Temple Mount

• 1. Introduction

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  The Temple Mount in Jerusalem is a flat stone plaza whose courtyard can host more than 400,000 worshippers, which makes it one of the largest mosques in the world. Jews call the same ground the holiest place in their faith, and Muslims revere it as the Noble Sanctuary. Eleven gates lead onto the platform, ten reserved for Muslims and one for non-Muslims, with Israel Police guard posts near each. Few places on earth carry so many names, and few have been fought over so often. Who raised the walls that still hold the hill in place? Who built the domed shrine near its center, and what stood there before it? Why can a single name become a diplomatic incident? And what is the arrangement, known as the status quo, that governs who may pray there today?

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• 2. A Hill of Names

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  In 2016, during a dispute over what the site should be called, UNESCO Director-General Irina Bokova said: "Different peoples worship the same places, sometimes under different names. The recognition, use of and respect for these names is paramount."

  The Hebrew name, Har haBayit, means Mount of the House. It first appears in the books of Micah (4:1) and Jeremiah (26:18) as a short form of the longer Mountain of the House of the Lord. It is absent from the later books of the Hebrew Bible and from the New Testament. The name Mount Zion also wandered. In the Book of Samuel, Zion is a Jebusite fortress. After the First Temple was built, the name moved to the eastern hill, and later it moved again to Jerusalem's Western Hill. Mount Moriah is a third name, which 2 Chronicles 3:1 gives to the ground where Solomon's Temple was raised.

  The Arabic names carry their own history. Al-Aqsa means the farthest mosque, a phrase taken from Surah 17 of the Quran, called The Night Journey. Medieval geographers such as al-Maqdisi in the 10th century and al-Idrisi in the 12th explained that the phrase covers the whole esplanade. None of the buildings existed when the Quran was written. A narrower term, al-Jami' al-Aqsa, points to the silver-domed congregational building at the southern end. During the Mamluk era, from 1260 to 1517, and the Ottoman era that followed, the wider compound also became known as the Haram al-Sharif, the Noble Sanctuary. Many Palestinians have drifted back toward the older name in recent decades. The word al-Aqsa now labels an uprising that began in September 2000, a television channel and a university founded in 1991 in the Gaza Strip.

  Names became weapons of argument. The Jerusalem Islamic Waqf has called the term Temple Mount a strange and alien name. In 2014 the Palestinian Liberation Organization urged journalists to avoid it. Scholars searching for neutral ground have used Sacred Esplanade, the title of a 2009 book by 21 Jewish, Muslim and Christian scholars, while the United Nations speaks of the Holy Esplanade.

  UNESCO has wrestled with the problem itself. Jordan proposed the Old City for the World Heritage List in 1980, and it was added in 1981 and placed on the danger list the next year. On the 26th of October 2016, a UNESCO resolution named the site only as Al-Haram al-Sharif. Israel said this denied Jewish ties to the hill and froze its relations with the body. In October 2017, Israel and the United States announced they would withdraw. On the 6th of April 2022, UNESCO unanimously adopted a resolution restating all 21 of its earlier resolutions on Jerusalem.

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• 3. Herod's Platform

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  Around 19 BCE, Herod the Great enclosed the natural plateau of the hill inside four massive retaining walls and filled the voids behind them. The hill is the northern end of a narrow spur that slopes sharply downward from north to south. The Kidron Valley lies to its east and the Tyropoeon Valley to its west, and the natural peak rises 740 m above sea level.

  The project employed 10,000 workers and more than doubled the platform to about 36 acres. Builders cut rock away on the northwest side and raised the sloping ground on the south with huge buttress walls and vaults, packed with earth and rubble. The result was the largest temenos, or sacred enclosure, in the ancient world. The trapezium-shaped platform measures 488 m along the west, 470 m along the east, 315 m along the north and 280 m along the south. Its area is roughly 150000 square meters.

  The Josephus account describes a magnificent basilica called the Royal Stoa on the southern side, with grand colonnades on three sides of the platform. The Royal Stoa served as a center for the city's commercial and legal business, with its own access to the city below by way of an overpass known today as Robinson's Arch. Herod also built the Antonia Fortress at the northwestern corner and a rainwater reservoir, Birket Israel, in the northeast. A monumental Stepped Street led pilgrims up from the city's southern gate to the western side of the platform. A 2019 proposal credits Pontius Pilate with building that road during the 30s.

