Was There a Temple in Jerusalem?

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Truth is the first casualty in war. We have seen this recently, in the bizarre and often hilarious lies of the Iraqi Minister of Information during the war in Iraq. Now there are Web sites devoted to the sayings of “Baghdad Bob,” along with T-shirts and other memorabilia. It also seems that the Bush administration lied to us about the nuclear threat posed by Saddam Hussein’s regime, relying on a report that the CIA knew was forged. This is disappointing, but perhaps not surprising. Lies in wartime are nothing new, though we often expect better.

In the Middle East, lies in wartime often also include lies about the past, since the past—or more precisely, public memory about the past—provides authority for claims about the present. I recently learned that the Palestinian Authority has taken to lying about the ancient biblical past in defense of its claims regarding Jerusalem. One of the chief negotiators of the Oslo accords, Saeb Erekat, states bluntly the current position of the Palestinian Authority: “For Islam, there was never a Jewish temple at Al Quds [Jerusalem].”¹ This is one of the reasons why the Palestinians wouldn’t accept a compromise about Jerusalem during the Camp David negotiations. I was floored when I read this. What a whopper!

To say that there never was a Jewish Temple in Jerusalem is a breathtaking revision of the past. It means that the sacred texts of Judaism and Christianity are a pack of lies, since the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament have abundant descriptions and testimony about the Jerusalem Temple—built by Solomon, restored by various Israelite kings, sermonized at by Jeremiah and other prophets, destroyed by Nebuchadnezzar and rebuilt by the Jewish returnees from the Babylonian Exile. In the New Testament, Jesus visits the Temple precincts, overturns the tables of the moneychangers and predicts the Temple’s destruction. According to Erekat’s claim, all this is false, and so too the abundant testimony outside of the Bible, including Iron Age inscriptions referring to the “Temple of Yahweh,” Josephus’s detailed description of the Temple, the briefer accounts of Tacitus and other Roman historians, the picture of the Jerusalem Temple on coins of the Second Jewish Revolt, and more.

But, perhaps unacknowledged by the revisers of history, according to this position not only is the Bible a lie, but so is the Quran, the sacred scripture of Islam, and so are the authoritative Islamic commentaries on the Quran. The Quran clearly refers to the destruction of the First and Second Temples (17:4–7). The prophet Muhammad for a time adopted the Jewish custom of praying toward Jerusalem. This is referred to in the Quran and clarified in later commentary: “The Prophet of God was given his choice of turning his face in whatever direction he wished. He chose the Holy House in Jerusalem in order that the People of the Book [the Jews] would be conciliated.”² (Some time later he changed the direction of Muslim prayer toward the Ka’ba in Mecca.) The al-Aqsa Mosque was built by Caliph Umar after his conquest of Jerusalem in the seventh century precisely because of the belief that the Temple Mount (called in Arabic the Haram al-Sharif, “the Noble Sanctuary”) was the place of Muhammad’s Night Journey from Mecca and the site of the Temple. According to a later work, the Caliph entered the site and said, “This must be the sanctuary of David of which the Prophet spoke to us when he said, ‘I was conducted there in the Night Journey.’”³ The Dome of the Rock was built later for the same reason. This is a lot of Islamic testimony and tradition to deny.

The very statement that “there was never a Jewish temple at Al Quds” is self-defeating. The Arabic term Al Quds, “The Holy (City),” is an abbreviation for the fuller term, Bayt al-Maqdis, which literally means “the Holy House.” This fuller form was the normal Arabic name for Jerusalem before the tenth century C.E. It is clearly a translation of the Hebrew term Bet Ha-Miqdash, “the Holy Temple.” In other words, the Arabic name for Jerusalem, Al Quds, has within it the memory that this was the city of the Jewish Temple.

Why would anyone want to deny the clear testimony of artifacts, texts and linguistic usage, stretching over thousands of years, that there was a Jewish Temple in 042Jerusalem? To bolster a negotiating position? To label one’s adversaries as liars? I suspect it goes deeper. Islam and Judaism are deeply intertwined in history. Muhammad was knowledgeable about Judaism, and Islam is a monotheistic and Abrahamic religion. Judaism flourished in the Golden Age of Islam, and many of the greatest works of Jewish philosophy, commentary and scholarship are in Arabic. Judaism and Islam are two brothers, like Isaac and Ishmael, and their conflicts can get very personal. But lying about the past means lying about one’s own identity. One hopes that these brothers can turn from their lies about each other and reconcile, or at least learn to live and let live, like Isaac and Ishmael when they came together to bury their father Abraham (Genesis 25:9). And the sooner the better.

Truth is the first casualty in war. We have seen this recently, in the bizarre and often hilarious lies of the Iraqi Minister of Information during the war in Iraq. Now there are Web sites devoted to the sayings of “Baghdad Bob,” along with T-shirts and other memorabilia. It also seems that the Bush administration lied to us about the nuclear threat posed by Saddam Hussein’s regime, relying on a report that the CIA knew was forged. This is disappointing, but perhaps not surprising. Lies in wartime are nothing new, though we often expect better. In the Middle East, […]