The Temple Mount In Jerusalem was definitely a Jewish Shrine long before Islam even existed, going back as far as the time of the Kingdom of Judah. This according to two separate archaeological finds revealed this past week.
Ancient clay pottery fragments dating back to the First Temple Period which were used in Temple sacrifices have been discovered, according to a report in the Hebrew Israeli daily Haaretz. In addition to this news. the Hebrew daily Yisrael Hayom (Israel Today) has reported on the discovery near Hebron of a one thousand year old Arabic Muslim inscription which calls the Temple Mount just that.
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Both discoveries were made by the Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA).
So now there is even more proof to refute the shocking and unfounded vote by UNESCO to declare that Jews have no historical connection to the Temple Mount. That decision was clearly politically motivated and not based on any evidence of any kind disproving a Jewish connection to ancient Jerusalem. Apparently even the New Testament is not considered a reliable source of information for the U.N. not to mention all of the ancient Greek and Roman historical texts that have survived to today and which talk about the Jews and Judea.
The new historical evidence is as overwhelming as it is convincing and comes on the heels of the recent discovery of a 2, 700 year old papyrus which refers to the city of Jerusalem in Hebrew. So we do know that Jerusalem and the country were both Jewish areas as far back as 700 BC, or at least before the Persian conquest of the region which took place 200 years later.
But even if you acknowledge this fact, there are Arabs who claim that the Jews did not settle in the area until era and that they did not build a Temple in Jerusalem until after the rise of the Persian Empire.
This is why the first discovery is so important. It proves that there was an ancient Temple on the very site of the Dome of The Rock today. This is something which Arabs have been denying for years. And academics who are Biblical text scholars/critics have also been keen to point out a lack of archaeological evidence to back up the histories of Kind David and King Solomon in Jerusalem.
The pottery was found over the last ten years in an excavation under the Temple Mount. This excavation was carried out in coordination with a controversial project which lay new power cables in the area. Carbon testing confirmed their age.
Yuval Baruch, head of the IAA Jerusalem Region, said of the discovery, “It’s the first time that we’ve found artifacts from this period on the Temple Mount. As far as the biblical period is concerned, the Temple Mount is a tabula rasa, nobody knows anything.”
Unfortunately, the artifacts lack inscriptions which can prove a connection to the ancient Israelites or Kingdom of Judah. So the Israel haters can claim that these finds only prove that someone performed sacrifices in that location a long time ago.
As for the other find, archaeologists Assaf Avraham and Perez Reuven presented their discovery of a 1, 000 year old Arabic inscription which refers to the Temple Mount as “Bait al-Maqdess.” This is Arabic for the Hebrew term “Beit Hamikdash” which means House of the Holy which is what the Jewish Temple was called. This was never a name for the are in Islam, nor for the Dome of the Rock (The Mosque of Omar) or the neighboring Al-Aqsa mosque.
The inscription was found on a mosque in the village of Nuba near Hebron.
The significance of this discovery is clear: Arabs once called the Temple Mount for its Hebrew name and so they acknowledged its Jewish history. Protestations that there is no Jewish historical connection to the area are clearly nothing more than recent political propaganda used as part of a general attempt to de-legitimize the existence of Israel.
Assaf Avraham said, “At the start of the Muslim period, religious rites were held inside the Dome of the Rock compound that imitated the ceremonies conducted in the Jewish Temple.”
“The people who conducted those ceremonies would purify themselves, change their clothes, burn incense, anoint the rock with oil, place curtains around the Foundation Stone, just like the ornamental curtain that existed in the [Jewish] Temple. In addition, those worshipers would wear ceremonial clothing and use incense burners over the Foundation Stone. These actions teach us that the Muslims saw the Dome of the Rock as the continuance of the Jewish Temple.”
So clearly the Muslims co-opted the Temple Mount as part of their religious heritage only after the Arab conquest of Israel shorty after the death of Mohamed.
And we know that the early Muslims knew that Jerusalem was originally a holy city of the Jews long before the rise of their religion. And they also acknowledged that the Jewish people once had a Temple in the city.
“There is plenty of evidence that shows the Jewish influence on the Muslim world at the beginning [of Islam]. Among other things, we can take notice of Muslim coins minted in the Land of Israel in the eighth century by Muslim rulers, which feature the symbol of the menorah of the Temple, ” added Avraham.
Unfortunately, none of this will get the U.N. to change its vote. And Israel haters will continue to deny the facts and claim that the Israeli government has simply fabricated these archaeological finds.
