WHILE YOU STAND ON ONE LEG: Jordan came out with another denial this week of Jewish connection to Jerusalem’s Temple Mount, which we have to rebut. Ritmeyer makes a persuasive case that looking down from the ambulatory in the Dome of the Rock, one can see the very spot on the Foundation Stone that in our Temple’s Holy of Holies was where the Ark of the Covenant long ago stood. The Europeans who destroyed Herod’s Temple and for centuries heaped debris on its ruins far from preserved the Mount. The Muslims, in their triumphant erection of the Dome on the Mount, preserved and display this core Jewish history evidence, though that hardly was their intent.
Answering Jordan’s Latest Unforgiveable Curse, and Another Side of the Dome of the Rock
Flight of Fancy?
Religious Jews see the Almighty’s Hand – “Jews, God & History,” as Max Dimont put it – in key moments in our people’s long march through the millennia. There are days when even non-synagogue-member, non-kosher Diaspora I fancy I see it.
One such moment may have been when the Almighty looked down upon Herod’s Temple Mount’s smoking ruins, just destroyed by the mighty Romans. Were He still to have literally conversed with us mortals, I fancy He’d have said this:
“I see these Temple Mount ruins still standing at their strong corners, four walls’ foundations and lower courses, and other places, and I will preserve these as perpetual physical evidence of your millennium’s Jewish presence in the Promised Land. You will not wholly leave and in time more fully return. I will give these Europeans who have done this destruction a half-millennium to honor and preserve these remains, failing which I will send a billion fanatics to do so. They will be led by one who will demand of those Europeans to be taken to the site of Solomon’s Temple, and who there, seeing the debris with which those Europeans have defiled it, will himself lead actions to clean it. They will erect upon the very site where your two Temples had successively stood on the top of Mount Moriah a magnificent Dome with an ambulatory surrounding and overlooking the Foundation Stone that had stood in your Temples’ Holy of Holies, exhibiting even the very indentation thereon where had stood the Ark of the Covenant.”
Eyeless in Israel
Perhaps illustrative alas of our blindness these days to what the Temple Mount today represents, a United With Israel article this week, Police Allow Jewish Visitors To Ascend Temple Mount After Muslim Prayers, contained this shocking statement:
“The Temple Mount, where the First and Second Temples were built, is the overall holiest site in Judaism. The Western Wall is the only remnant of a retaining wall encircling the Temple Mount built by Herod the Great. [emphasis added]
The Western Wall is not the Temple Mount’s retaining walls’ only remnant. Walk with me around those walls, led by a guide of guides, archeology architect Leen Ritmeyer, “the world’s leading expert on the archeology of the Temple Mount” – Hershel Shanks, Editor of the Biblical Archeology Review, Foreword to Ritmeyer’s Secrets of Jerusalem’s Temple Mount (p. 8). Page citations below are from this extraordinary thin little book (“Secrets”) and from Ritmeyer’s full account, The Quest (“Quest”). Shanks says “there is no certainty in these things, but I do believe that he [Ritmeyer] has come as close as anyone to solving these problems …. I, for one, think he makes quite a good case.” (Secrets, p. 8.)
Begin by appreciating just how vast a structure itself Herod’s western retaining wall was, and how much of it remains. That Western Wall we call “The Wall” in standing in awe before it is a visible part of the western retaining wall of Herod’s Temple, The bottom seven courses you see are Herodian. But beneath your feet nineteen additional Herodian ashlar courses go down 68 feet to bedrock. You can see them (I have) in today’s well-lit astounding shafts dug in the 1800’s by British archeologist Charles Warren. (Secrets, p. 16). North of “The Wall,” a modern tunnel begins at Wilson’s Arch (a later reconstruction of a Herodian arch – Quest, p. 31). The tunnel follows the northern part, today underground, of Herod’s western retaining wall all the way to its northern end, inside which “four of the largest stones of Herod’s Temple Mount have been found.” Ritmeyer attributes them to “a desire by Herod to impress the pedestrians walking alongside.” (Quest, p. 32). Further Herodian western retaining wall site remains include substantial portions of Warren’s and Barclay’s Gates, Robinson’s Arch, the Hebrew-labeled “trumpeting stone” which fell from above in the Roman destruction, and remains of streets, shops and steps.
“All the lower courses of the Southern Wall are Herodian, including the ‘Great’ or ‘Master’ course that runs from the Double Gate to the southeast corner” (Quest, , p. 60). The southwest corner of Herod’s retaining walls “has been preserved to a great height due to the enormous stones used in its construction” (Quest, p. 61). The Double Gate, used mainly by the public, and Triple Gate, used mainly by priests, have exterior and interior Herodian remains in the Southern Wall, as do stairways in the southern plaza leading up to them.
