Who May Ascend the Hill of the LORD? Archaeologists Just Found Where Pilgrims Prepared

Illustrated aerial view of the Ophel excavation south of the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, with the southern wall and Triple Gate above and a golden dashed line outlining the area where the ancient pilgrim ritual baths were discovered

October 9, 2026

Artist's impression of pilgrims preparing to ascend to the Temple in the first century, based on published descriptions of the Ophel excavation.

Picture it.

The road from Galilee has been long. Your sandals are caked with dust, your feet ache, and your children have finally stopped asking are we there yet, because now they can see it: Jerusalem. High above the city, bright against the sky, stands the Temple.

But you can't simply walk in. Between you and the gates rises a great stone staircase, crowded with pilgrims from every direction. And there is one requirement no one can skip: before you set foot on holy ground, you must be clean.

So you find the line. You wait. When your turn comes, you step down into cool water, over stone steps worn smooth by thousands of travelers before you, and you go under.

For generations, we could only imagine that scene. This fall, archaeologists in Jerusalem showed us where it may have happened.

The Announcement

On Thursday, September 24, 2026, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem announced a find on the Ophel. This is the slope just south of the Temple Mount, between the Temple and the City of David. The timing was striking, because it came just before the Feast of Tabernacles (Sukkot) began.

The excavators call it Beit haMikvaot, the "House of Mikvehs." It is a monumental complex of ritual baths about 164 feet from the Triple Gate, one of the great southern entrances to the Temple Mount. After five seasons of digging, directors Uzi Leibner and Orit Peleg-Barkat described a structure devoted entirely to purification, beside a Temple gate, as "a truly unparalleled phenomenon."

Step Inside

Let's walk through it.

You enter near the heart of the complex, a vast plastered pool about 39 feet by 31 feet, with steps leading down on all four sides. Next to it stands a finely cut stone building of four rooms. Three of those rooms held large public ritual baths, each with stairs descending into a plastered pool. The whole complex covers about 3,000 square feet.

In one room, you look up and stop.

The ceiling is still there.

One bath survives floor to ceiling, a full 14 feet, under its original vault of stone. At the top is the shaft where water was once poured in. Leibner called it the "crown jewel" of the site. Such a survivor from the Second Temple period is almost unheard of in Jerusalem, which has been burned, rebuilt, and shaken for two thousand years.

A Machine Made of Water

The cleverness goes underground.

Each bath had a drain plugged like a bathtub, and the drains feed tunnels over six feet tall. You could walk through them upright. They run down toward the Kidron Valley, and the excavators say water would still flow through them today.

That means the water could be changed, which is rare for ritual baths of the period. The team believes the pools may have been fed by running water, probably from the aqueduct that brought water from the Hebron hills past Solomon's Pools to the Temple Mount. It was a first-century water system built to serve a crowd.

And what a crowd. The historian Josephus claimed some 2.7 million people were in Jerusalem for one Passover. Scholars regard that number as wildly inflated, but it captures the scale of the festivals.

The crowd needed managing too. On one staircase, researchers found a low dividing line down the middle. Leibner's reading is simple: "People would go in on one side and come out on the other." Those who had already been purified would not touch those who had not. Picture the entire hillside moving in orderly lines, going down into the water and coming up clean.

Layers of Pilgrim History

This was not the first purification complex on this spot. Beneath it, the team found an earlier public facility with its own large mikveh, probably from the first century BC. Peleg-Barkat described the site as having "two clear distinct phases."

The main complex was built around AD 10, dated by coins. It stood in the lifetime of Jesus and went on serving pilgrims until the Roman destruction of Jerusalem. The excavators count 18 pools within a 1,600-square-meter area, found over decades by teams including Benjamin Mazar, his granddaughter Eilat Mazar, and Yosef Garfinkel. The great four-sided pool was first uncovered back in the early 1970s. After Eilat Mazar died in 2021, Leibner and Peleg-Barkat carried the work forward.

The Day the Water Stopped

Then came the summer of AD 70.

Roman legions broke into Jerusalem and burned the Temple, only a few dozen yards above these pools. The excavators found collapsed masonry, layers of ash, and dozens of coins from the First Jewish Revolt scattered on the floors and in the debris. Among the wider finds was a silver half-shekel from the third year of the revolt.

