Beit She'arim National Park
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How it came to be
The Necropolis of Bet She'arim is a set of catacombs cut into limestone hills southeast of Haifa in northern Israel. In 135, after the failed second Jewish revolt against Rome barred Jews from Jerusalem, it became the main Jewish burial place outside the city.
What drew people here was the burial of Rabbi Judah the Patriarch, the leader who compiled the Mishnah. To lie near his grave, the dead were brought from as far as Palmyra, Tyre and Himyar in Yemen. Close to 300 inscriptions have been found in the tombs, most in Greek and others in Hebrew, Aramaic and Palmyrene.
By the 6th century the tombs were no longer used, and robbers later broke into almost all the sarcophagi. In 1936 the historical geographer Samuel Klein identified the site as Bet She'arim, and in the same year the watchman Alexander Zaïd found a cave decorated with inscriptions. Benjamin Mazar and Nahman Avigad excavated it in the 1930s and 1950s, and it was inscribed as a World Heritage site in 2015.
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