What is Beneath the Temple Mount?

[Adsos Letter]

SOURCE: Smithsonian.com
By Joshua Hammer
Photographs by Kate Brooks
Smithsonian Magazine, April 2011


My stint as an amateur archaeologist began one morning on the southern slope of Mount Scopus, a hill on the northern outskirts of Jerusalem. Inside a large hothouse covered in plastic sheets and marked “Temple Mount Salvage Operation,” a woman from Boston named Frankie Snyder—a volunteer turned staffer—led me to three rows of black plastic buckets, each half-filled with stones and pebbles, then pointed out a dozen wood-framed screens mounted on plastic stands. My job, she said, was to dump each bucket onto a screen, rinse off any soil with water from a garden hose, then pluck out anything of potential importance.

It wasn’t as easy as it sounded. A chunk of what looked like conglomerate rock turned out to be plaster used to line cisterns during the time of Herod the Great, some 2,000 years ago. When I tossed aside a shard of green glass I thought was from a soft-drink bottle, Snyder snatched it up. “Notice the bubbles,” she told me, holding it up to the light. “That indicates it’s ancient glass, because during that time, oven temperatures didn’t reach as high as they do now.”

Gradually, I got the hang of it. I spotted the handle of an ancient piece of pottery, complete with an indentation for thumb support. I retrieved a rough-edged coin minted more than 1,500 years ago and bearing the profile of a Byzantine emperor. I also found a shard of glass from what could only have been a Heineken bottle—a reminder that the Temple Mount has also been the scene of less historic activities.

The odds and ends I was gathering are the fruits of one of Israel’s most intriguing archaeological undertakings: a grain-by-grain analysis of debris trucked out of the Temple Mount, the magnificent edifice that has served the faithful as a symbol of God’s glory for 3,000 years and remains the crossroads of the three great monotheistic religions.

Read more: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history-archaeology/What-is-Beneath-the-Temple-Mount.html#ixzz1HYXKBzjg
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This is a lengthy article, though not the best at addressing the issues involved.


As both William Dever and Israel Finkelstein in their respective works: Who Were the Ancient Israelites and The Bible Unearthed have noted, archaeology has immense political ramifications in the region.

[gateley]

1. I love stuff like this - thanks for posting!! nt

[HysteryDiagnosis]

2. Edgar Cayce indicated that there is some rather interesting stuff under one of

the Great Sphynx's feet, but that's another story altogether.

http://www.edgarcayce.org/are/blog.aspx?id=2750&blogid=445

For fifteen years, the Edgar Cayce Center in Virginia Beach, Virginia, has been conducting expeditions off the coast of the tiny island of Bimini and along the Gulf Stream in search of Atlantis. They have found fascinating underwater features that may be man-made structures covered by ages of sand and coral.

According to the Edgar Cayce readings, the people of Atlantis became aware of the fact that their civilization was about to be destroyed. As a result, they hid identical records of the Atlantean civilization in Bimini, in Egypt, and in the Yucatan. Numerous readings contend that this “Hall of Records” will be discovered, including:

(Q) Give in detail what the sealed room contains.



(A) A record of Atlantis from the beginnings of those periods when the Spirit took form or began the encasements in that land, and the developments of the peoples throughout their sojourn, with the record of the first destruction and the changes that took place in the land...

[azurnoir]

3. Fascinating article

what saddens me is that the science and history is so mucked up by politics

[Adsos Letter]

4. True that. The Temple Mount area is an archaeological gold mine, just waiting for some

well regulated, disciplined research/digs.

[azurnoir]

5. Just out of curiousity are you at all

familiar with the work of Dr Francesca Stavrakopoulou? She has made some interesting finds

[Adsos Letter]

6. I read the article she wrote on Asherah; it was in today's issue

of Discovery Magazine (online; didn't actually check the date, just read it this morning before logging in to DU).

[azurnoir]

7. The article is fascinating I wonder if it will cause much 'flap' religious among types

I remember something from back in the '90's where the Lutheran Council of Women Theologians(?) came to a similar conclusion that early on G-d had a wife who was subsequently written out of the texts, the idea was not welcome to say the least

[Adsos Letter]

8. I think it will depend upon the individuals perception of the historicity

of the Hebrew scriptures, and upon their perception of the nature of inspiration.

Scholars like Proffesor James K. Hoffmeier Faith, Tradition, and History: Old Testament Historiography in Its Near Eastern Context; Israel in Egypt: The Evidence for the Authenticity of the Exodus Tradition and Ancient Israel in Sinai: The Evidence for the Authenticity of the Wilderness Tradition or Professor Kenneth Kitchen On the Reliability of the Old Testament which take a stand for the historicity of the Hebrew scriptures, are certainly going to arrive at conclusions different from Stavrakopoulou.

William Dever, an American archaeologist from the University of Arizona (and a noted expert in Syro-Palestinian archaeology) has written on this subject also: Did God Have a Wife?: Archaeology and Folk Religion in Ancient Israel; What Did the Biblical Writers Know and When Did They Know It?: What Archaeology Can Tell Us About the Reality of Ancient Israel and Who Were the Early Israelites and Where Did They Come From?

The bigger argument among archaeologists and biblical scholars (comprised of specialists in ancient languages, textual analysis, and the like) is whether or not the Hebrew scriptures underwent a revision and re-compilation circa the 7th century BC, and to what extent; Kitchen and Hoffmeier argue against this; an archaeologist by the name of Israel Finkelstein takes the opposite extreme of the spectrum The Bible Unearthed: Archaeology's New Vision of Ancient Israel and the Origin of Its Sacred Texts and The Quest for the Historical Israel: Debating Archaeology and the History of Early Israel; while Dever comes down somewhere between the two regarding historicity.

I'm sure there has been more written since I took a single class on biblical historiography in college, but these guys are all worth a read, if you've not already seen them.

I suspect more liberal non-scholars will be more apt to accept Finkelstein, Dever and Stavrakopoulou; while more conservative laymen will probably chalk it up to the many references in the Hebrew scriptures to the prophets' warnings to Israel of their association with the deities of the surrounding peoples.

Please forgive the length of this; it's a subject I am interested in, and it sounds like you are too. :hi:

[azurnoir]

9. It's a subject I find very interesting

I have been checking out the titles in your post, and have found much information, it is always informative to veiw religious writtings through a non-religious eye
Tnank you and I apologize for the length of time it took me to reply