Easter is a good time to reflect on what the Temple Mount means for the three Abrahamic faiths, especially in the wake of the 7 October attack by Hamas on Israel and all that has come to pass since.
While holy to so many different religious believers, the Temple Mount in Jerusalem has also long been a focus of violent conflict. The Al-Aqsa Mosque compound contains within it the famous Dome of the Rock which still dominates the Jerusalem skyline and has occupied what was the empty Temple Mount since 691.
In a poll conducted in the West Bank and Gaza by the Palestinian Centre for Policy and Survey Research, 81 per cent of those polled thought that the attack and atrocities of October 7 were, among other things, “a response to settler attacks on Al-Aqsa Mosque”. Indeed, Hamas has named its actions on that infamous day as the beginning of Operation Al Aqsa Flood.
On the Friday that we Catholics now know as Good, Jesus was convicted of blasphemy after being asked by Caiaphas if He was the Son of God. The answer to that question had consequences for Jesus, and thus for all of us. But it came only after an earlier attempt to convict Jesus of blasphemy had failed.
That earlier attempt at conviction involved witnesses who falsely charged that Jesus had said “I will destroy this temple built by hands, and after three days I will build another, not built by hands” (Mark 14.58). In fact, Jesus had spoken of His own body being destroyed by others and of His rising from the dead. This elevated and transcendent idea of the Temple that Jesus was proposing was one that was too hard to bear – or to understand – for many of His listeners.
So magnificent was the earthly Temple that Herod, the tyrant who ordered its construction, is known as “The Great”. This otherwise-disliked “King of the Jews”, ruling the Jews by permission of the Roman State, finally gave that people the Temple they had dreamed of and which allowed them to perform the ritual animal sacrifices which were the heart of their religion.
The Temple’s greatness was said to be worthy of the many visions which the Jewish people had had of a restored glory. Jews who knew their scriptures and history would know that the original Temple, Solomon’s, had been ordered by that wise King, who had himself received plans for it from his father King David. David had brought the Ark of the Covenant to Jerusalem, and it was here that a fitting home was to be found for this most sacred object of the Jewish people.
Yet Solomon is deemed a more fitting person to complete the building of the Temple than his father. As Simon Goldhill in his excellent study The Temple of Jerusalem points out: “Solomon’s building was a monumental temple for a national religion, but it was otherwise a very weird temple indeed. It was a temple not for God but for God’s Name. This explains how a house can be built for a god who is everywhere. It is a temple where the special presence of divinity can be perceived and acknowledged.
“The Ark was to be kept in the Temple’s deepest and holiest recesses, but already by the time of the destruction of Solomon’s Temple even that had disappeared. It was buried, according to the rabbis, beneath the Temple Mount awaiting the Messiah.”
However, Scripture differs from rabbinic tradition, telling us (2 Maccabees 2.4-7) that Jeremiah buried that Ark in a cave in Mount Nebo. As a result, the Romans were later amazed to find that there was nothing to see at the centre of the Jewish Temple.
The first Temple, according to Scripture, was built in Solomon’s reign in the 10th century BC, and in the Book of Kings we learn that it is the boy king Josiah who restores Solomon’s Temple to purity (620 BC) –after his predecessors have descended into polytheism – ensuring that it is to be the only site for the all important ritual sacrifices.
The destruction of Solomon’s Temple by Nebuchadnezzar, King of Babylon, in 587 BC was a devastating blow to the Jewish people. Yet, as so often, after exile came restoration and under the Persian Cyrus the Great, vanquisher of the Babylonians, the Jews were given permission to rebuild their Temple in Jerusalem in 538 BC.
This second Temple is known as Zerubbabel’s Temple and was finally completed in 515 BC where, according to Simon Schama: “it was seen to be a modest rebuild but enough for there to be the sprinkling of blood and roasted sacrifices that the Holiness Code of Leviticus required, enough to command the reverence of pilgrims on days of harvest festivals.” That Temple was to stand for half a millennium until it was replaced by Herod’s in 19 BC.
Yet Herod’s great Temple was destroyed utterly in 70 AD by the army of Rome’s supreme military commander, Titus, just as Christ had predicted. Already on Good Friday, forty years earlier, as Christ expired on the Cross “the veil of the temple was rent in twain from the top to the bottom; and the earth did quake; and the rocks were rent”.
