WHILE YOU STAND ON ONE LEG: The Washington Post last week called the Jewish Temples’ existence on Jerusalem’s Temple Mount not historical facts but matters of “Jewish tradition.” Down to the very niche that Solomon carved in the Holy of Holies for a stable resting place for the Ark of the Covenant, evidence of our Jewish Temples is real, and all of us can support that.
Herod’s and Solomon’s Temples: Historical Facts or “Jewish Tradition”?
A JNS article last Friday, 4/21/23, Washington Post ‘Confuses Facts’ Equating Reality of Jewish Temples, Muhammad Ascension, rightly criticized that important American newspaper for statements it made in an article regarding the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. The Post had written:
“In Jewish tradition, the Temple Mount is the site where the First and Second Temples once stood. For Muslims, it is known as the Noble Sanctuary, the place where the prophet Muhammad ascended to heaven.”
The Post exacerbated this imbalance of relegating just the Jewish Temples’ reality to “tradition” by subordinating the Jews’ [and Christians’] name for the site to that of the Muslims’:
“… the al-Aqsa compound, known to Jews as the Temple Mount.”
Alas, deep divisions exist today between and among our Diaspora and Israeli Jewish communities, notwithstanding enemies’ existential threats against all of us, and against preservation of all evidence, from Talmuds to Temples, of what we believe. If there’s one core Jewish history fact which we can all unequivocally endorse, it’s that our people’s First and Second Temples were real.
In last week’s #1160, I summarized famed archeological architect Leen Ritmeyer’s persuasive contentions, using physical evidence still remaining in sight, of the location on Herod’s greatly enlarged Temple Mount of the original 500 square cubit Mount of Solomon’s First Temple. This is accepted today as solid historical fact, not “tradition.” Ritmeyer has written (Secrets of Jerusalem’s Temple Mount, p. 91): “By now, this location is well established in the archeological world, having been adopted, for example, in the latest edition of the archeological encyclopedia of the Holy Land published by the Israel Exploration Society.”
But that’s not all of the Solomon Temple remains that are still visible physical facts, not merely Jewish religious “tradition.” Ritmeyer goes on (id., pp. 91-92) that it proved possible for him, working inward from this original Temple Mount location, to locate where the walls of Solomon’s Temple had stood and even “the very spot where the Ark of the Covenant stood within the Holy of Holies.” Ritmeyer, The Quest, his full account of his findings, p. 273: “This small basin which Solomon had made has been preserved until today.”
I can’t speak for you, but if ever I’ve read a startling historical relic preservation statement rather matter-of-factly stated, that last statement of Ritmeyer’s, embracing three thousand turbulent years – “this small basin which Solomon had made has been preserved until today” – is definitively it. Come with me on a short tour.
The Mountain did not come to King Solomon. King Solomon went to the Mountain, the summit of Mount Moriah. There, enclosing and enshrining that Mountain’s crest, Solomon built our First Temple, the surrounding Mount of which his successors extended to the 500 square cubits of which the second century CE Mishnah speaks. Babylonians destroyed that First Temple, following which returnees from Exile built its Second Temple successor on the same site, later rebuilt more grandly by Herod, destroyed by the Romans in 70 CE. Romans and their successor Byzantines defiled the site until the Muslim conquest in 638.
The Dome of the Rock, that magnificent eight-sided structure built by the Omayyad Muslims in 691 with its circular balustrade surrounding and overlooking Mount Moriah’s top, preserves, displays and honors the summit, es-Sakhra, the Rock from which Muslims believe Muhammad ascended to Heaven. It likewise exposed the Ark of the Covenant’s resting niche that Solomon had carved into the summit. But the Europeans weren’t done. Crusaders came in 1099. Among other desecrations, the Crusaders chipped away at the Rock, selling slivers in Europe for their weight in gold, coming ominously close with their chipping away to that Solomon-carved niche for the Ark. Hand of the Almighty? Saladin defeated the Crusaders at the Horns of Hatton in 1187, and Muslims took back Jerusalem. And there the Dome of the Rock’s balustrade surrounds, overlooks and displays Mount Moriah’s summit, Muhammad’s heavenly ascension point and Ark of the Covenant niche to this day.
In his previous findings, Ritmeyer had recognized that the northwestern corner Dome platform slightly-skewed stair, the bottom step stone of which had been part of the original Mount’s western wall (later replaced with a further westward wall by Herod) ran 3.5 degrees east of north, as does the Mount’s unchanged original eastern wall., exactly 500 cubits away! He now recognized the “very significant” fact (Secrets, pp. 105-106) that the natural western edge of Mount Moriah’s summit lay along a parallel line, and that the back wall of the First Temple stood at this site. The Temple’s long axis was at right angle to this, aligning with the top of the Mount of Olives across the Kidron Valley, from which the Bible tells us the high priest sacrificing the Red Heifer could gaze directly into the Temple’s entrance. A flat area on the summit’s southern side bears evidence of a wall foundation, exactly 20 cubits north of which is the human-cut northern edge of the summit, “the Biblically prescribed measurement of each side of the Holy of Holies! Here the northern wall of the Holy of Holies would have been built, exactly at the foot of the northern scarp of es-Sakhra [the Rock, Foundation Stone, Mt. Moriah summit], which was originally cut for that purpose.”
In the middle of this square Holy of Holies is that rectangular niche on the summit. Eliminating alternative possibilities (Secrets, pp. 107-110), Ritmeyer concludes, based on Ark and niche dimensions, that this had been carved by Solomon as the stable resting “place” referenced in the Bible for the Ark of the Covenant, a conclusion Ritmeyer calls “inescapable.”
Conclusion
I drove down last week to visit Dan, my old law school roommate from sixty years ago at his home in Florida (accounting for this #1161 being two days late). Dan arranged a breakfast chat with a Christian professor, who led with seeking my view on “Israel’s displacement of the people of the West Bank.” I rejected his formulation of the question, calling it Judea-Samaria, part of the 22% of Palestine left for the Jewish national home after severance from the Mandate of 78% of Palestine as today’s Jordan with its Palestinian Arab majority population. I denied Israel’s displacement of Arabs from Israel, and cited Israel’s absorption of a greater number of indigenously Middle-eastern Jews displaced from Arab and other Muslim lands. I cited Trump’s peace plan in which Judea-Samaria Arabs would have self-administered home rule in an area larger than they occupy now, with Israel retaining security control, if they agree within four years. Our rather amicable-tone conversation made clear to me we have to get through to Americans that by history and Mandate Israel’s our Jewish national home and we’re not “occupiers” of “East” Jerusalem and “the West Bank.”
In making our historical presence in Palestine case (Dan lent the professor his copy of my Israel 3000 Years continuous-Jewish-presence-in-Palestine book), we have to cite the evidence that Herod’s and Solomon’s Temples weren’t just “Jewish tradition” but real. The evidence is still out there, still in plain sight, as Ritmeyer has so persuasively shown.