  Much of this architecture now hides in plain sight. The northern wall and part of the western wall sit behind residential buildings. The southern stretch of the western flank is the exposed Western Wall, whose stones descend many meters below the present ground level. On the south and east, the walls stand visible almost to their full height. Visitors can see a northern portion of the western wall inside the Western Wall Tunnel, which was dug through adjoining buildings. From the tunnel one can also look up at the underside of a monumental bridge carrying Gate of the Chain Street, which sits level with the platform but is no longer visible from the outside. The Temple itself and its courts once stood on a raised platform in the middle of this great enclosure.

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• 4. Sacred to Judaism

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  According to the Hebrew Bible, the hilltop began as a threshing floor owned by Araunah, a Jebusite. When a great plague struck Israel, a destroying angel appeared on that floor, and the prophet Gad advised King David to build an altar to God there. David bought the property from Araunah for fifty pieces of silver, and the plague ended. God then forbade David to build the Temple himself, because he had shed much blood. The task fell to his son Solomon.

  Jewish and Samaritan tradition dates Solomon's Temple to 957 BCE. The innermost room, the windowless Holy of Holies, housed the Ark of the Covenant and the presence of God. Only the High Priest entered it, once a year on Yom Kippur, carrying the blood of a sacrificial lamb and burning incense. A rabbinic text called Genesis Rabba, probably written between 300 and 500 CE, adds an argument about ownership. It says the nations cannot accuse Israel of stealing this place, because David paid its full price. One caution applies. No archaeological evidence has been found to verify the existence of the First Temple, and scientific excavation is limited by religious sensitivities.

  The Neo-Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar II destroyed the First Temple in 587/586 BCE and exiled the Judeans to Babylon. After Cyrus the Great of Persia issued a proclamation, the exiles were allowed to return. In 516 BCE they rebuilt the Temple under Zerubbabel. The Second Temple is believed to have drawn tens, and perhaps hundreds, of thousands of pilgrims during the Three Pilgrimage Festivals. Hanukkah commemorates its rededication at the start of the Maccabean revolt in the 2nd century BCE. Herod renovated it, and the Roman Empire destroyed it in 70 CE. Tisha B'Av, an annual fast day, marks the fall of both Temples, which tradition places on the same date in the Hebrew calendar.

  The rabbis who produced the Talmud taught that the Foundation Stone beneath the Dome of the Rock was the point from which the world was created and expanded, and the place where God gathered the dust to make Adam. Jewish tradition also locates the Binding of Isaac here, linking the hill to the land of Moriah named in Genesis. The identification goes back to at least the first century CE, though modern scholarship tends to treat the two places as distinct. The Book of Isaiah foretells that "the mountain of the LORD'S house shall be established as the top of the mountains" and that all nations shall flow to it.

  Prayer keeps the hill present in daily life. Jews face the Mount when they pray, and the Amidah, recited three times a day, includes a plea for a Third Temple and the return of sacrifice. Many Jews will not set foot on the Mount at all, for fear of unknowingly stepping where the Holy of Holies stood. Rabbinical law holds that some aspect of the divine presence remains there.

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• 5. Rome, Rubble and Christianity

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  In 67 BCE, a quarrel between Aristobulus II and Hyrcanus II over the Hasmonean throne drew in the Roman general Pompey, who backed Hyrcanus. Aristobulus and his followers barricaded themselves on the Temple Mount and destroyed the bridge linking it to the city. Pompey had the defending moat filled in on the north, choosing to work on the Sabbath so that the defenders would not interfere. After a three-month siege, the Romans toppled a guard tower and stormed the hill. Pompey entered the Holy of Holies himself but left the Temple unharmed and let the priests carry on.

  The First Jewish-Roman War of 66-70 CE ended differently. Titus reached Jerusalem in April 70, and it took his army four months to defeat the defenders on the Mount. The Romans razed the Temple and every other structure on the platform. Archaeologists later found collapsed stones from the upper walls lying across the Herodian street beside the southern Western Wall, some burned at temperatures reaching 800 degrees Celsius. In one of those piles lay the Trumpeting Place inscription, a monumental Hebrew inscription thrown down by Roman soldiers.

  In 130 CE, Emperor Hadrian founded the city of Aelia Capitolina on the ruins and dedicated a temple to Jupiter over the old Temple site. He raised a giant statue of himself in front of it, so two huge images stood on the Mount, which Jews considered idolatrous. After the Third Jewish Revolt, Jews were barred from the city on pain of death. Constantine had the Temple of Jupiter demolished after the First Council of Nicea in 325 CE. The Bordeaux Pilgrim, visiting in 333-334, described Hadrian's two statues and a pierced stone that Jews came to anoint each year: "They mourn and rend their garments, and then depart."

