Jerusalem Explained

Okay. Originally there was a natural hill. This is a mountain that the Bible calls Mount Moriah. At the top of the hill there's a rock, the natural bedrock. This, in Judaism, came to be known as the Stone of Foundation, Even haShetiya, in Hebrew, because all the beginnings were linked to this rock. In Jewish tradition, from this stone the world was created. Adam, the first human, was created on the stone. And to this stone, Abraham brought his son Isaac for the sacrifice. So all the beginnings of the world, of mankind, and of the Jewish people, were all linked to this. So around the year 1,000 BC, King Solomon built the first temple just over the rock, and the rock became the face of the Holy of Holies. This temple stood for 420 years, almost, until the Babylonians came and destroyed it in the year 586 BC. Fifty years later, the Babylonians are gone, and the Persians are now the new boss in town. King Sirus of Persia lets the Jews, gives them permission to rebuild their temple. They come back from their exile in Babylon, and they rebuild the temple. It takes them another 20 years. But by 516 BC, we again have a new temple standing on the same location of the first, and the stone, the Holy of Holies, goes back to serve in the same place. The only difference, in the first temple we had the Holy Ark, the Ark of the Covenant, standing in the Holy of Holies. In the second temple, it's gone. Nobody knows where it is today. So this temple now stands again for a few centuries, and it goes under a few renovations. Around the year 20 or 19 BC, the mighty King Herod, wants to rebuild the temple, make it nicer than ever before. He has a problem. He wants a larger base to build a larger temple. But in order to do that, you could either cut down the mountain, flatten it, and have a larger base. But then you would lose the Stone of Foundation, the reason that the temple is here. So King Herod instead built huge retaining walls all around the mountain. On them, now he can build the larger platform, and the area is 35 acres. It's like over 20 football fields put together. Now he can build a larger, nicer temple than before. And indeed, his holy area was bigger than Rome or Athens or all the holy areas of the ancient world. This comes to an end after a big Jewish rebellion in the year 70 AD, by the Romans. Now a nice pneumonic trick, if you count the years between the destruction of the first temple and the rebuilding of the second temple, you get 70. If you count the years that the second temple stood, from 516 BC to 70 AD, you get 586 years off the second temple. Since the year 70, there was nothing atop the mountain until the Muslims came in the 7th century, in 638, and later built the Dome of the Rock, adopting all the Jewish traditions of sanctity to the mountain, and adding one more. To this rock came Mohammed, and from this rock ascended to the heavens on his miraculous night journey, which is mentioned in the Koran, in the 17th chapter. So since the 7th century, we have this beautiful dome that you see right behind me. When the crusaders came, and this was 1099, this building was too beautiful to destroy. So they christened it. All they had to do is take off the crescent, and put on it a cross. Now it became known as Templum Domini, Temple of the Lord. In Christianity, the same traditions were linked to the left here, to the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, and the rock of the crucifixion, Golgotha, or Calvary, came to be known in Christianity as the place of creation. So luckily, that's why Christianity is nowadays not part of the Jewish/Muslim site over the Temple Mount. Eight-eight years later, the crusaders are kicked off from the Holy Land by Saladin and the Muslim armies. All Saladin has to do, take off the cross and put back the crescent, which from then is still there nowadays. So that's the brief history of the Dome of the Rock. My name is Nir Ortal. I grew up in Jerusalem. I'm a master's student here at the Hebrew University of Archeology. Some of my digs were here in Jerusalem. Others were in the north, in the Galilee, in the biblical city of Hatsor. My interest lies more in the Byzantine periods and in the Armenian presence inside Jerusalem in the 5th and 6th centuries.