WHILE YOU STAND ON ONE LEG: Palestinian Arabs again this week proclaimed there’s “no historical proof” the Jewish people “had any kind of presence” in the Land of Israel. I want to tell you briefly about convincing proof that can be seen there today of the core of the core of that historical presence – of the 500 cubit square Mount of Solomon’s Temple. I know we’re divided on judicial reform, “two-states,” etc., but on the reality and legitimacy of our homeland presence, from then through now, we must in unison together stand up.
Worse Than Being Unforgivably Cursed: Not Sensing You Were
Yeah, I know the Harry Potter stories are fiction, but a couple things in them are real. One is “the Unforgivable Curse” – a malediction so fundamentally devastating to your very being or deepest beliefs that relations between you and the curse hurler cannot be resumed. Another is the state of being “confunded” – you lose ability to act in your own interest, but instead numbly succumb to the adversary confunder’s control.
The case I’ll try to make to you this week is that our Jewish people today is being Unforgivably Cursed, and we’re acquiescing as though we’ve been confunded. Not good.
Relax, I’m not arguing here for implementing Judicial Reform or rejecting “The Two-State Solution,” pleas of mine rendering not a few of you Gentle Readers not gentle. That Curse of which I speak rips from the heritage and possession of us all, Israeli and Diaspora both, devout and secular both, the core place of our people’s three-millennia presence. That dispossessing curse bestows ownership of that core Jewish place upon invaders who came there a millennium and a half after we built that core place, and built their own structures, all right, one of them “third holiest” to them, upon it. That core place of ours is our holiest place, our Jewish-built Temple Mount in Jerusalem.
Such divestiture of Jewish equity in our people’s most meaningful site might be justified, perhaps, if all physical trace of the Temple Mount’s original Jewish identity had long ago been utterly erased and our connection to it long ago voluntarily abandoned, but neither has happened. That Western Wall we revere while standing today in awe before it was universally recognized, in ridicule if not in reverence, all through the post-Destruction centuries as the Jews’ “Wailing Wall,” our place of mourning and tenaciously maintaining our link to our Temple.
Less known and appreciated, even by us, is that the physical evidence of our Temples [plural] has not been erased. Physical evidence of the boundaries of not just Herod’s Second Temple Mount (part of one of the retaining walls of which the Western Wall is), but of our First Temple’s 500 cubit square Temple Mount is still there to be seen. And though the Temple buildings themselves are long gone, their place on their Mounts can be shown, down to that of their Holy of Holies.
So the case I’ll endeavor to make to you Gentle Readers this week embraces two points: first, that physical evidence of our First Temple’s 500 square cubit Mount is there to be seen; and second, that an Unforgivable Curse has been hurled at us, falsely divesting the Temple Mount from us, and that we have not gone nuts over this, as a self-respecting people should do.
Revealing Our First Temple’s 500 Square Cubit Mount
Irony of ironies, the clue which led to the revealing of our First Temple’s 500 square cubit Temple Mount was found not through unearthing long-buried and lost Jewish remains on today’s Mount, but in Jewish remains in plain sight that had been incorporated into a Muslim structure today. In a tour de force of detective work of which Sherlock Holmes would have been proud, archeological architect Leen Ritmeyer recounts in The Quest (a briefer version of which, Secrets of Jerusalem’s Temple Mount, was published by Biblical Archeology Review) how one clue led to the next.
Ritmeyer’s quest for the First Temple’s 500 cubit square Mount starts with an anomaly of a step. The Muslims’ magnificent Dome of the Rock sits today on a trapezoidal raised platform sitting on the top of Herod’s huge Second Temple Mount, which had engulfed and expanded the Mount of Solomon’s Temple, which his successor kings of Judah had expanded to the 500 square cubit dimension which the Mishnah (second century CE) ascribes to it. The sides of that trapezoidal Muslim raised platform are reached by eight sets of stairs ascending from the Mount’s surface, seven of which are precisely parallel to the side of the raised platform they reach. However, the stairs at the raised platform’s northwest corner are a little cockeyed, but are precisely parallel to the eastern wall at the far side of the Temple Mount. That eastern wall sits on the Mount’s very eastern edge and could not have been shifted further eastward by Herod.
And there’s a further anomaly regarding that northwest corner of the raised platform’s stair’s bottom step. It’s not built of small stones like the other steps, but of large ashlars, cut in a manner resembling that of the pre-Herodian stonework near the center of the Mount’s eastern wall. These factors – the step’s stone’s size, pre-Herodian shape and orientation parallel with the Mount’s eastern wall – show it as having been part of the original Mount’s western wall.
