WHILE YOU STAND ON ONE LEG: A friend of mine’s writing a book, When Bible Meets History, for which I offered to do the index, using the program I wrote (I wrote business software in real life) for my own book. This renewed my interest in “biblical archeology,” which in turn led me to thinking about what I argued here last week, that we should base our arguments against “the two-state solution” on we Jews having a stronger historical claim than the Arabs to western Palestine, Eretz Yisrael, not least Jerusalem.
The Most Meaningful Archeological Find, and WHY
What’s your pick for the most meaningful “biblical archeology” find, and what makes it so meaningful to us today? Here’s my selection.
The Most Meaningful Archeological Find
“My” rabbi’s also an archeologist (really). He lives in Jerusalem’s Old City and provided me a thorough analysis of the Khirbet Qeiyafa findings, in which he was centrally involved, which I cited at length in my book, Israel 3000 Years, in showing that the Jerusalem-based Israelite entity of David’s time was both militarily substantial and literate.
But he and I approach archeology differently. Barnea qua archeologist is a professional scientist, not going beyond where solid evidence takes him. I’m an advocate. I wrote a book arguing that, as historian Parkes had asserted, the Jewish people’s permanent presence in Palestine, in post-biblical as well as in biblical times, was sufficiently substantial, “in spite of every [post-biblical foreign rulers’] discouragement,” to have written today’s Israelis’ “real title deeds.” And so, when I look at archeological findings, I look at how far they advance our case that historically, as well as legally under the Palestine Mandate, western Palestine, the land of Israel, our Jewish people’s historical homeland, is Ours.
My choice, for many years, of our most meaningful archeological finding had been the House of David inscription. I’d been particularly permanently incensed by a “minimalist” archeologist’s scoffing that King David, dynasty-founder and key figure of ancient Israelite homeland history, had been “as real as King Arthur.” Then a ninth century BCE enemy king’s inscription was found at Tel Dan, boasting of his victories over the northern kingdom of Israel and over “the house of David.” Israel Finkelstein, never the foremost champion among Israeli archeologists of the magnitude of David’s and Solomon’s kingdom, nonetheless assessed the House of David inscription this way: “This is dramatic evidence of the fame of the Davidic dynasty less than a hundred years after the reign of David’s son Solomon.” (Finkelstein & Silberman, The Bible Unearthed, p. 129).
I’ve since changed my mind. Leen Ritmeyer, a Dutch archeological architect, is responsible. In Secrets of Jerusalem’s Temple Mount (fuller version, The Quest: Revealing the Temple Mount in Jerusalem) he lays out, in a Sherlock Holmes-worthy demonstration, a piece of archeological evidence that’s been right there before our eyes all along, but which we’d never really seen. How significant is what he lays out? I’ll put it this way: Each spring I tell my archeologist rabbi: “Your task this summer is to find the Ark of the Covenant (preferably inside the Green Line).” Short of that, nothing exceeds in Jewish importance what Ritmeyer found. Come along.
Ritmeyer’s demonstration’s first step is literally a step, the bottom-most step of the northwest corner flight of steps ascending from the Temple Mount’s surface to the Muslim platform on the Mount on which stands the shrine of the Dome of the Rock. This step, and hence this flight of steps, unlike the other seven flights of steps ascending to the Dome’s platform from the plaza of the Mount, is slightly skewed from alignment with the platform’s edge. Moreover, unlike the other steps even in its own flight, this bottom step is composed of large stones cut in a pre-Herodian style, as if it had been part of a pre-Herodian wall later inside Herod’s Mount. And its lay is exactly parallel to the Mount’s eastern wall opposite, the oldest part of that wall, which Herod had not replaced. And the distance between that bottom step and eastern wall is, by one of the then-used measurements, exactly 500 cubits, the significance of which is that ancient sources tell us the Jewish First Temple’s Mount had been 500 cubits square. And, famous 1800’s surveyor Charles Warren recorded evidence indicating that the edge of this bottom step sits at what had been the First Temple’s Mount’s northern wall.
There’s a slight bend in the Mount’s eastern wall, indicating a possible point at which the original Mount had been extended by later construction, and this bend is located 500 cubits south of the point at which a northern wall, positioned as stated above, had met the eastern wall. And, in addition to other clues, there’s a gate, Barclay’s Gate, in Herod’s western wall, west of the original Mount’s western wall, in which the interior passageway, initially going east, right-angle turns south, and that point is in a line with that bottom step up to the Dome’s platform mentioned above. So Ritmeyer makes “quite a good case,” as Biblical Archeology Review’s Hershel Shanks put it in his Foreword to Secrets, for his demonstration.
But Ritmeyer doesn’t stop with laying out the First Temple’s Mount. His “quite a good case” goes on to locate where the First and Second Temples both stood on their Mounts, and what had formed the floor of their Holy of Holies, the summit of Mount Moriah, on which both Temples had stood. The Babylonians and then the Romans had destroyed the Jews’ Temples, which, successively had stood for a millennium, and then, half a millennium later, the Muslims built there the still-standing magnificent Dome of the Rock. That Rock, es Sakhra, is the same summit of Mount Moriah, and on that Rock Ritmeyer builds the climax of his case.
If you haven’t been inside the Dome of the Rock, which I have, as has Ritmeyer, infinitely more portentously, there’s an elevated circular walkway inside, from which you can gaze down at es-Sakhra, Mount Moriah’s summit. The difference between Ritmeyer and me (and everybody else who’s been there) is that archeological architect Ritmeyer understood what he was looking at. From manmade depressions on the summit, which he identified as remains of wall foundation trenches, and guided by ancient sources’ wall thickness and spaces measurements, he was able to lay out a proposal of where the Holy of Holies’ walls had stood, and noted that a manmade rectangular cut in the Rock “sits exactly in the center of the proposed Holy of Holies” (Secrets, p. 101). Using advanced photographic processes, Ritmeyer was able to determine the dimensions of that rectangular slot, which are those in Exodus 25:10 for the Ark of the Covenant, with room on the side for a scroll. He eliminates other possible explanations of this Holy of Holies centered rectangular slot, concluding (Secrets, p. 109): “In the end, the conclusion that this unique depression marked the emplacement of the Ark of the Covenant inside the Holy of Holies is inescapable.”
What It Means To Us Now
I argued last week in #1201 that the case that we make against “the two-state solution” – “two states along the 1967 [1949] lines with mutually agreed territorial swaps” – should be grounded not in “the Palestinian Authority not being an appropriate ruler of a western Palestine Arab state,” but in Eretz Yisrael, our Jewish people’s historical homeland, belonging to us Jews and not to the Arabs. Yet I feel that many of my fellow grassroots non-Orthodox American Jews continue even after October 7 to favor “two-states.” Certainly, the Jewish Democrats in the House of Representatives, and all of the Democratic party US Senators, favor “two-states,” many doubtless thinking most of us do.
So this week I tried something else. Can it be, if there’s at least “quite a good case” that still to be seen there today in what had been dead center in the Holy of Holies of Solomon’s Temple is the slot King Solomon cut to set the Ark of the Covenant, American Jews would acquiesce that Palestinian Arabs have a stronger ownership claim to historic Jerusalem than we Jews? God, I hope not.
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