2023-10-27 04:02:31
October 2014, a sigh ago, brought with it a series of riots in the old town of Jerusalem. On the 13th, a day of misfortune, the Israeli army attacked a group of young Palestinians who, according to the Mossad, was preparing to create chaos. The most striking thing was the improvised ‘ring’ in which the scuffle took place: the Esplanade of the Mosques or Temple Mount –the name given to it, respectively, by Muslims and Jews–. The enclave is still one of the most sacred in the city. Not in vain is it home to what is known as the Dome of the Rock, a temple with a golden dome that hides inside the stone on which, according to both religions, Muhammad ascended to the seventh heaven and Abraham was about to murder Isaac.
Holy place
The origin of the temple is closely linked to the birth of the holy city. Fernando Cisneros maintains in ‘The Dome of the rock: ideology beneath the simbol‘that the city was originally populated by the Jebusite people. According to the biblical texts, the Hebrews tried to put an end to them, but it was impossible: “The children of Judah could not exterminate the Jebusites who lived in Jerusalem, and so the Jebusites continued to inhabit Jerusalem with the children of Judah until the present.” That mix of societies was the one that settled definitively in the area and associated Mount Moriah with a sacred place.
The border between reality and biblical myth is blurred, but it seems that, for them, “the top of the mountain represented a sacred location, which corresponds to a sacred rock, a ‘betylium’, the founding stone, the ‘omfalós’. or navel of the world. That sanctuary was made up of an infinite number of elements, among which the aforementioned rock, a tree, a fountain and a cave stood out. There was also a temple “where the ritual banquet was held after the sacrifices, which constituted a site of cultural devotion for the Semites.” That sacred acropolis is the same one where, today, the golden dome stands, the heart of the discord between the three cultures.
As the centuries passed, the acropolis had a marked biblical significance for the Hebrews and Christians. Judaic tradition maintains that it was on that rock that Yahweh asked Abraham to sacrifice his son, Isaac, to demonstrate his faith. The story, more than popular on a social level, is described in ‘Genesis’: «he immediately took out a knife to kill his son. But the angel of the Lord called to Abraham from heaven saying, ‘Abraham! Abraham!’. And Abraham answered, ‘Here I am.’ Then the angel said, ‘Stop! Don’t hurt the boy. Don’t do anything to him, because now I know that you respect and obey God. You did not deny him your only son.’”
Lift and pull
Biblical tradition is elusive and blurs reality. According to the chronicles, it was King Solomon – who presumably lived between the years 966 BC and 926 BC – who ordered the construction of a temple on that mountain to create a new place of worship and house an infinite number of relics: from the Ark of the Alliance, to the very foundation rock. Theologian Mark S. Kinzer reveals in ‘Jerusalem crucified, Jerusalem resurrected‘, that “Solomon began to build the house of the Lord in Jerusalem, on Mount Moriah, where the Lord had appeared to his father David, in the place where he had designated.”
In ‘True and Sacred History of King Solomon’, the 18th century editor Manuel José Martín describes this temple down to the smallest detail, although always paying attention to the sacred scriptures. He states, for example, that “all the stones that made up the magnificent building were made of marble, locked with very strong iron”, that each piece was enormous, that there were “2,224 windows” and that the bars, according to Josephus, were made of gold. The opulence was unparalleled, in the author’s words: “The floor and walls were covered with cedar and fir boards, and these with sheets of gold, nailed with 25-ounce gold nails, the heads set with precious stones.”
Model of the Second Temple of Jerusalem ABC
The temple remained standing until, in the 6th century BC, when the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar II He took the city after a long siege. According to Simon Sebag Montefiore, who studied history at Gonville and Caius College in Cambridge, in the essay ‘Jerusalem, the biography’, the monarch had no mercy either for the citizens or the buildings: “He deported 20,000 Jews to Babylon.” . A month later, he ordered his general to make the capital and the buildings disappear. Among them was the enclave built by Solomon, which was destroyed and plundered. “They set fire to your sanctuary,” lamented Psalm 74. Each and every stone of the building fell down the hill, to the humiliation of the Jews.
The area continued in this way until the Jew Zerubbabel arrived in the 6th century BC, when the city was under Persian sovereignty. This biblical character, leader of the exiled Hebrews, acquired all kinds of riches and rebuilt the temple in 515 BC Authors, historians and theologians are elusive on this point. Some maintain that, according to tradition, that sacred rock remained under the building; as many others, who were on the mountain; and the latter deny its existence. You go to know. What is clear is that this new holy place ended up shattered after the revolt that the Hebrews staged against Rome in the 1st century AD.
