The City of DavidBetaSoutheastern ridge of Jerusalem · Gihon Spring to the Pool of Siloam · c. 4500 BCE – today

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How to read thisColour = phase
The base map is deliberately grey. Every colour on screen belongs to a phase, running cool for the earliest periods to warm for the latest. The selected phase is drawn solid; other phases you switch on sit behind it as faint underlays, the way a published phase plan stacks its periods.
Line = how sure we are
Solid means excavated and not seriously disputed. Long dashes mean the line is partly reconstructed between excavated points. Short dashes mean scholars disagree about its date or identification. Dotted means it is drawn only to help you read the map. Hatching marks destruction and collapse.
Four ways to look
Plan looks straight down and numbers each element to the list on the right. Section cuts along the ridge at 2.5× vertical exaggeration to show the water systems underneath. Elevation is a true-scale side view you can walk along. 3D is a modelled landform you can orbit, with every structure at its real footprint and height.
Moving around
Drag the timeline, or press the left and right arrow keys to step one phase at a time. Drag inside any drawing to pan and use the plus and minus buttons, or the scroll wheel in 3D, to zoom. Hover anything — on the drawing or in the element list — to read what it is and how confident the evidence is.
This is a reading of published excavation, not a photograph of the past. Where the evidence is contested — the date of the Stepped Stone Structure, the Large Stone Structure as a Davidic palace, Nehemiah's wall, the Seleucid Akra — the disagreement is shown rather than resolved, and the essay for each phase sets out both sides.
The City of DavidPrepared by Taylor Halverson, Ph.D. · Beta
Thirteen phases of the southeastern ridge of Jerusalem, from the first spring-side settlement to the archaeological park standing there now, drawn on one fixed footprint so that every period can be laid over every other. Each phase carries the same four views — plan, section, elevation, 3D — and an essay setting out what was found, who found it, and what remains argued.
Beta
Phase dates, structure footprints and the identification of individual buildings are still under review. Where the published evidence is itself unsettled, the drawing says so through its line weight rather than quietly choosing a side.
On the terrain
The landform is built from measured points: the Gihon Spring at 636 m, the Pool of Siloam at 635.7 m, the ridge crest falling from about 725 m at the north to 624 m at the south end. Hezekiah's Tunnel drops roughly 30 cm over its 533 m, and the model holds that. Slopes between those anchors are reasoned, not surveyed.
On vertical exaggeration
The ridge is genuinely subtle, so the 3D view exaggerates height — ×1.6 by default — to make it legible. The factor is stated on screen at all times and the slider will return it to true 1:1. Plan distances are never exaggerated.
Sources
Published excavation reports from Warren, Parker, Weill, Kenyon, Shiloh, Reich and Shukron, and the ongoing Givati and Giv'ati parking-lot work; elevations from the Survey of Israel; water-system gradients from the tunnel surveys.
Your own imagery
A satellite photograph from your own device can be loaded into the plan view and aligned to the ridge with scale, rotation, stretch and pan. It stays on this device; nothing is uploaded.
Corrections are welcome — particularly measured elevations for the eastern and western flanks, which are the weakest part of the landform.
Taylor Halverson, Ph.D.Author · Teacher · Tour leader · Scripture scholar
Taylor Halverson is a scholar of scripture and a teacher of learners — an entrepreneurship professor in the BYU Marriott School of Business who spends his working life helping people find and act on the best ideas and tools available to them.
He is the author and editor of more than fifty books and nearly a thousand articles and blog posts, and a builder of scripture study resources: the ScripturePlus app with Scripture Central, whose scripture YouTube channel he co-hosted to more than fifty million views, and BYU's Virtual Scripture Group, whose team spent more than five years reconstructing New Testament Jerusalem in three dimensions. This visualization of the City of David belongs to that same body of work — tools made so that ordinary readers can see what specialists see.
He leads tours to Israel and the Middle East, China, India, Central America, Europe, and the national parks of the American West, where he unfolds how geology, geography, civilization, and scriptural texts created our beautiful present day.
Academic training

              Ph.D., Judaism & Christianity in Antiquity — Indiana University
              Ph.D., Instructional Systems Technology — Indiana University
              M.A., Biblical Studies — Yale University
              B.A., Ancient Near Eastern Studies — Brigham Young University
            
Two doctorates in two separate fields — the ancient world, and the design of learning. Both of them are in this tool.
Elsewhere

              insights.taylorhalverson.com
              books.taylorhalverson.com
              exodustours.com
            
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Phases · click to select

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          Modern map overlay
        
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Present-day village and archaeological park: outline in plan, ground surface in section, standing buildings in the elevation and 3D views.
Satellite photo (plan view)

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Align to the ridge

              Scale
              Rotate
              Left–right
              Up–down
              Stretch
            
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        Labels on drawing
      
        Scripture references
      
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Fade the hillside to glass to follow the water system underneath it — the spring at the foot of the Kidron, the shaft and tunnel inside the rock, the pool at the southern tip, and the buildings standing above them all.
The ridge is genuinely subtle — about 100 m of fall over 700 m. Stretching heights makes the landform readable; plan distances stay true. Set it to 1.0 for the real shape.
Key — what is on screen now

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Key — confidence

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Base map
Schematic, north at top. The plan is a simplified rendering of the ridge, not a survey drawing. The section is a projected longitudinal cut along the ridge, north on the left, with roughly 2.5× vertical exaggeration; features off the centre line, including the spring, are projected onto it.

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          N
          
          c. 100 m
        
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          metres above sea level · vertical exaggeration c. 2.5×
        
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What you can see
Hover any row to find it on the drawing. The tag says how certain archaeologists are.

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In scripture
Passages that name what is drawn here, or that happen on this ground. Turn them off in the controls at left.

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      Drag the slider through time
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