Discovery of the first Hebrew inscription from the Temple of Herod, destroyed by the Romans in 70 A. D., was announced today by Prof. Benjamin Mazar of the Hebrew University, head of an archaeological team that has been carrying out excavations near the Wailing Wall for the past three years. Mazar said the seven foot long fragment of stone contains the Hebrew words “Leveit Hatekiah” and the Hebrew letter “L,” presumably part of another word that was not preserved. “Beit Hatekiah” means house of the shofar blowing. Mazar said a reference to it appears in the book “Wars of the Jews” by the historian Flavius Josephus, one of the major historical sources for the fall of the Temple. Josephus wrote the Beit Hatekiah was located at the corner between the southern and western walls of the Temple. From it, priests would blow the shofar to announce the beginning and the end of the Sabbath. The stone fragment has a niche in which the priest presumably stood. It was found lying on a pavement dating from the Herodian era. Prof. Mazar believes it must have fallen there when the Temple was sacked and burned by the Romans and remained untouched until its discovery.
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