Temple on the Mount

Temple on the Mount
By Anna Boberg

“Thus saith the Lord: ‘I will return to Zion, And dwell in the midst of Jerusalem. Jerusalem shall be called the City of Truth, The Mountain of the Lord of Hosts, The Holy Mountain.’"
Zechariah 8:3

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The Midrash Tanhuma, an ancient Jewish midrash, imagines the geography of holiness as a series of concentric circles:

“As the navel is set in the center of the human body, so is the land of Israel the navel of the world and Jerusalem in the center of the land of Israel, and the sanctuary in the center of Jerusalem, and the holy place in the center of the sanctuary, and the ark in the center of the holy place, and the Foundation Stone before the holy place, because from it the world was founded.”

The Foundation Stone—the Even Shetiya—still sits atop Jerusalem's Temple Mount today, enshrined now beneath the Dome of the Rock. And if the sages are right about its layered identity, no square foot of earth on this planet has borne more sacred weight.

Talmudic tradition holds that it was from this rock that the whole world was created, itself being the first part of the Earth to come into existence. It was here that God gathered the earth that was formed into Adam, and on this rock that Adam—and later Cain and Abel and Noah—offered sacrifices to God. Jacob laid his head on stones at this place and dreamt of the ladder between heaven and earth; that pile of stones, the Midrash says, fused into this one. Abraham climbed Moriah here to offer his son Isaac, and heard the voice of heaven stop his hand. King David bought the land when still a threshing floor and saw the destroying angel stayed. Solomon raised his Temple over it and fixed the Holy of Holies and Ark of the Covenant upon it. For nearly a thousand years, the smoke of morning and evening sacrifice rose from this rock—until Jesus, presented here as an infant and found teaching here first as a boy and then a man, was at last led outside its walls to become the Lamb that God Himself provided. At the moment of his death, the veil of this very Temple was rent in two (Matt. 27:51).

Hugh Nibley called the temple “the primal central holy place dedicated to the worship of God and the perfecting of his covenant people,” and said of the temple at Jerusalem, “as the ritual center of the universe, the temple was anciently viewed as the one point on earth at which men and women could establish contact with higher spheres. From the temple at Jerusalem went forth ideas and traditions that are found all over the Jewish, Christian, and Muslim worlds.” Sacred temples built across the world today are heirs of that ancient pattern. Matthew Henry, writing centuries ago on Mount Moriah and King David’s decision to one day place the temple there, said it best: “Where God has met with me it is to be hoped that he will still manifest himself.” For, as the Zohar put it nearly two thousand years ago, it is from this place that “all the world is nourished and blessed.”

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