More On Did Jewish Temples Exist on The Temple Mount

Recognize this building?



No?

It's the Al-Aqsa Mosque, from just over a century ago.



I don't deny it exists.

As an advocate of Jewish rights to and on the Temple Mount, I have noted many times in this blog about Muslim fantasies that the Temple Mount did not have Jewish Temple on it. One excample is here. And vetran readers will recall the story of the hole.

At the 2000 Camp David summit, Yasser Arafat announced that "The Temple didn't exist in Jerusalem, it existed in Nablus.…There is nothing there [i.e., no trace of a temple on the Temple Mount]." Bill Clinton, Ehud Barak, and Dennis Ross, former U.S. Special Envoy to the Middle East respectively, all recalled Arafat's statement with astonishment. Arafat repeated his claims to the French president, Jacques Chirac, on September 20th, 2000, saying "But the ruins of the Temple don't exist! Our studies show that these are actually Greek and Roman ruins."

Anyway, despite what you may have heard or read, the existence and location of the First and Second Temples are attested to by Islamic sources. Here's some material on the subject:-

Did the Temples Exist?

The Qur'an refers to the existence of both temples in verse 17:7. In this passage, the Qur'an deals with God's punishment of the Children of Israel for their transgressions:

(We permitted your enemies)
To disfigure your faces,
And to enter your Temple
As they had entered it before,
And to visit with destruction
All that fell into their power.

The word translated as "Temple" by Abdullah Yusuf Ali (and by the influential translator Marmaduke Pickthall before him) is masjid. This word, which is usually translated as mosque, has the meaning of a sanctuary wherever it appears in a pre-Islamic context. The usual Muslim exegesis of this verse (including that of Abdullah Yusuf Ali) holds that it refers to the destruction of the First and Second Temples.

Muslim tradition is especially adamant about the existence of the First Temple, built by Solomon, who appears in the Qur'an as a prophet and a paragon of wisdom. Verse 34:13 is an account of how Solomon summoned jinn (spirits) to build the Temple:

They worked for him
As he desired, (making) Arches,
Images, Basons
As large as wells, And (cooking) Cauldrons fixed
(In their places)

Early Muslims regarded the building and destruction of the Temple of Solomon as a major historical and religious event, and accounts of the Temple are offered by many of the early Muslim historians and geographers (including Ibn Qutayba, Ibn al-Faqih, Mas'udi, Muhallabi, and Biruni).

The Location of the Temples

So much for the existence of the Temples. But what of their location? The Islamic sanctity of the Haram al-Sharif is based upon verse 17:1:

Glory to (Allah)
Who did take His Servant
For a Journey by night
From the Sacred Mosque
To the Farthest Mosque

This is the textual proof of the isra', the earthly segment of the Night Journey of the Prophet Muhammad: overnight, Muhammad was miraculously transported, round-trip, from "the Sacred Mosque" (al-Masjid al-Haram) that is, the Ka'ba (or its vicinity) in Mecca to "the Farthest Mosque" (al-Masjid al-Aqsa). Later Muslim tradition came to identify "the Farthest Mosque" with Jerusalem. But during Muhammad's lifetime, no mosque stood in Jerusalem; the Muslims conquered the city only several years after his death. Abdullah Yusuf Ali's commentary on this verse summarizes the traditional explanation: "The Farthest Mosque," he writes, "must refer to the site of the Temple of Solomon in Jerusalem on the hill of Moriah."

Sari Nuseibeh, president of Al-Quds University, has emphasized this original meaning of the site for Muslims: the mosque is the last and final in a series of sanctuaries erected there. "The mosque was itself a revivication of the old Jewish temple," writes Nuseibeh, "an instantiation of the unity with the Abrahamic message, an embodiment of the new temple yearned for and forecasted. And why should this seem strange when Muhammad himself, according to the Qur'an, was the very prophet expected and described in the 'true' Jewish literature?"(2)

(1) Rashid Khalidi, "Transforming the Face of the Holy City: Political Messages in the Built Topography of Jerusalem," paper presented to the conference on "Landscape Perspectives on Palestine," Bir Zeit University, November 12-15, 1998,

(2) Sari Nuseibeh, "Islam's Jerusalem"

Much more material here

And the Waqf's own 1925 booklet.


P.S

On January 26, 2001, Yediot’s senior political columnist Nahum Barnea, perhaps the country’s foremost political writer, characterized the Temple Mount as "a difficult matter: For religious and political reasons [a peace settlement] is impossible with it. For religious and political reasons it is impossible without it."

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