Four monumental tombs stand carved into the western face of the Mount of Olives, in the Kidron Valley directly below the southeastern corner of the Temple Mount. From north to south they are conventionally called the Tomb of Absalom (or Absalom's Pillar), the Tomb of Jehoshaphat, the Tomb of Bnei Hezir, and the Tomb of Zechariah. The traditional names reach back to the medieval pilgrim period and identify them with the biblical Absalom of 2 Samuel 18, with King Jehoshaphat, and with the prophet Zechariah. None of the traditional identifications is correct. All four monuments date to the late Hasmonean and early Herodian periods — the first century BC. The Tomb of Bnei Hezir bears a clear Hebrew inscription on its architrave naming it as the burial place of "the priests of the Bnei Hezir," the priestly course listed in 1 Chronicles 24:15 as the seventeenth of David's twenty-four divisions. Émile Puech's epigraphic re-edition, together with subsequent work by Joe Zias and Boaz Zissu, confirmed the inscription and established that the adjacent so-called Tomb of Zechariah is in fact a nefesh — a memorial monument — for the same Bnei Hezir family complex, carved as a single monolithic cube with pyramid roof from the living rock. The neighboring Absalom's Pillar, with its conical roof and Ionic pilasters, is a slightly later first-century-BC monument of the same priestly milieu. The biblical significance is geographical. The road from Bethany to Jerusalem descended the Mount of Olives and crossed the Kidron Valley directly between these monuments before climbing to the Temple Mount. Jesus and his disciples walked past them on the way to the Triumphal Entry, on the way to and from the Temple during Passion Week, and on the night of the arrest in Gethsemane. The monuments stood then exactly as they stand now. Sources: Émile Puech, "L'inscription dite des Bnei Hezir" (Revue Biblique 90, 1983); Joe Zias and Émile Puech, "The Tomb of Absalom Reconsidered" (Near Eastern Archaeology 68, 2005); Boaz Zissu, "Necropolis of Jerusalem in the Second Temple Period" (PhD dissertation, Hebrew University, 2001); 1 Chronicles 24:15.
The Bnei Hezir inscription provides epigraphically confirmed evidence of a named priestly course — listed in 1 Chronicles 24:15 — active in the late Second Temple period. The monuments' precise location along the Bethany–Jerusalem road places them within the verifiable topographical framework of the Passion Week narrative.