Dear Friends, shalom,
About a month ago a lady in Connecticut, surfing the web for an interesting and not too strenuous walking tour of Jerusalem, for herself and her husband, landed on jerusalemwalks.com.
Thrilled she called her husband who immediately shot off an e mail to the clearly avant guard jerusalemwalks.com tour guide and writer of Leon’s no news bulletin.
On Thursday I met them dressed in white on either side of the glass breakfast table covered in a white starched table cloth, sipping the last coffee and toast looking out of their hotel dining room windows at the handsome German clock tower by the pointed dome of the Dormition Church pondering down into the profound depths of the Hinnom Valley riddled with stone cut tombs of the original inhabitants of the holy city we’d be walking through that day.
“A good end has a thoughtful beginning.”
Wise words from “Lecha Dodi” the song of the welcoming of the Sabbath.
The best way to end a walk through Jerusalem’s colorful, gauntlet like, shopkeeper lined alley ways to the conglomeration of holy places and archaeological digs is to start by driving to the top of the Mt. of Olives for a panoramic preview.
Then go underground to the Western Wall Tunnel and meet your guide at the other end which is the first station of the Via Dolorosa.
Scurrying into the Ecce Homo Church we escaped Mike, my Moslem, high pressure salesman friend and found ourselves, almost surely on an Aelia Capitolina period (132 CE) stone floor, known by many scholars as the Lithostratos or stone pavement of the Herodian period Antonio fortress (30 BCE) where Pontius Pilate gave Jesus the cross and Roman soldiers whipped Him.
It covers a Neolithic period (7000 BCE) water cistern known by the ancient Canaanites (2000 BCE) as the Pool of Astarte* and the Romans (132 CE) as the Struthian Pool.
We climbed out of the dark coolness of the Neolithic depths into the blazing sun and Mike’s warm embrace exactly at the same moment when kids showing their report cards to their proud parents came out of the Madrassa built on top of the ancient stone floor we had just seen for the last day of the school year.
Entering the school grounds especially with Mike, the devout Moslem by our side, seeing a magnificent view of the spectacular gold domed shrine built by the Caliph Omar in 692 CE and actually entered the realm of dispute about the place of the Holy of Holies, getting diverted as many religious people are, from thoughts of the amazing primordial event of a man offering a ram instead of his son to God to thoughts about where is the holy place where this great event happened.
This event is the precursor to prayer and getting tangled in a discussion about where it happened in fact carries us away from the importance of the act of prayer. But getting entangled in discussion about religion happens all the time here.
The dispute is so fierce that Moslems consider it blasphemy to doubt that the Dome of the Rock is standing on the site of the Holy of Holies because if it’s not the place then Abraham didn’t sacrifice the ram instead of his son Isaac here and Mohammad didn’t receive the Koran from God here.
Nobody has a problem with believing that Abraham, performed a laudable act of sacrificing a ram instead of his son. Everybody has a problem with where the sacrifice took place.
Instead of concentrating on the world changing act which Abraham performed people are bickering over where it happened and who’s holy place it should be.
As far as Moslems like my friend Mike are concerned a tour guide who tells his tourists in no uncertain terms that this is the place and no other is worth his salt but one who raises a possibility that the event happened somewhere else and that the Caliph Omar was wrong is a charlatan and a liar.
Little do they realize that today since the development of scientific methods and instruments for the study of ancient events for the first time in the history of the world it’s possible, to actually uncover the true places of events that changed the course of history and whose discovery can bring about a change for the better in the continued history of the world in the future.
My suggestion is simply to consider the possibility that the Shrine of Omar is really standing on the site of the Antonia Fortress and not on the site of Holy of Holies of Solomon’s Temple and therefore might not be the place where Mohammad received the Koran or where Abraham offered the ram caught in the thicket instead of his son.
Solomon built the Holy of Holies on the site where Abraham made the offering of the ram instead of his son and this was not at the top of Mt. Moriah but at the side.
Abraham wouldn’t have built his altar at the top of the mountain because the Canaanite Temple of Astarte was standing there at the time. Astarte represented the stars which the ancient Canaanites worshipped.
Solomon built a star shaped fortress on top of the temple of Astarte on top of Mt. Moriah
Only archaeological excavation can verify this. In the meantime with the refusal of Moslems and so called scholars to consider any alternative to their traditional beliefs this is impossible.
Wishing you a great no news day
Yours truly
Leon Gork
Note:
* The name Straton by which the Romans knew the Neolithic pool originates in an Akkadian word for star (language at the time of Abraham) Astarte.
Come for a Jerusalem Walk with Leon Gork
Jerusalemwalks.com
legork@netvision.net.il
Tel: 052 3801867