from the steep heights and completely covered the valley floor. The continuous layer of debris covering it is so thick that the English engineer Warren, who carried out excavations here, could not reach virgin soil at a depth of eighty feet.
Now Muslim graves cling to the western side along the slope of Moriah. To the east, the slope of the Mount of Olives is strewn with Jewish tombs. "The fantastic monument of Absalom and the austere tomb of Zechariah dominate these heaps of tombstones, covered with Hebrew inscriptions."
Two bridges, or more exactly two stone embankments, have been made in the valley of Kidron. The upper bridge, arched in stone, is six paces wide and sixteen long. It lies below the gate of St. Stephen. The other, lower bridge, is below Absalom's tomb. It is built like the first, arched, and several paces wide. Its surface rises above the valley floor by eleven feet on the north side, and by twenty and a half feet on the south.
Both bridges lead to the western slope of the Mount of Olives, whose outline is beautifully marked upon the horizon. At the distance of a Sabbath day's journey from Jerusalem, Acts 1:12, it rises with its three rounded summits. The middle summit dominates the other two like a head above the shoulders of a human body.
This middle summit rises 175 feet above Zion and 600 feet above the floor of the Kidron Valley. Tradition sanctifies it as the place of the Ascension of the Lord Jesus Christ, Acts 1:12. Constantine the Great already marked it with a special monument. Now an octagonal Muslim mosque and a dervish monastery stand here. From the monastery minaret there is a beautiful view of Jerusalem and its surroundings.
The other summit, to the north, has long borne the name Galilee, or viri galilei. Here the "men of Galilee" stood and long looked into the heaven that had hidden from them their ascended Master and Lord, Acts 1:9-11.
South of the mountain of the Ascension, the third summit bears the name Mount of Offense. Tradition connects it with Solomon's idolatrous worship, 1 Kgs 11:7-8.
The western slope of the Mount of Olives is covered here and there with olive and fig trees, bent with age and stripped bare. At its foot, immediately by the road that leads from the gate of St. Stephen through the upper bridge to Bethany and Jericho, there is a quadrangular space enclosed by a high stone wall. It is 160 feet long on the western side and 150 feet wide on the northern.
Inside this enclosure, the whole area is divided by wooden lattices into several small gardens. There are paths strewn with sand and symmetrically arranged flower beds. Here also grow eight olive trees, the oldest among the trees of the Mount of Olives. Their trunks are eighteen, twenty, and even twenty-one feet in circumference. On their stumps and countless roots they bear the expressive seal of a thousand years' existence.
Their enormous trunks consist of many thick branches, as though joined under one bark into a single tree. They resemble a group of columns joined together. Flowers and various shrubs grow at the very base of the trees. They cover from the heat of the sun the huge roots that stretch several fathoms over the ground.
This is the garden of Gethsemane. Here they also point out the rock where the Lord's disciples slept during their Teacher's last prayer, and the place of Judas' betraying kiss. A few paces north of the enclosure of the garden of Gethsemane, separated from it only by a road, stands the burial cave of the Theotokos. To the right of it, a little door leads into a cave where, according to tradition, the Savior spent the agonizing hours before Judas' betrayal. Now there is a chapel here, and the whole cave bears the name antrum agoniae, the grotto of agony.
This is the place which, eighteen and a half centuries ago, on the night of 14 Nisan in the thirty-fourth year of our era, witnessed the beginning of an event unequaled in history. Through this very valley of Kidron, or Jehoshaphat, in that great night from Thursday to Friday, the Lord Jesus Christ passed with His own feet. He came 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. It 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 place does not correspond to what it was in the days of the earthly life of the Lord Jesus Christ. According to Josephus, Pompey had already destroyed many gardens in the vicinity of Jerusalem. Titus, needing material for embankments against the fortress Antonia, found no trees near the city. He had to seek them in the more distant region. The Roman army stripped bare a space of 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 spared just as little. 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 the vineyards mingled with the green of fig trees and, in places, mulberry trees. Often it intertwined with the silvery gleam of the olives, thickly covering both slopes of the mountain. On the western side, flooded with soft moonlight, it looked like a wondrous, fantastic carpet. Beginning at the mountain summit, it rolled down the slope and lost its other edge in shady Gethsemane. At the full moon of Nisan, or Abib, corresponding to the second half of our March and the first half of April, the Jews celebrated their Passover: Ex 12; 13; 23; Lev 23.
One would also be deeply mistaken if one judged 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, a mill for obtaining oil from olives, נת שׁנמנא, then named the olive groves that densely covered the western foot of the Mount of Olives. Some, less probably, derive it as ני שׁמנא, an olive field.
These groves were the property of the sanctuary. Yet they were not enclosed by anything and were accessible to all. More than once, beneath their shade, they sheltered poor strangers who had gathered from various places for the feast in the sacred city.
But if the appearance of the place has not remained the same, at least the place itself has remained. If the eight old olive trees amid the flower beds of the present garden of Gethsemane cannot vividly awaken in our imagination the image of the true Gethsemane on the night of the Lord's sufferings, they still indicate its actual place approximately.
The tradition that bears the seal of deep antiquity never sought Gethsemane somewhere else. It always sought it here, near these eight veterans. The Bordeaux Pilgrim does not name Gethsemane, but he indicates the place of betrayal quite clearly. "If one goes from Jerusalem," he says, "through the gate 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, is the stone where Judas Iscariot betrayed Christ. From there one ascends the Mount of Olives, where before His Passion the Lord taught the disciples."
Here the place of betrayal is indicated below, in the Valley of Jehoshaphat, near the road leading from the eastern gates of the city to the Mount of Olives. That is, it is near the present garden of Gethsemane.
According to the noble pilgrim of the late fourth century, one comes to the place of the prayer concerning the cup, and then to Gethsemane, descending from 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 Martyr also points to 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." In the same place, 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 it the Lord prayed on the night when He was betrayed, and the prints of His knees were impressed as though in wax."
THEOSIS