  In 363, Emperor Julian, an opponent of Christianity, gave permission for the Temple to be rebuilt. A letter attributed to him promises to rebuild Jerusalem himself once his war in Persia was won. Church historians wrote that the Jews began clearing rubble but were stopped by a great earthquake and then by fire springing from the ground. No contemporary Jewish source mentions the episode.

  Christians had read the Temple's ruin through prophecy. Early Christians, like Josephus and the sages of the Jerusalem Talmud, regarded the destruction of 70 CE as divine punishment for the sins of the Jewish people. They saw it as the fulfillment of Christ's words recorded in Matthew 23:38 and 24:2. Early pilgrims came to the site as proof of a prophecy fulfilled. Byzantine Christians largely neglected the hill, and worship centered on the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. The Gospel of John records Jesus telling a Samaritan woman that true worshippers will worship neither on her mountain nor in Jerusalem. He said: "God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth." Many readers take this to mean that physical location had ceased to matter.

  In 610, the Sassanid Empire drove the Byzantines from the region, and the Jews of Palestine briefly ran a vassal state that lasted five years. Rabbis restarted animal sacrifice and began rebuilding the Temple. Before the Byzantines returned, the Persians handed control to the Christian population, who tore down the unfinished structure and turned the site into a garbage dump. That was the condition of the hill when the Rashidun Caliph Umar took the city in 637.

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• 6. Night Journey and Dome

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  The Quran describes how Muhammad was carried by night from the Sacred Mosque in Mecca to the Farthest Mosque. According to tradition, he rode the miraculous steed Buraq, prayed there, and then ascended into heaven with the angel Jibril, or Gabriel, meeting earlier prophets on the way. The Quran does not say where the Farthest Mosque stands, and it never names Jerusalem. The standard Islamic reference work notes that the phrase was first understood as a site in the heavens. Al-Bukhari and Al-Tabari are believed to have rejected the identification with Jerusalem. Over time a consensus formed around the city and, by implication, the Temple Mount.

  Some scholars see politics in that process. The Umayyads, they argue, tied the Night Journey to Jerusalem to compete with the sanctuary in Mecca, then controlled by Abd Allah ibn al-Zubayr. The 9th-century Abbasid historian Ya'qubi read the Dome of the Rock as an attempt to redirect the Hajj away from the Kaaba. Other academics point to a genre of city-praising literature called al-Fadhail, which swelled Jerusalem's sanctity beyond the holy texts. Eighth-century historians al-Waqidi and al-Azraqi inspired a further claim, that the Quran's mosque lies in the village of al-Ju'ranah, 18 miles northeast of Mecca.

  The hill also has an earlier role in Muslim prayer. After the migration to Medina in 624, Muslims faced it for 16 or 17 months, making it the first qibla. A revelation received in the Masjid al-Qiblatayn then redirected prayer toward the Kaaba, where it has stayed.

  Tradition gives Caliph Umar a memorable scene. Entering the conquered city, he asked Ka'ab al-Ahbar, a Jewish convert to Islam who had traveled with him from Medina, where to place a mosque. Ka'ab suggested a spot behind the Rock, so that all of Jerusalem would be before him. Umar replied, "You correspond to Judaism!" Disgusted by the filth, he began clearing the debris with his own cloak, and his followers copied him. He then prayed where Muhammad was believed to have prayed before the night journey, reciting the sura Sad. A later account instead has Ka'b advise a site north of the rock, with Umar choosing the south.

  The first eyewitness is the pilgrim Arculf, who visited around 670. As recorded by Adomnan, he saw a rectangular wooden house of prayer built over ruins, large enough for 3,000 people. The Caliph Abd al-Malik then raised an octagonal, domed building around the rock. This was the Dome of the Rock, completed in 692 and still among the oldest surviving Muslim structures in the world. In 715 the Umayyad Caliph al-Walid I built al-Aqsa Mosque at the southern end of the mount, facing Mecca.

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• 7. Custody Through Centuries

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  In 1099, the First Crusade captured Jerusalem, and the Dome of the Rock was given to the Augustinians, who turned it into a church. Al-Aqsa Mosque became the royal palace of Baldwin I of Jerusalem in 1104. The Knights Templar, who believed the Dome stood on the site of Solomon's Temple, named it Templum Domini. The order was probably granted the use of al-Aqsa as its headquarters at the Council of Nablus in January 1120. The Crusaders called the mosque Solomon's Temple, and the order took its name, the Poor Knights of Christ and the Temple of Solomon, from it.

