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Temple Mount

Hebrew: הַר הַבַּיִת (“Har HaBayit,” the Mount of the House) · Arabic: الحرم الشريف (al-Haram al-Sharif, “the Noble Sanctuary”)

Judaism’s holiest site, in Jerusalem’s Old City: the platform of the First and Second Temples, which stood here for roughly a thousand years, until Rome destroyed the Second in 70 CE, centuries before Islam existed. The same platform later came to hold the Dome of the Rock (c. 691 CE) and the Al-Aqsa Mosque (c. 705 CE), and Islam venerates it as the site of Muhammad’s Night Journey. That bond is real but later: the Quran never names Jerusalem, and both buildings rose decades after Muhammad’s death in 632. Under the status quo, Jews may visit but not pray there.

Etymology and scope

Section titled “Etymology and scope”

“Har HaBayit” literally means “Mountain of the House,” shorthand for Beit HaMikdash, “the House of the Sanctuary,” the Hebrew Bible’s name for the Temple. The Arabic name grew from “al-Haram al-Sharif” into the fuller “al-Haram al-Qudsi al-Sharif” under Ottoman use. Both names describe the same raised platform, roughly 37 acres, in the southeastern corner of Jerusalem’s Old City. The platform itself is largely the work of Herod the Great, who nearly doubled its footprint around 19 BCE to support the Second Temple complex; the massive retaining wall he built survives today as the Western Wall.

History of the site

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Jewish tradition dates the First Temple to King Solomon, roughly the 10th century BCE; the Babylonians destroyed it in 586 BCE. The Second Temple rose in 516 BCE after the Babylonian exile and stood, expanded by Herod, until the Roman legions of Titus razed it in 70 CE. Finds recovered from the platform, including First Temple-period seal impressions and Second Temple-era ashlar stones, confirm continuous Jewish use of the site for roughly a millennium. For the next six centuries the mount lay largely in ruins under Roman and Byzantine rule. The Umayyad caliph Abd al-Malik built the Dome of the Rock around 691 to 692 CE, and his son al-Walid I completed the Al-Aqsa Mosque around 705. Crusaders held Jerusalem from 1099 to 1187, converting the Dome of the Rock into a church, “Templum Domini,” and quartering the Knights Templar in Al-Aqsa, the source of that order’s name; Saladin restored Islamic control in 1187. Ottoman rule ran 1517 to 1917, followed by the British Mandate, both preserving Muslim custodianship while allowing Jewish access to the adjacent Western Wall. Jordan seized the Old City in 1948 and, until 1967, barred Jews from the mount and the Wall entirely, destroying synagogues and using Jewish gravestones as paving material. Israel captured the site in the Six-Day War of June 1967; Defense Minister Moshe Dayan then returned day-to-day administration to the Jordanian-appointed Waqf while Israel kept security control, the arrangement that still governs the site.

Misused today, and the accurate record

Section titled “Misused today, and the accurate record”

The mount is a recurring target of denial. Yasser Arafat told President Clinton at Camp David in 2000 that no Jewish Temple had ever stood there, a claim with no support in archaeology, Roman and Byzantine sources, or the Quran and hadith themselves, which assume Jerusalem’s earlier sanctity rather than inventing it. The slogan “Al-Aqsa is in danger,” used to claim Israel plans to destroy the mosque or partition prayer times, has recurred since the 1920s and helped ignite the Second Intifada in 2000; Israel has made no such move in over 55 years of control. The honest record: two peoples hold real, dated attachments to the same 37 acres, one going back three thousand years, the other fourteen hundred, and denying either does not strengthen a claim, it just abandons the truth.

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Sources

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