Today I Hiked to the Mount of Olives

Russian Orthodox Church on the Mount of Olives.

Tombs carved into the bedrock on the side of the Mount of Olives. Most of the hill is now a very large cemetary of which you can see just a few rows at the top of the picture. The modern Mount of Olives is not a very pleasant thing to look at. Aside from two nice churches it is covered with dirt, rocks, and tombstones in varying states of reconstruction.

The Kidron Valley below the Mount of Olives. Here are the Olive trees!

An excavated tomb site on the Mount of Olives. In ancient times many people did not have a plot of ground that they were buried in as we do today or even as is now present on the Mount of Olives. The body was laid on a cement slab in the tomb and allowed to decompose for about a year. Then the tomb was reopened and the bones moved either into a box as show here, known as an ossuary or into an open pit in the tomb where bones were collected for many years. This gives the Old Testament phrase "and he was gathered to his fathers" new meaning as in the age of the patriarchs they definitely used the later method and collected the bones all together in a loose chamber. So when you died you literally were "gathered with your fathers" in the family tomb.

An example of an excavated stone slab with burial chambers below. The blocks to the right are the stone building that has been built above the tomb site.

This is a blosom on a tree that was growing out of the side of a stone wall. There are not many flowers out right now. I suspect that this is one of the first trees to flower as winter begins to move into spring.