Imagine them lying there. These were coins dropped by people in the last hours before everything changed.

For nearly 300 years, nothing was built here. Then Byzantine builders put a residential quarter on top. Instead of tearing out the ancient baths, they sealed the best-preserved one beneath a new floor and used it as a cistern. By accident, they preserved it for more than 1,500 years.

What Scripture Tells Us About Why This Place Mattered

Why would anyone build such a monumental purification complex? Because the Bible commanded the journey:

"Three times a year all your males shall appear before the LORD your God at the place that he will choose: at the Feast of Unleavened Bread, at the Feast of Weeks, and at the Feast of Booths." — Deuteronomy 16:16 (ESV)

And the Psalms captured the longing of the road:

"I was glad when they said to me, 'Let us go to the house of the LORD!' Our feet have been standing within your gates, O Jerusalem!" — Psalm 122:1-2 (ESV)

But the Psalms also asked a searching question:

"Who shall ascend the hill of the LORD? And who shall stand in his holy place? He who has clean hands and a pure heart." — Psalm 24:3-4 (ESV)

The Gospels show how real this was. Jesus Himself went up to Jerusalem for the feasts (John 2:13). And John records the preparations of the crowds:

"Now the Passover of the Jews was at hand, and many went up from the country to Jerusalem before the Passover to purify themselves." — John 11:55 (ESV)

At the Feast of Booths, John gives us a scene we can now picture a little more vividly:

"On the last day of the feast, the great day, Jesus stood up and cried out, 'If anyone thirsts, let him come to me and drink.'" — John 7:37 (ESV)

Jewish tradition records a water-drawing ceremony from the Pool of Siloam during Sukkot. In a city this devoted to water, with pools and drains and aqueducts, those words would have landed with unusual force.

Years later, we see the same world in the book of Acts. Paul went to the Temple to join men completing a vow:

"Then Paul took the men, and the next day he purified himself along with them and went into the temple." — Acts 21:26 (ESV)

Luke doesn't say where Paul purified himself. But a complex like this is exactly the kind of place such a purification would have happened.

Now think of Pentecost, the Feast of Weeks, when Jerusalem was packed with devout Jews from every nation. Luke records that about three thousand were baptized in a single day (Acts 2:41). The text doesn't tell us where. But it's hard not to wonder whether the pools around the Temple Mount were part of that story.

A Careful Word

Good faith includes good caution. A few things should be said plainly.

This find has been announced by the excavation team and the Hebrew University, but it has not yet appeared in a peer-reviewed report.
No evidence connects these particular pools to Jesus, to Paul, or to any person named in Scripture. They stood in His day, but we cannot say He used them.
Some questions remain open. The four-sided pool is unusual for a mikveh, and the excavators suggest it may have served a different purpose, perhaps washing vessels. The exact route of the water supply is still being traced.
The excavators also suggest the complex may have served the upper ranks of society or the Temple workers themselves.

Scripture does not need archaeology to be true. But when the stones confirm the world the Bible describes, it deepens our wonder.

From the Pools to the Cross

The great irony of the Temple's purification system is that it was always pointing beyond itself. Hundreds of steps, thousands of pilgrims, and drains running to the Kidron could cleanse the body for the Temple. They could never fully cleanse the conscience.

"Let us draw near with a true heart in full assurance of faith, with our hearts sprinkled clean from an evil conscience and our bodies washed with pure water." — Hebrews 10:22 (ESV)

That is the good news of the Gospel. At the Last Supper, Jesus told Peter, "The one who has bathed does not need to wash, except for his feet, but is completely clean" (John 13:10, ESV). What those pools pictured, Christ accomplished:

"He saved us, not because of works done by us in righteousness, but according to his own mercy, by the washing of regeneration and renewal of the Holy Spirit." — Titus 3:5 (ESV)

"The blood of Jesus his Son cleanses us from all sin." — 1 John 1:7 (ESV)

So the next time you read of pilgrims climbing toward the Temple, picture the stairs, the waiting lines, the cold water, and the clean steps upward. And remember that you have been invited into a cleansing no pool could give.

At Moriah Cross Works, our pieces are conceptualized, designed, hand-finished, and packaged in the Holy Land, a land where, as this discovery shows, the stones still have stories to tell. We make them to help you keep Scripture close.

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