Beit She'arim Necropolis

The Hebrew name means house of gates, and the Parks Authority offers two explanations without choosing between them: the gates in the town wall, or se'orah, barley, for the fields around it. In Aramaic the place is Beit Sh'arei; in Greek it is Besara, and Greek inscriptions carrying that name confirmed the identification. Josephus is the first writer to name it, as the centre of an estate belonging to Berenice, daughter of Agrippa I. The earliest building remains on the hill date from the second century BCE.

Its importance is second and third century. Judah ha-Nasi, known in the sources simply as Rabbi, moved his study house and the Sanhedrin from Shefar'am to Beit She'arim; the Roman authorities had granted him tenant status on several estates, one of them here, which the Parks Authority gives as the reason he chose the place for his grave. The excavated town covers about 100 dunams and has produced a synagogue, a basilica, a study house, dwellings, a wall, a gate and an olive press.

The synagogue is a hall of large dressed ashlars, 35 metres by 15, its facade turned towards Jerusalem; one of its two Greek inscriptions reads "Jacob of Caesarea, head of the synagogue of Pamphylia. Shalom", and shalom is the only word in it written in Hebrew. The decline was quick. Once the Sanhedrin moved on to Zippori the building work coarsened, though burials went on in plainer forms, and the town was destroyed and burned in the fourth century CE. Britannica dates the synagogue's destruction precisely, to 352; the Parks Authority gives only the century.

Judah ha-Nasi died at Zippori and was buried here in 220 CE, in a grave prepared while he was alive. The Talmud records the arrangement plainly: "Rabbi was lying [on his sickbed] at Sepphoris but a [burial] place was reserved for him at Bet She'arim" (Ketuboth 103b). Afterwards the cemetery acquired a sanctity of its own, and two things worked together: proximity to Rabbi, and the Roman prohibition on Jewish burial in Jerusalem.

The inscriptions then read like a shipping manifest of the eastern Roman world, recording origins, trades and family ties. In the Cave of the Syrian Jews a Greek text marks the tomb of "Edesios, head of the council of elders of Antioch". Sarah's Cave has "Burial place of Theodosia also called Sarah of Tyre" on a basalt lintel, and a marble tablet for "Caliope the elder, who is also the freedwoman of Procopius", which the Parks Authority reads as evidence both of slavery among Jews and of release from it.

The Textile Merchants Cave holds six inscriptions, among them "Sabirius son of Sabinus, the chief textile dyer", and a marble plaque reading "Daniel son of Ada of Tyre" in Greek with the single Hebrew word shalom below. Grave robbery is a theme rather than a footnote: the Cave of the Breach is named for the hole above its door, where robbers gave up on the stone slab and went through the weak point beside it, and the Cave of the Curses next door carries twelve texts including one promising an evil end to anyone who opens the graves.

The pattern repeats down the slope. Steps drop into an open courtyard; the cave front behind it is dressed as classical architecture; in the middle is a door cut from a single slab, turning on a rock hinge, carved with bands and studs in imitation of the metal reinforcement used on wooden doors. Several keep the ring that was pulled to swing them. Behind the doors the burials take four forms: arcosolia, benches under an arched ceiling and the commonest type here, loculi driven into the wall, graves sunk into the floor, and free-standing stone coffins.

The Cave of the Coffins is the largest system found, 75 by 75 metres behind a three-arched facade. It held 135 sarcophagi, twenty finely carved, mostly with bulls, eagles, lions, birds and fish. On its wall is a menorah in relief 1.9 metres high and 1.25 metres wide, standing as much as 36 centimetres out from the rock, which the Parks Authority calls the mother of all menorahs. The Cave of the Horseman is the biggest by capacity: some 380 burial places in sixteen chambers off one corridor, with Palmyrene inscriptions in four of the halls.

The cave attributed to Judah ha-Nasi has three doorways under a triple arch eight metres high, and painted inscriptions naming Rabbi Shim'on, Anina the younger and Rabbi Gamaliel. In the back room are two rectangular graves cut side by side into the floor, unusual here, once covered by heavy slabs and carrying no inscription at all. The identification rests on the combination: those were the names of his two sons and of a rabbi he appointed head of the Sanhedrin, a bench structure for memorial gatherings sits directly above, and he had asked to be buried in the ground rather than in a coffin. The Parks Authority calls that reasonable evidence rather than proof.

