Charred beams pulled from the earth in Jerusalem’s City of David are forcing archaeologists to rewrite their timeline of the First Temple’s destruction — and offering the most tangible physical evidence yet of the catastrophe the Bible describes in stark, unflinching detail.

Excavators working the Givati Parking Lot dig, a joint project of the Israel Antiquities Authority and Tel Aviv University inside the Jerusalem Walls National Park, uncovered massive wooden beams burned when Nebuchadnezzar’s Babylonian army destroyed the First Temple in 586 BCE. The beams once formed the roof of an inner courtyard in a First Temple-period building. When the structure collapsed in the fire, the beams fell to the floor — and there they stayed for roughly 2,600 years, preserved by an unlikely agent: melted plaster.