  In 1187, Saladin retook Jerusalem and removed every trace of Christian worship from the hill. The Jerusalem Islamic Waqf has managed the Mount continuously since that reconquest. The Mamluks added buildings around the esplanade, among them the late 15th-century al-Ashrafiyya Madrasa and the Sabil, or fountain, of Qaytbay. They also raised the level of the valley along the west by building huge substructures. Those structures now cover much of the Herodian western wall.

  After the Ottoman conquest in 1516, non-Muslims were forbidden to set foot on the Mount until the early 19th century. In 1867, a Royal Engineers team led by Lieutenant Charles Warren and financed by the Palestine Exploration Fund began secretly digging tunnels near the walls. Warren was the first to document the lower courses of the walls. He also cleared rubble from passages leading off the Double Gate chamber.

  Between 1922 and 1924, the Islamic Higher Council restored the Dome of the Rock. The Zionist movement of the time strongly opposed any idea of rebuilding the Temple. In 1931, the Haganah militia assassinated a Jewish man after learning of his plan to blow up the Islamic sites. A summer earthquake in 1937 led to renovations at al-Aqsa Mosque from 1938-1942. After riots in 1929, the Supreme Muslim Council and the Jerusalem Islamic Waqf barred Jews from the site's gates.

  Jordan held the hill from 1948. It replaced the leaking wooden inner dome of the Dome of the Rock with an aluminum one in 1952. When that dome leaked too, it carried out a second restoration between 1959 and 1964. On the 7th of June 1967, during the Six-Day War, Israeli forces advanced into the West Bank and took the Old City, including the Mount. Shlomo Goren, the army's chief rabbi, led soldiers in religious celebrations on the hill and at the Western Wall. Within days, more than 200,000 Jews flocked to the Western Wall in the first mass Jewish pilgrimage there since 70 CE.

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• 8. The Status Quo

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  On the 17th of June 1967, Moshe Dayan met Muslim religious authorities at al-Aqsa Mosque to set new rules. Jews could visit the Mount freely and without charge if they respected Muslim feelings, but could not pray there. The Western Wall would remain the Jewish place of prayer. Religious sovereignty would stay with the Muslims, while overall sovereignty became Israeli. Muslims objected, since they rejected the conquest outright, and Goren objected too, arguing that the deal handed the complex to Muslims. Within weeks Goren brought 50 followers on the Ninth of Av with a shofar and a portable ark, and Waqf officials grew alarmed.

  In 1976, the Israeli High Court's President, Aharon Barak, weighed an appeal over police interference with an individual's prayer. He wrote: "The basic principle is that every Jew has the right to enter the Temple Mount, to pray there, and to have communion with his maker." He added that this right is relative, not absolute, and can yield to the public interest. Israel's courts treat the matter as political, and police have continued to forbid Jewish prayer on the Mount.

  Attempts to alter the arrangement have repeatedly ended in violence. An October 1986 agreement to allow short visits by small groups was used once and never repeated, after about 2,000 Muslims attacked the visitors with stones and bottles. In October 1990, protests followed the announcement that the Temple Mount Faithful planned to lay a cornerstone for a Third Temple. Security forces fired on the crowd, and more than twenty Palestinians died. A 1969 arson attack, a 1982 shooting in the Dome of the Rock and several foiled bombing plots in the 1970s and 1980s added to the fear on every side.

  Between 1992 and 1994, King Hussein of Jordan personally paid $8 million to cover the dome with 5000 gold plates. Under the 1994 Israel-Jordan peace treaty, the site remains under Jordanian custodianship. The Preservation of the Holy Places Law, passed by the Knesset after 1967, protects the holy places and promises freedom of access. Even so, Israel enforces a ban on non-Muslim prayer, and police can expel anyone seen praying.

  On the 28th of September 2000, opposition leader Ariel Sharon visited the compound with Likud members and 1,000 armed guards. Many Palestinians took this as a provocation. A demonstration followed, and 24 people were injured. The next day, police stormed the compound after Friday prayers, killing four and wounding about 200. The visit sparked a five-year uprising, the al-Aqsa Intifada. Until that year, non-Muslim visitors could enter the mosques with a ticket from the Waqf. Since then, visitors have been allowed on the Mount only from Sunday to Thursday, for four hours a day, and not inside the mosques. On the 5th of November 2014, Israeli police entered al-Aqsa Mosque for the first time, after talks with Waqf leaders and rioters failed. On the 3rd of January 2023, National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir visited the Mount, prompting protests and condemnation from several Arab countries.

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