For the Christian, the coming of Christ is the fulfilment of the Jewish religion. Since He is the fulfilment, all that led up to Him must be seen in the light of His Coming, His Sacrifice and His Resurrection. The sacrifices associated with the Temple of Jerusalem thus become obsolete, for it is in Christ’s Sacrifice, the source of untold graces, that redemption is to be found from the sin which imprisons us.
In light of this understanding, it is fitting that the Temple Mount remain empty, as a recognition of the fact that the Old Dispensation is now over, while the nations have attained to the “dignity of Israel”. The Holy of Holies is to be found in the tabernacle of every Catholic Church, and is the God-man Himself, the only worthy sacrifice that can be made to God the Father for our sins.
Early Christians grasped this and made a point of it. St Helena deliberately left the Temple Mount empty as she planned, with her son Constantine overseeing the building of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. The most significant Christian site in Jerusalem is not the Temple Mount.
Yet for Jews, the Western (Wailing) Wall of Herod’s Temple has become, especially in more recent times, a place where many religious Jews gather to pray and mourn what happened to the Temple of Jerusalem and all that that means for the Jewish people.
An attempt to rebuild that Temple was undertaken by Julian the Apostate (331-363 AD) who allied with Jewish leaders to do this and thereby discredit Christians who saw the Temple’s very destruction as a proof of their Divine favour.
Yet the attempt had to be abandoned when, according to Ammianus Marcellinus, at the end of May 363 AD “fearful balls of fire burst forth near the foundations, burning several workers and making the spot inaccessible. Thus the very elements, as if by some fate repelling the enterprise, it was laid aside”. Where Christians saw Divine intervention, others saw mere coincidence.
In 638 Caliph Omar, leading a Muslim army, conquered Jerusalem and by 691 Caliph Abd-Al-Malik, according to Goldhill, “erected in its place the stunningly beautiful Dome of the Rock, the Qubbat al-Shakra, the glorious octagonal building now capped by a golden dome…This building houses the rock on which, it was said, Abraham bound Isaac for sacrifice, the same rock was believed to be the altar of Solomon’s Temple, and it was where the prophet Mohammed rose from the earth on a winged steed to meet Abraham, Moses and Jesus in heaven, where he lead them in prayers.”
As Goldhill notes: “Islam recognises the prophetic tradition of Judaism and Christianity, but declares itself to transcend both. The Dome of the Rock visibly instantiates that transcendence: it is built on the traditions of those other religions, and is designed to soar magnificently – and symbolically – over the city of Jerusalem.”
On this Mount, where Islam boldly declares its superiority and transcendence over its predecessors, some sects within present-day Judaism, as well as apocalyptic Christian Zionists, have expressed a profound wish, for opposing reasons, to rebuild the Temple of Jerusalem. That feat is now complicated by the presence of an Islamic holy site on the Mount itself. Other Jewish groups regard such rebuilding projects as a grave offence to the Almighty, especially in the absence of the promised Messiah who alone could sanction such a project.
As discussed by David Abulafia in the April edition of the Catholic Herald magazine, the atrocities committed by Hamas and the subsequent Israeli invasion of Gaza mark a turning point not just in the fraught relationship between Israel and the Palestinians but between religious communities and ethnic groups in the United Kingdom as well.
Previous conflicts between Israel and Gaza, Abulafia notes, have resulted in an increase in anti-Semitic behaviour, such as abuse of ultra-orthodox Jews in parts of north London, but the latest outbreak of anti-Semitism that has occurred since 7 October has led Abulafia to observe that “something has gone truly, terribly wrong”.
While horrors unfold in the Middle East (and which may yet engulf the wider world), the peace offered by the One who spoke of the Temple as Himself is needed more than ever. Ultimately, His is the once-and-for-all sacrifice for the atonement of all of our sins and it is the Sacrifice that takes place in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre and in every Catholic church toward which we as Catholics must look if hope is to be had.
In the meantime, for non-Christians in the Holy Land, especially the Jewish Israelis and Muslim Palestinians, there remain peaceful voices among the two faiths which may again help them live together in harmony and friendship in a land sacred to both.
The tragedy though is that among those most concerned with the holy site of the Temple Mount, it is often the less pacific strands of two of the Abrahamic faiths (and indeed sometimes of all three) that make the headlines. That this is still too often the case – repeating previous painful history – should lead all to contemplate further what might be the true meaning of the Temple Mount.
Photo: Photo of the Temple Mount from Wikimedia Commons.
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