The First Temple Mount’s Eastern Wall, sitting near the edge of a steep decline, is the only one Herod was unable to move. He extended it to the south, after the Maccabee/Hasmoneans had done so first, and to the north. 106 feet north of Herod’s Mount’s southeastern corner is the “famous ‘straight joint,’” a masonry change from pre-Herodian to Herodian. “The southern extension is clearly Herodian and is remarkably well preserved” (Secrets, p. 37). “At the northeast corner of the [Herodian] Temple Mount, the Herodian tower still stands to a considerable height. One of the shooting holes of the tower is still visible today.” (Secrets, p. 38). No trace of the Antonia fortress at the Mount’s northwestern corner described by Josephus has been found, but one of its large buttresses has (Secrets, p. 38).
Two further remarkable chapters of Ritmeyer’s Secrets are “5 Locating the Original Temple Mount,” and “6 The Ark of the Covenant: Where It Stood In Solomon’s Temple.” So there’s far more there there than the visible Western Wall being “the only remnant of a retaining wall encircling the Temple Mount.”
Answering Jordan’s Latest Unforgiveable Curse
Jewish Voice, Monday, April 10, 2023:
“Sinan al-Majali, a spokesperson for the Jordanian Foreign Ministry said that the entire area of Al-Aqsa Mosque, which includes 144 dunams (meaning the entire area of the Temple Mount [Jewish Voice parenthetical]) is a place of worship exclusively for Muslims.
“Muslim clerics claim that the entire area of Al-Aqsa Mosque also includes the Western Wall and belongs exclusively to Muslims. They also completely deny the fact of the past existence of the Holy Temple on the Temple Mount.”
A fortnight ago in #1158 I defined (thank you, JK) an Unforgiveable Curse as “a malediction so fundamentally devastating to your very being or deepest beliefs that [unless retracted] relations between you and the curse hurler cannot be resumed,” and being “confunded” as when “you lose ability to act in your own interest, but instead numbly succumb to the adversary confunder’s control.”
Ask yourself: When others
“completely deny the fact of the past existence of the Holy Temple on the Temple Mount,”
And
“claim that the entire area of the Al-Aqsa Mosque also includes the Western Wall and belongs exclusively to Muslims,”
is that not an Unforgiveable Curse, and is our shrugging it off conduct of the confunded? We must answer back that Muslims’ own Temple Mount structures embody Jewish Temple and Temple Mount evidence.
It wasn’t always this way. Muslims’ Brief Guide to Al-Haram Al-Sharif, Jerusalem, published by the Supreme Muslim Council in 1924, states:
“The site is one of the oldest in the world. Its sanctity dates from the earliest (perhaps from pre-historic) times. Its identity with the site of Solomon’s Temple is beyond dispute.”
We must assert to the world that identity, and that the Dome of the Rock, that magnificent structure so meaningful to Muslims and the world, has preserved a mountain top foundationally meaningful to us. Hershel Shanks (Secrets, p. 7): “The site is now graced by one of the most breathtaking buildings from the ancient world to have survived wholly intact.” To Muslims it enshrines the es-Sakhra (“Arabic for Rock, particularly the rock-mass inside the Dome of the Rock” – Quest, p. 146). To us, that Rock, “the summit of Mount Moriah” – Quest, p. 243, is the Foundation Stone (Quest, p. 244).
Through a long line of reasoning, Ritmeyer identifies a rectangular slot in the Foundation Stone as a stable resting place for the Ark on the Rock. “This small basin which Solomon had made has been preserved until today” (Quest, p. 273). What preserved it? Not the Romans-Byzantines who destroyed Herod’s Temple in 70 CE and heaped the remains with debris until Omar and his Muslim army came in 638. Just like that telltale skewed Muslim raised platform northwest corner stair bottom step stone, remnant of the First Temple’s western wall, that I talked about a fortnight ago in #1158, the Dome of the Rock incorporates and exhibits, though hardly with such intent, evidence of the reality of Solomon’s Temple.
Standing on the ambulatory in the Dome of the Rock, looking down on es-Sakhra, one sees (I did) the Foundation Stone that had stood in the Holy of Holies of Herod’s and before that of Solomon’s Temple, and carved into it the rectangular slice whereon the Ark of the Covenant long ago stood. If the Almighty intended to permanently preserve that sight in a suitable frame with attentive custodians, that’s what He did. Our role is to make that fact, that core of the core piece of Jewish peoplehood history, and our owners’ equity in it, clear to the world.
PS: I’m threatening Thursday to drive down to Florida to visit Dan, my roommate from Penn Law sixty years back. So if I delay my answering your emails on this one, it’s not that I’ve been browbeaten out of responding by some of your responses to my mention last week of that third-rail word “Trump.” Here’s proof. Dan is a Quaker, and while these people are among the most solid and admirable of American citizens, most of their views of our Jewish homeland of Israel are not those of us rightwing American Zionist Jews. One of Dan’s relatives calls my six-decades relation with Dan among the solar system’s improbable. Solar system, hell, Milky Way Galaxy. So fire away, Gentle Readers who see this week’s issues differently from me. I’ll get back to you when I get back. j