What then of the site of the original Mount’s northern wall, which Herod later moved further north? Underground work done by Warren in the 1800’s to the east of that anomalous step had revealed an underground chamber with a wall cut in a manner of a foundation for an east-west wall at that point. Projecting a line from that chamber wall westward intersects the northern edge of that anomalous step stone’s northern edge. Hence, the original 500 cubit square Mount’s northwestern corner was found.
The length of that northern wall from that northwestern corner step stone to the eastern wall of the Mount measures 861 feet. How many cubits this is depends of course on the length of a “cubit.” Of the several cubit lengths in ancient times, the “royal cubit” with a length of 20.67 inches was often used in the land at that time. 861 feet x 12 = 10,332 inches, divided by 20.67 = 499.85 cubits. Northern wall fits, further validating the step stone as part of the western wall.
The First Temple Mount’s original eastern wall had been extended to the north by Herod and to the south by the Maccabee-Hasmoneans and then Herod. Ritmeyer “quickly measured 861 feet south from the point on the eastern wall that we had identified as the northeast corner of the pre-Herodian Temple Mount,” and right there found “a slight bend” in the eastern wall, previously recorded by Warren, which Ritmeyer believes resulted from a masonry change (from pre-Hasmonean to Hasmonean) now deep below ground, and there “the southeast corner of the pre-Herodian Temple Mount is probably still in existence deep below ground.”
Ritmeyer then shows that the configuration of later underground structures indicates their coming into contact with pre-existing southern and western walls of the original 500 cubit square Temple Mount. He then goes on to locate the place of the First and Second Temples on their respective Temple Mounts. Literally on top of all these First and Second Temple structures evidencing along with all else historical Jewish presence from the late second millennium BCE, the Muslims in the seventh century CE built their Dome of the Rock and Al-Aqsa Mosque.
Unforgivable Curses
United With Israel reported this week:
“PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas’ spokesman Nabil Abe Rudeina denied Jewish history claiming on official PA TV that there is ‘no historical proof (he Jews) had any kind of presence’ in the Land of Israel.
“’The Church of the Holy Sepulchre and the Al-Aqsa Mosque are among the foundational pillars of history, and they are Palestinian holy places, and not Jewish holy places. There is no historical proof – despite all the excavations – that (the Jews) has any kind of presence in this land,’ he says as noted by Palestinian Media Watch.
“The Al Aqsa Mosque mentioned by Abu Rudeina is located on the Temple Mount, the holiest site in Judaism.”
Talk about “foundational pillars of history,” as this PA spokesman put it on PA TV this week, United With Israel put it exactly right, the Al-Aqsa Mosque (and Dome of the Rock’s) foundational pillars are literally those of our own Jewish history. Can you envision a more fundamental belief-delegitimizing Unforgivable Curse?
Well, maybe you can. On March 24, 2021, an American newspaper, the Philadelphia Inquirer, claiming to be reporting the news, ran a headline “Mosque Visits Resume,” dealing with Israel reopening to Jews the Temple Mount which it had temporarily closed only to them due to Muslim violence thereon. The Inq accompanied this misleading headline (the Jews “visited” the plaza of the Mount, not the mosque at the Mount’s southern end, visits to which had not been interrupted for Moslems, so for them the visits didn’t “resume”) with a photo the Inq captioned:
“Palestinians clash with Israeli police at the Al-Aqsa mosque complex Friday. On Saturday, a group of 250 Jews visited the mosque, the third holiest site in Islam.” [emphasis added]
Note first that the Inq’s name (which it has used before) for the site of the police-Palestinian Arabs clash is the Islamic name, “the Al-Aqsa mosque complex,” not the Jewish and Christian name, Temple Mount, used in the West for millennia.
Note second the Inq’s shift of the name of that site when referencing what “a group of 250 Jews” did. Per the Inq, they didn’t “visit” that “Al-Aqsa mosque complex” (a/k/a Temple Mount), they “visited the mosque, the third holiest site in Islam.” (The extreme Muslim position, doubtless lost on most Inq readers, is that the whole Temple Mount is that “mosque.”) Beyond insinuating that this “group of 250 Jews” intruded into the religious hall of people belonging to a different religion, which is what the Inq’s readers would reasonably glean from their having “visited” apparently a building, “the mosque,” these Jews’ seeming chutzpah went further, in their having trespassed upon “the third holiest site in Islam,” when in fact the site that they’d visited was their own Temple Mount’s plaza, the first holiest site on the planet to them. An Unforgivable Curse, don’t you think?
But what has continued to bother me about that Inq “news” article is that we just shrugged it off, that we didn’t go nuts. The US these days is joining much of the rest of the world in putting multiple improper pressures on Israel. Time for us to stop being confunded, you think?