• Cave of the Coffins (20): 75 by 75 metres, 135 sarcophagi, the 1.9-metre menorah relief
• Cave of the Horseman (1): some 380 burial places, Palmyrene inscriptions in four halls
• Cave of Rabbi Yehuda Hanasi (14): a triple arch 8 metres high and two unmarked floor graves
• Cave of the Steps (13): twelve chambers on two levels, 26 inscriptions in Greek and Hebrew
• Cave of the Curses (12): twelve Greek and Aramaic inscriptions, several of them threats
• Museum Cave (28): a cistern turned glass workshop, now the site's interpretation room

Almost everything underground is original cutting. These are not reconstructed buildings but voids hewn from chalk, and what has been added is lighting, paths and safety work. The interventions are on the decorated surfaces: the relief of a warrior with a menorah above his head was badly damaged by vandals and has been restored, and the great menorah in the Cave of the Coffins was stabilised by the Parks Authority with the Israel Antiquities Authority to stop it deteriorating.

Two spaces were never tombs in their present form. The Museum Cave began as a cistern, became a glass workshop and is now the park's interpretation room; in the middle of it lies a slab of glass weighing 8.8 tonnes, made in the ninth century CE and apparently abandoned because of a flaw. Accounts differ in detail, with Wikipedia's article reporting that a bulldozer turned it up in 1956 and putting it at about nine tons. The other is the Slik Cave, a Roman reservoir 26 metres long holding more than 1,300 cubic metres, which the Haganah floored in concrete in the early 1940s and used as a firing range and weapons cache, and which was fully excavated in 2014.

The most consequential thing above ground is the planting. The park was laid out in the 1950s by the landscape architect Lipa Yahalom, who won the Israel Prize for the work, and those trees have matured and are now driving roots into the chalk, opening and widening cracks over the burial chambers. In May 2026 the Parks Authority announced that about a hundred trees, mostly cypress, would be felled over roughly three days to save caves 25, 26 and 27, which it says are already closed to visitors on safety grounds. It states that the risk of doing nothing includes collapse and transfer to the World Heritage list of properties in danger.

The hill was surveyed in the nineteenth century but not understood. The Parks Authority credits Claude Conder with the first study of the caves in 1871 and says it revealed very little; Wikipedia's article gives his visit as 1872 and Britannica says the site stayed obscure until a rediscovery in 1875. The accounts agree that nothing much came of it.

The find that mattered was accidental. Alexander Zayid settled on Sheikh Abreik hill in 1926 as a guard for Jewish National Fund land. In 1936 he came upon an opening, entered what is now called the Cave of Hell, got through a hole in its wall into the neighbouring Cave of the Horseman and found ancient Jewish material. He summoned Benjamin Mazar and Yitzhak Ben-Zvi, later Israel's second president; Mazar proposed that the hill was ancient Beit She'arim, and digging began shortly afterwards.

Mazar excavated from 1936 to 1940 for the Jewish Palestine Exploration Society, and Nahman Avigad resumed the work from 1953 to 1958 for the Israel Exploration Society and the Hebrew University; those two campaigns exposed the town and about thirty catacombs. Work restarted in the last decade, on the reservoir in 2014 and on the town from 2014 to 2015 under Adi Erlich of the University of Haifa. Zayid did not see it finish: he was murdered in an ambush in 1938, and a bronze statue of him on horseback now stands on the hilltop beside the double-domed tomb of Sheikh Abreik.

A second complex opened to visitors in 2009: six burial caves at the foot of the western slope, unusually rich in carving, with dozens of reliefs of the seven-branched menorah on their walls. Because that menorah became the emblem of the state, the Knesset put money into conserving them, which is what made opening part of the group to the public possible.

They are not on the free-roaming circuit. The Parks Authority takes visitors in with one of its own guides only and requires arrangement in advance, citing both the value of the carvings and visitor safety. Its English page gives departures on Fridays and Saturdays at 10:30 and 11:00; its Hebrew page routes bookings through the online reservation system and warns that the entry time to the menorah presentation is exact, so visitors should arrive at least fifteen minutes early.

What is inside is the reason to bother. The Torah Ark Cave has four chambers and about a hundred burial places, with an incised Torah Ark, lions, an altar and a menorah, the figure of a Jewish gladiator beside the Greek words "Germanos son of Isaac the Palmyrene", and a man shown diving, which the Parks Authority suggests may stand for the passage to the world of the dead. The Cave of Hell carries two merchant ships incised on its walls, read as evidence of Jewish seafaring. The tour ends in the reservoir with an audio-visual presentation tracing the menorah from the destruction of the Temple to the emblem of the state.