The Holy City

18 April, 2010

Today we visited non-church sites in Jerusalem.  We had an early breakfast and left for the Temple Mount area, where the first and second temples (the temples of Solomon and Herod) were built.  This area is known to Muslims as Haraam ash-Sharif, the Noble Sanctuary.

In the centuries after the destruction of the second temple by the Romans, this area became a rubbish dump.  But when the Muslim Ummayad forces took control of Jerusalem, they cleared it of rubbish, and built on it two beautiful buildings - the famous shrine known as the Dome of the Rock, and the Al-Aqsa mosque.

The Dome of the Rock is the oldest Muslim monument still standing.  It is not a mosque, but a Muslim shrine. It was built  in the late seventh century by the Umayyad Caliph Abd ul-Malik over a sacred stone that has important associations both to Jews and to Muslims.  In Jewish tradition the stone was thought to be the place where Abraham prepared to sacrifice Isaac.  It also marked the place of the Holy of Holies in the now destroyed Temple.  In Muslim tradition the stone is believed to be the place from which the Prophet Muhammad ascended into heaven during his Night Journey to heaven.

The first Al-Aqsa mosque was built by the Caliph Omar, and a much extended version was completed by the Caliph Al-Walid in 709AD.  The building that you see above is actually the third mosque on this site, completed in 1135.  Al-Aqsa means 'the farthest', and it received this name because, when it was originally built, it was the farthest mosque from the Islamic heartland of Arabia.  It is the third most important mosque in Islam after the mosques in Mecca and Madina.
Sadly, Christians and Jews are not allowed in the Al-Aqsa mosque nor the Dome of the Rock, but pictures of their interiors can be found on the internet if you are interested.

It seems slightly wierd that in Jerusalem the Temple Mount, which is so sacred to the Jews, has two Islamic monuments on it.  The Jews have focused their attention on the Western Wall (the Wailing wall) which is a wall of the support structure for the Temple Mount, built by Herod the Great.  This is now the holiest site for Jewish people.

We went from the Temple Mount to the Western wall, and took the opportunity to pray there.  In the picture above you can see a small enclosure on the right, which is the women's section, and the section on the left is for men.  Christians are welcome to pray there, and as is customary, I took a prayer, written on paper, to insert into the cracks of the wall.  As I laid my hand on the wall and prayed, I had a strong sense of the faith in God and religious devotion that had been expressed in this place.  I had not expected to be moved as I visited the Western Wall, but I was.

After leaving the Western Wall, we went to view the excavations at the southern wall.  There was evidence there of the destruction of the Temple.  These paving stones were broken by stones that were hurled down by the Romans from the wall of the Temple.

Also found were many ritual baths (mikvehs), where people would ritually purify themselves before entering the Temple.

I began to feel tired from tramping around looking at things, so I decided to sit down.  I found a seat that looked a bit large for me, but worked fine.

Not far from this site were the southern steps of the Temple, outside the current city walls.  These were steps up and down which Jesus would have walked as he visited and left the Temple.

After lunch in the old city we visited the City of David excavations and Hezekiah's tunnel (outside the current city wall further down the hill on the southern side of the Temple Mount).  Recently the Israelis have been excavating the old Canaanite-Jebusite city area, which David captured and made into his own city.  Among the houses and other buildings in the city of David (also known as the Ophel) they have found signs of the destruction caused by the Babylonians in 586BC.  Records were burned in the Babylonian destruction, but in some cases the seals on them survived the fires.  A number of these seals had names on them that were known from the Bible, such as Gemariahu son of Shaphan, who was a high-ranking official in the court of King Jehoiakim (Jer. 36:9-12).  So as the excavations continue they are uncovering parts of our - as well as the people of Israel's - biblical heritage.

Hezekiah's tunnel (also known as the Siloam tunnel) was built in 701 BC, in in the time of King Hezekiah, when the kingdom of Judah was under imminent threat of attack by the Assyrians under King Sennacherib (2 Kings 20:20).  It is an amazing piece of engineering, bringing water from the Gihon spring, which was outside the city walls, to a point within the city walls - the pool of Siloam.  (This was crucial to the survival of the city, because the city could only survive a siege if the inhabitants had adequate amounts of fresh water.)  In fact, King Hezekiah did not want the Assyrian army to get any water from the Gihon spring, so he somehow diverted the water so that the Assyrians could not gain access to it (2 Chronicles 32:2-4,30).

The tunnel itself is a curving channel 533 metres long, cut in the bed rock.  It was, of course, all done with hammer and chisel.  The gradient for the water is only 30 cm (0.6%).  An inscription found within the tunnel states that the tunnel was cut from both ends simultaneously.  By some feat of engineering - possibly by the guidance of sound from the surface tapped into the bed rock, they managed to make the two tunnels meet.  We were allowed to walk through the tunnel.  The picture on the left below shows the discrepancy between the two tunnels at the point of meeting - only around 30-40cms.  In the other photograph you can see the water level, which for most of the way was just above ankle height, but at the beginning was quite a lot higher, with the water rushing from the spring.

At the end of the tunnel we came to the Pool of Siloam, which was a lovely, peaceful spot.