What's odd about this picture? Click for a close-up.Today we started off by heading just outside of Jerusalem and shifting through trash. Actually, whether or not it is trash depends on who you ask.
Back up a few years to 20 BC. King Herod orders a new temple built. In order to make it more magnificent and in order to build in a sloping valley, he builds a huge platform supported by an arched substructure and builds the temple on top of all of this. Now fast-forward a bit to 1999. The Waqf, the Muslim group that controls the Temple Mount, applied for a permit to open an emergency exit to an underground mosque under the Dome of the Rock. The “exit” turned into an entire mosque. To build the mosque they removed 200 dump truck loads of the rubble that was in the substructure to a landfill. At first they sent it to a landfill in the Kidron Valley in between the Israelis and Palestinians, but then they started shipping it to a landfill in Palestinian-controlled territory. By cleaning out this rubble they opened up the area underneath the Temple Mount (for the mosque).
Someone said this was the work of rockets, but I doubt it. This private bus line is a primary means of intercity transport for Palestinians.The crux of the matter is that no one had ever been under the Temple Mount because it was filled up and because it was too politically sensitive. The Waqf is widely accused of destroying evidence of any Israeli presence on the site, and Israelis are now sifting through the excavated landfill for artifacts. They have found quite a number of objects. Here’s the crazy part: Palestinians claim that anything found in the rubble must have been “planted” by Israelis, because the Palestinians claim that there never was any Jewish temple on the site at all. (I don’t know if this is true of Palestinians in general or just the Waqf/religious zealots, but it’s pretty widespread in Islam over there.)
http://www.archaeology.org/0003/newsbriefs/flap.html
So here’s how the debate goes:
Israel: “Quit destroying artifacts!”
Palestine: “What artifacts? There are no artifacts.”
Israel: “The artifacts from under the Dome of the Rock that are ending up in landfills.”
Palestine: “You must have planted those, because there never was any temple there.”
Israel: “But we’re finding these in the rubble you brought from the temple!”
Palestine: “That proves that you must have planted them, because there was never a temple there and therefore there couldn’t be any artifacts there.”
Frankly, that’s a pretty disturbing pattern. It would be one thing to engage in a debate over who should control the Temple Mount, whether or not the artifacts are really important, etc., but it’s a very different thing when your debate tactic is to simply deny that X ever happened/existed, and therefore any evidence for it must be trumped up. You simply can’t debate that, because it starts with a conclusion and accepts/denies evidence based on that, rather than the other way around. (There are some situations where this might not be such a fallacy, but that’s another conversation.)
Just be glad I didn't bring you anything from this store.
Now you’re caught up to today. We spent an hour or two sifting through landfill. Other than the expected broken rocks, I found some mosaic tiles, pottery shards, animal bones, and a mushy cigarette butt. Nothing that will really be of any use archaeologically, but the fact that the items were present (particularly the bones) was telling.
Mosaic on the front of the Church of All Nations. Click for a close-up to get a peek at the style of the art in the church.Afterwards we headed to the Church of All Nations near the Garden of Gethsemane. It was interesting because the architecture is fairly standard Catholic Church, but it has very modern frescos inside. Across a valley you can see a Muslim graveyard up against one wall of the Temple Mount in front of a sealed door. I forget which door this is, but it is the one through which the returning Lord is supposed to enter. Entering a graveyard makes a Jew ceremonially unclean, so putting a graveyard there is basically an attempt to spiritually block the entrance.
Part of the Kidron Valley. The Muslim graveyard is in front of the sealed gates you see in the wall.We then went to one of my favorite places on the trip. It was the Garden Tomb, the site where Jesus was supposedly laid after taken down from the cross. I will admit that I was a bit suspicious – it sounded like a relic to me. We had a great Scottish Presbyterian guide named Bob who pointed out a few things. From the edge of the garden you can see a hill that, if you squint right, does look like skull is carved in the pits in the side. He talked about a few other reasons why it might have been the crucifixion site. All made sense, but I wouldn’t bank on it. The description of the tomb, however, made a lot of sense. I talked to Jethro (our group’s Jewish guide) later, and he affirmed everything that our Garden guide said about why the site would match the Biblical description. One reason I have enjoyed him is that he is honest about everything and it is good to bounce things off him to make sure that you’re not hearing a bunch of unsubstantiated Christian hype in some places. The reason I liked the Garden Tomb so much wasn’t the fact that I might have been looking at the tomb where Jesus’ body lay, but rather what the rest of what our guide had to say. His presentation wasn’t an attempt to sell us on the idea that this was “the” tomb, but rather the opposite: whether or not this is the tomb doesn’t matter, because it has no bearing on our faith. The only important part is that the tomb is empty.
This garden was the first nice, lush garden I had seen on the trip. There was also a huge underground water cistern (the third largest in Jerusalem) that held collected rainwater, which is one of the reasons they are sure it was a rich man’s garden/vineyard.
That afternoon I stopped by a Jerusalem McDonald’s. It had a security guard out front, and I saw him check some bags as people entered. The McD’s here have a “10 Shekel Value Meal,” their equivalent of our dollar menu (though the exchange rates make it closer to $3).
That night back at our hotel in Jerusalem, someone not with our group sat down and played some worship songs that I recognized on the piano. A Muslim lady went over and said that she liked the songs, probably not knowing what they were. After the girl left, a Muslim man went over and played the Moonlight Sonata. Normally I like the song, but he played it with the sustain pedal depressed and with absolutely no style, and it turned a good piece into an awful noise.
I wandered around that night for a while and the area around our hotel was totally dead. Keep in mind that it was the evening of Shabbat, since Shabbat starts at sundown on Friday.
