Buried with His Fathers (2022) 绘画 由 Severn (Jie Cheng) Wang

The Kidron Valley is located in the northeastern part of the Old City of Jerusalem and is a valley that separates the Temple Mount from the Mount of Olives. The special location of the valley naturally led to many references in the ancient scrolls, such as: King David leaving Jerusalem via the Kidron Valley to escape from Absalom; King Asa burning the statue of Asherah at the Kidron Valley; King Hezekiah throwing the defiled objects of the Temple and the statues of the city in the Kidron Valley; and Jesus of Nazareth and his disciples crossing the Kidron Valley many times between Jerusalem and Bethany.
The modern Kidron Valley, which no longer has a stream, has been one of the main cemeteries of Jerusalem for over 2,000 years and still contains many ancient tombs, as well as cemeteries that are still in use. Three of these tombs are important landmarks in Jerusalem, and two of them appear in this painting.
The Tomb of Benei Hezir, dating from the second century B.C., was built by cutting directly into the cliff. Inscriptions on the tomb indicate that it belonged to a priestly family named Benei Hezir, who is also mentioned in the Bible. It is a family tomb, a form of burial commonly used in ancient Israel, in which the remains of the newly deceased are preserved with the bones of the ancestors. The tomb of Zechariah is more interesting in that it is carved out of a single block of rock and is traditionally thought to be the tomb of the biblical prophet Zechariah, but archaeologists believe that its Hellenistic style is very similar to that of the Tomb of Benei Hezir, and that there is no burial chamber, and a chiseled passage was found leading to the Tomb of Benei Hezir. Therefore, it is likely that the so-called Tomb of Zacharias is a monument-like structure of the Tomb of Benei Hezir, and the adjacent Tomb of Benei Hezir is actually a whole rather than a separate tomb.
Since the Tomb of Benei Hezir was built in the second century B.C., when Jesus of Nazareth was walking with his disciples in the Kidron Valley in the first century, would the disciple Peter have wondered when he passed by the Tomb of Benei Hezir: "Who is the owner of this magnificent tomb?" Perhaps the landscape then was similar to that of today, with the stones glistening in the hot sun, as they walked through the valley of the stream between the Temple Mount and the Mount of Olives, the air filled with the fragrance of the sacrifices made in the Temple.
What interested me in this work was the feeling of strong sunlight in the Israel region, so I deliberately raised the brightness of the ground, Zechariah's tomb and the sky by one level, while lowering the rocky part of the mountain a bit. A common mistake of beginners is to paint the shadowed parts of the picture dark, as if there is a hole in the paper. In order to avoid the same problem, I have deliberately shown the texture of the Israeli harsh sunlight shining on the ground, creating a reflection that illuminates the shadowed parts of the rocks in this work. I tried to soften the brush strokes as much as possible by using wet-in-wet with paint, leaving as many of the angular objects in the picture as possible to the tomb in the center of the picture. The path in the lower left corner of the picture is used to guide the viewer into the picture and move the eye to the most prominent spire of the tomb of Zechariah, then to the Tomb of Benei Hezir with its repeated shape along the artificial cut of the mountain, and finally back to the path through the reflection of the rock.
That day, in the Kidron Valley, I couldn't help but remember what happened here in the Bible, the withered fig tree, the parable of the mustard seed, the line of people going to Lazarus' tomb or the Garden of Gethsemane. We are walking where he walked, looking at similar landscapes and ancient tombs.
But, more importantly, the Tomb of Benei Hezir is here. They are buried with their fathers.
But there is no tomb of Jesus of Nazareth on earth. He is not here; he is risen.

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WatercolorWatercolourIsraelJerusalemKidron Valley