35 BIBLICAL AND HISTORICAL JERUSALEM ian conquest and required no repair, or else no ancient wall existed along this line. The latter assumption rests on the claim that the Dung Gate, which may possibly be identified with the pre-exilic Potsherd Gate (Jer 19,2) 31, was the place where the late First Temple wall that encompassed the Southwestern Hill reached the southern end of the City of David. According to this assumption, the king who built the wall (either Ahaz or Hezekiah) considered it redundant to fortify the inter-mural section between the Valley Gate and Dung Gate and left it unwalled 32. The former assumption may be supported by two ar- guments: (a) the unlikelihood that the southern part of the City of David was left defenseless as late as the late eighth century BCE, the time when the ‘Broad Wall’ was constructed. (b) According to Neh 12,31b, the first procession passed from the Valley Gate and “went southward on top of the wall to the Dung Gate”. Although there is no unequivocal evidence that can settle the controversy, I tend to as- sume that a narrow pre-exilic wall ran along the southwestern mar- gin of the city and defended the nearby quarter. Before his departure to Jerusalem, the keeper of the king’s garden supplied Nehemiah with timber to make beams for the gates of three major walled units (bîrâ): 33 the temple, the city and the governor res- idence (Neh 2,8) 34. No wonder that the author of the account of the rebuilding project laid such a great emphasis on the construction of the temple’s and the city’s gates (Neh 3,1.3.6.13.14.15). After the project was completed, the city’s mayor was called śar habbîrāh (“mayor of a walled city”) (Neh 7,2). 31 For the identification see SIMONS, Jerusalem, 230-231; D.C. LIID, “Pot- sherd Gate”, ABD V, 427, with earlier literature. 32 D. USSISHKIN, “The Borders and De Facto Size of Jerusalem in the Persian Period”, Judah and the Judeans in the Persian period (eds. O. LIPSCHITS – M. OEMING) (Winona Lake, IN 2006) 147-160; FINKELSTEIN, “Jerusalem”, 508-509; FINKELSTEIN – KOCH – LIPSCHITS, “Mound on the Mount”, 4-5, 10-11,13. 33 For the terms birtu and bîrâ in the Persian and Hellenistic periods, see A. LEMAIRE – H. LOZACHMEUR, “Bīrāh/birtā’ en Araméen”, Syria 64 (1987) 261-266; P. MANDEL, “‘Birah’ as an Architectural Term in Rabbinic Litera- ture”, Tarbiz 61 (1992) 195-217 (Hebrew); E. LIPIŃSKI, “Origins and Avatars of birtu, ‘Stronghold’”, Archiv Orientální 67 (1999) 609-617. 34 I very much doubt the correctness of the commonly accepted transla- tion of v. 8 “… for the gates of the temple fortress”. The term bîrâ describes the temple compound as being surrounded by wall, not the erection of a for- tress in its area. Hence the search for a fortress within the temple, the fore- runner of the later “Antonia” fortress.