Rock-cut Tombs In Israel
Hundreds of rock-cut tombs were constructed in Israel in ancient times. They were cut into the rock, sometimes with elaborate facades and multiple burial chambers. Some are free-standing, but most are caves. Each tomb typically belonged to a single, wealthy family. Bodies were laid out on stone benches. After a generation, the bones were moved to a bone chamber or, later, into ossuaries and the benches used for new burials. Rock tombs were the province of the wealthy; the common people were buried in the ground.
The tombs date from several periods. The earliest Canaanite cut-rock cave tombs date from 3100–2900 BCE, but the custom had lapsed a millennium before the earliest Israelite tombs, which date to the 9th century BCE in Jerusalem. There are a great many Jewish tombs dating to the Second Temple period, and others in the late Roman or early Byzantine period.
Read more about Rock-cut Tombs In Israel: Biblical Tombs, Canaanite Period, First Temple Period, Second Temple Period, Tomb of Jesus, Beit She'arim
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“How old the world is! I walk between two eternities.... What is my fleeting existence in comparison with that decaying rock, that valley digging its channel ever deeper, that forest that is tottering and those great masses above my head about to fall? I see the marble of tombs crumbling into dust; and yet I don’t want to die!”
—Denis Diderot (1713–1784)
“We Americans are the peculiar, chosen people—the Israel of our time; we bear the ark of the liberties of the world.”
—Herman Melville (1819–1891)