In another quarter Herod strengthened the city very much. The reader will have noticed that while it was a usual thing with assailants to attack the north wall, and take the Lower City as a preliminary to assaulting the Upper City, yet there was one spot where the Upper City might be approached at once from the outside. This was by the Valley Gate, and was owing to the fact that the second wall started from the Gennath Gate to go northward, whereas the wall of the Upper City was prolonged westward. Herod determined to strengthen this part of the city all the more because his own palace was in this part; so he built three strong towers, which he named Hippicus, Phasaelus, and Mariamne. Hippicus was at the outer angle; the base of it remains, and is the foundation of the north-west tower of the present citadel, which measures 45 feet square. Phasaelus remains, and is the one conspicuous object on the right hand as the traveller enters the Jaffa Gate. It is 70 feet by 56 feet, and is solid to the height of 60 feet; the stones are bevelled, like those round the Haram, and do not appear ever to have been disturbed. The site of Mariamne is less certain, but it probably corresponded with the third tower which we see marked in almost every plan of the so-called Castle of David.
The Jerusalem of Herod’s day was the Jerusalem which Jesus Christ would be familiar with.
In the year 43 A.D., Agrippa built a third wall, to enclose the suburban dwellings which had sprung up on the north. This third wall began at the tower Hippicus, went northward, and had a tower called Psephinus at its north-west angle, then passed eastward “over against” the monuments of Helena, queen of Adiabene (the so-called “Tombs of the Kings,” half a mile out, on the great north road), then passed by the caverns of the kings, bent southward at the tower of the north-eastern corner, and finally joined the old wall at the valley “called the Valley of Kedron” (Josephus, Wars, v. 4, 2). “The city could no way have been taken if that wall had been finished in the manner it was begun.” But Agrippa “left off building it when he had only laid the foundation, out of the fear he was in of Claudius Cæsar.” The wall was 10 cubits wide, and was afterwards raised as high as 20 cubits, above which it had battlements and turrets. In the course of the third wall, according to Josephus, there were ninety towers, as compared with sixty in the first; and the whole compass of the city was 33 furlongs. He also says that the ninety towers were 200 cubits apart; but this would make the third wall alone more than 5 miles in length, and so we judge that some mistake has crept into the text. Therefore we shall venture to take the present north wall of the city as representing Agrippa’s wall, notwithstanding that the entire circumference would then be less than 33 furlongs. There seems to be no sufficient evidence for going beyond the present wall. It is a wall which begins at the tower Hippicus, by the Jaffa Gate. The position of the great corner tower Psephinus seems to be indicated by the ruined castle called _Kalat Jalud_ (Giant’s Castle), just within the present north-west angle. The Damascus Gate is “over against” the so-called Tombs of the Kings, for a spectator standing at the Tombs would look down directly upon that gate. The “royal caverns” we may identify with the Cotton Cavern, the quarry whence the kings of Judah obtained the stone for the great buildings of the city. The entrance to them is in the face of the scarped rock, about 300 feet east of the Damascus Gate, and the city wall runs right across the entrance. At the north-east corner of the present wall we find the tower which Josephus assigns to that point--“the most colossal ruins after those at the north-west corner.” A trench cut in the rock at the foot of the eastern wall is deflected here, passes round the corner, and goes west; it does not go any further north as we might expect it to do if the wall ever extended further north. And then the wall from the north-east corner is brought southward and joins the Haram wall, the junction not being at the north-east angle of the Haram, but much nearer to the Golden Gate, at the deep valley which Pompey began to fill up. We have to bear in mind that this third wall had been built before the siege of Jerusalem by Titus, in A.D. 70.