of Absalom" is not only a burial structure in its own right, with its upper part serving as a nefesh (funeral monument) for the tomb in its lower part, but it was probably also meant as a nefesh for the adjacent burial cave system known as the "Cave" or "Tomb of Jehoshaphat", with which it forms one entity, built at the same time and following a single plan. During the times of the Second Temple, many wealthy citizens of Jerusalem would have monuments built adjacent to their family burial caves. These monuments were built according to the architectural fashions of the time, many times with a pyramid on top, or in this case, a cone. Jewish sages of that era opposed the building of such monuments by saying: "You do not make nefashot for the righteous; their words are their commiseration." Byzantine inscriptions In 2003, a mid-4th-century inscription on one of the walls of the monument was discovered. It reads, "This is the tomb of Zachariah, the martyr, the holy priest, the father of John". This suggests that at the time, the monuments was considered to be the burial place of the Temple priest Zechariah, father of John the Baptist, who lived 400 or so years earlier than the inscription date. A second inscription of the same age discovered in 2003 says the monument is "the tomb of Simeon who was a very just man and a very devoted el(der) and (who was) waiting for the consolation of the people". The words describing Simeon are identical to those from as they appear in the Codex Sinaiticus, a 4th-century manuscript of the Christian Bible. The two inscriptions, discovered and deciphered by Joe Zias and Émile Puech, support the concept known from Byzantine period sources such as Theodosius (c. 530) that a tradition existed at the time, wrongly identifying the 1st-century monument as the tomb of James, the brother of Jesus; Zechariah, the father of John the Baptist; and Simeon, the old priest from the Gospel of Luke. These two inscriptions are part of a secondary use of the monument during the Byzantine period, when Christians gave new interpretations to Jewish Second Temple period tombs from the Kidron Valley, associating them with characters and events from the New Testament, Apocrypha, and Christian traditions. The association of the so-called Tomb of Absalom with Zechariah, the father of John the Baptist, has led to