Jesus and his disciples almost certainly trod in reality The City of David: Walking Through the Biblical Heart of Jerusalem

Close your eyes and strip away the towering Ottoman walls of the current Old City. Imagine instead a rugged limestone ridge, a mere 12-acre spur of land rising defiantly between the deep, echoing shadows of the Kidron, Tyropoeon, and Hinnom Valleys. This slender ridge is the City of David, the original core of ancient Jerusalem and the very ground where the footsteps of kings and prophets first echoed long before the Western Wall was ever quarried.
When travelers ask, “What is the City of David?” they are seeking the Bronze Age nucleus of the Holy City. It was here, around 1000 BCE, that King David conquered the Jebusite fortress, established his capital, and pitched a tent to house the Ark of the Covenant. While the modern city has expanded in every direction, this archaeological park remains the definitive foundation the ancient nucleus from which the spiritual pulse of the world began to beat.

There is often a poetic confusion regarding the title of “David’s City,” and understanding this duality is key to grasping the King’s legacy. To the uninitiated, the question arises: Why is Bethlehem called the City of David? In the biblical and ancestral tradition, Bethlehem is David’s cradle. It is the humble town of pastures where he tended his father’s sheep, the site of the fields of Boaz, and the place where he was first anointed by the prophet Samuel.
However, when historians and archaeologists ask, “What city is called the City of David?” in the context of the Israelite monarchy and the rise of a nation, they point exclusively to this ridge in Jerusalem. Jerusalem was David’s adopted city, the strategic stronghold he transformed into the political and spiritual center of a United Kingdom. Bethlehem gave us the shepherd; Jerusalem gave us the King. For the sophisticated traveler, visiting both offers a complete arc of a legacy that changed the course of Western civilization.

Standing on the observation platform today, it is easy to visualize the dramatic scene described in the Second Book of Samuel. From the roof of his palace, King David surveyed his growing capital, looking down into the courtyards of his subjects. Beneath your feet lies the Stepped-Stone Structure, a massive, curved retaining wall that may be the largest Iron Age structure in the Levant. While archaeologists continue to debate the exact stones of the palace, the sheer scale of the engineering suggests a seat of power unlike any other in the region.
The ruins offer an intimate, almost startling window into the daily lives of Jerusalem’s ancient elite during the reigns of kings like Hezekiah and Josiah. Take, for instance, the House of Ahi’el. This four-room residence reveals a world of Iron Age luxury, featuring an external stone staircase and a rare limestone toilet seat, a true status symbol in the 10th century BCE. The discovery of furniture remains made of Syrian wood and traces of imported cosmetics suggests a royal bureaucracy that enjoyed the finest goods the ancient Near East could offer, even while the prophets Isaiah and Jeremiah paced these same streets warning of the spiritual costs of such opulence.

Perhaps the most breathtaking connection to the Bible lies in the Royal Archive. Though the papyrus scrolls of the Judean kings were lost to the Babylonian fires of 586 BCE, their signatures survived through a miraculous twist of chemistry. Dozens of clay seals, or bullae, were baked hard by the very fire that destroyed the documents they protected.
These seals bear names that leap straight out of the Scriptures. One seal belonged to Gemariah son of Shaphan, a high-ranking scribe in the court of King Jehoiakim. Another belonged to Azariah son of Hilkiah, a priest from the lineage that served in the First Temple. Incredibly, one seal found here mentions Bethlehem, the first time the town appears in history outside of the Bible. This proves that even as David’s dynasty flourished in Jerusalem, the administrative and emotional ties to his ancestral home remained unbreakable. For the intellectually curious, these seals are the DNA of the biblical narrative, providing tangible, forensic proof of the people who shaped Jerusalem’s destiny.

For a city to survive in the parched Judean hills, it needed more than walls; it needed a secret. That secret was the Gihon Spring, often called the Virgin’s Spring or the Well of Miriam. To protect this lifeblood, the ancient inhabitants engineered some of history’s most daring fortifications.
Visitors can descend through Warren’s Shaft, a complex vertical system discovered by British engineer Charles Warren in 1867. This shaft allowed residents to draw water safely from within the city walls during a siege. But the true masterpiece of the site is Hezekiah’s Tunnel.
In the late 8th century BCE, with the terrifying Assyrian army of Sennacherib closing in, King Hezekiah took a desperate gamble. He ordered two teams of workmen to tunnel through solid limestone from opposite ends, aiming to meet in the middle and divert the spring’s water into the city. Wading through this winding, 530-meter water system in the cool, echoing darkness is a sensory journey through time. You can still see the pick-axe marks where the two teams miraculously met, an event recorded in the famous Siloam Inscription. For those preferring a drier path, the adjacent Canaanite tunnel offers a well-lit alternative that whispers of the city’s pre-Israelite history.

At the southern base of the ridge lies the Pool of Siloam, the site where millions of pilgrims once gathered during the three festival feasts to ritually purify themselves before beginning the final ascent. From the pool, you can step onto the Herodian Street, often called the Pilgrimage Road.
This 2,000-year-old stone thoroughfare was the direct, majestic route to the Temple. It is a path that King Solomon, Hezekiah, and Josiah envisioned in spirit, and one that According to Christian tradition. Walking these massive, original paving stones, you are treading on the same ground as the Judean elite and the common pilgrims of the Second Temple era.
Beneath the street lies a darker, more somber history: the drainage tunnel that served as a final sanctuary for the last Jewish rebels during the Roman Siege of 70 AD. The finds here are haunting: a Roman sword still in its leather sheath and a delicate golden bell, perhaps once sewn to the hem of a High Priest’s robe as described in the Book of Exodus. These artifacts, paired with the chilling accounts of the historian Flavius Josephus, remind us that the City of David is not just a place of triumph, but a powerful testimony to human resilience in times of destruction who survived the total destruction of their spiritual center.

The City of David is not a static museum; it is a site of intense and ongoing excavation where the soil yields secrets every week. Because the park is situated in a complex geopolitical landscape and its subterranean labyrinths are vast, the depth and comfort of the experience depend entirely on the quality of the narrative.
At Dekel Tours, we understand that for our clients, a visit to the City of David is more than a checklist item; it is an emotional and intellectual homecoming. Our private, expert guides are masters at synthesizing complex archaeological data with biblical texts and modern historical contexts. We move beyond the “what” and into the “why,” explaining the controversies and the triumphs with the nuance they deserve.
Whether your family wants to participate in the Archaeological Sifting Project at the Emek Tzurim National Park—where you can personally discover artifacts from the Temple Mount—or you wish to engage in a deep-dive study of First Temple political intrigues, we provide a curated, bespoke experience.

The stones of the City of David are waiting to speak. Walk the path of kings, prophets, and rebels. Allow the layers of history to unfold before you in a way that is both intellectually rigorous and deeply personal.
Contact Dekel Tours today to curate your private journey through the place where Jerusalem began.