Legions and Christianity
The revolution did not last long. From the ‘eternal urbs’ several legions arrived to put an end to it. And, upon entering the city, Titus Flavius Vespasian boasted that a divine power had allowed Rome to overcome that resistance. “We have fought with the help of God and it is God who expelled the Jews from these fortresses,” he stated. Shortly after, the temple in Jerusalem began to burn. Historians agree that it was caused by the military. However, the historian Josephus later maintained that, although a soldier had spread the flames, the general had expressly ordered that this building not be attacked.
Even destroyed, the temple remained in the minds of the Jews. For them, its location, without a building, was still the ‘axis mundi’, the ‘highest point’ or the ‘navel of the Earth’. The enclave remained virgin until 130, when Hadrian proposed to build a new city on that mountain: the Aelia Capitolina. Although this was left on ‘stand by’ for different reasons. In the end, it was in the year 330 when Flavia Julia Helena, mother of the emperor, arrived in the holy city and shook the society of the time by stating that she had found the cross of the savior there. “Almost immediately, construction began on the complex of the Holy Sepulchre, the Basilica of the Nativity in Bethlehem and the Eleona on the Mount of Olives,” says Cisneros.
For the next three centuries, Christianity insisted that devastation must reign over the old temple. In the words of the Spanish expert, “as the emblem of the disgrace of the cult of the so-called ‘old alliance’.” But Cisneros goes further. In his text he maintains that, on the one hand, the men of the cross felt “revulsion” towards the enclaves consecrated to the pagan gods. On the other hand, “they developed the strategy of superimposing Christian devotion on the places of worship of the previous gods.” In practice, they prohibited prayer in that area, except once a year, when the Jews were allowed to anoint the founding rock and, as the scriptures stated, “lament their fate by tearing their garments before leaving.”
Dome of the Rock
In the 7th century that hill, better known at the time as ‘quadra’, was still a place of tension between Christians and Jews. The first ignored the remains of the temple; The latter, for their part, were convinced that sooner or later its reconstruction would take place. When Islam conquered Jerusalem in 637 AD from the Byzantines everything changed. Caliph Omar raised the need to erect a place for Muslim prayer…. and chose the mountain for its symbolic value. “The caliph himself began to clear the space where he would perform the rite, which constituted a notable symbolic act,” explains Cisneros.
The first mosque built south of the esplanade was defined by a 7th century chronicler as “a square prayer house, made with large beams and planks, on ruins; a low quality work. It was the Umayyads who replaced it with an architectural complex that became one of the largest and richest enclaves in Jerusalem. The Caliph ‛Abd al-Malik ordered the construction of the current Dome in the year 688. Its construction was completed in 691, although a collapse forced it to be rebuilt in the 11th century. The result, in any case, is splendid: an octagonal building crowned with a golden dome and blue mosaics.
three Palestinian women as they pass by the golden dome of the “Temple Mount” or Esplanade of the Mosques in the old city of Jerusalem abc
Furthermore, inside it is hidden that rock in which Abraham would have tried to end his son’s life. And it has a reason. After the conquest by Islam, the idea spread that this stone was the one from which Muhammad ascended to the heavens. That made it a sacred city for this culture, as Thomas A. Idinopulos, author of ‘Jerusalem, the holiest of cities’, explains: “The legend continued to glorify Muhammad’s journey, after the construction of the Dome had been completed. in 691. Muhammad had been escorted by the Archangel Michael. […] Finally, he was taken to the seventh heaven, where Allah was waiting to grant him the final revelation.
Since then it has passed through a thousand hands. The Christians held the enclave for three centuries when they conquered Jerusalem. Part of them, under the protection of the Knights Templar, the same ones who today ask the Pope for their return. In addition, they established the building as a place of pilgrimage, which caused thousands of people to take small pieces of its interior as a relic. In the end, a fence was built to prevent the Dome from being looted. Saladin, upon recovering the city for Islam, ordered the destruction of all memory of the Holy Cross in the area. He only left one thing: that fence. And only because it seemed useful to him. And so, until today.
#mysterious #sacred #stone #hides #temple #Jerusalem