The Dome of the Rock

 

 

 

Anyone who has studied the history of Jerusalem will appreciate how the Dome of the Rock holds a unique place with a multi-layered past.  It is a Muslim shrine (not a mosque), built in the form a Christian martyrium of Late Antiquity.  The Crusaders repurposed it as theTemplum Domini (the Temple of the Lord), believing it to have some connexion to the Temple mentioned in the Bible.  And indeed, it sits on the old Temple Mount of that Biblical Temple.  After the Ottomans took control of the region, they renovated and enhanced the shrine with the glazed tiles and golden roofing we see today.  The cultural and historical backstory to the location of the Dome of the Rock is worth summarizing to highlight its significance in Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and even in Roman paganism.

 

When David took the Canaanite city of Salem, he renamed it Jerusalem and brought the Ark of the Covenant there from Shiloh where, according to the books of Judges and Samuel, it had resided since Israel’s occupation of Canaan.  He placed the sacred object on a hill just across a ravine from his new capital.  The ark was housed in a tent (tabernacle) either in imitation of the one described in Exodus, or perhaps even in the original which might have been stored with the ark in Shiloh, or perhaps the Exodus description is a reading back into history of David’s shrine (all such details beyond textual or archaeological evidence must be regarded as speculative).  David’s son, Solomon, is said to have built a temple for the ark, which we now call the First Temple.  After Solomon, the realm split into two: a northern Kingdom of Israel, with its key shrine at Samaria (thus later, “the Samaritans”), and a southern Kingdom of Judah centred on Jerusalem, with the Davidic dynasty continuing to rule there.

 

At that time, the footprint of Jerusalem was not the square Old City that we know now, but a smaller, oblong settlement to the south of the Temple Mount.  By the time of the Babylonian conquest (587 BC), the city had been expanded significantly, but still lay across the southern half and to the south of the current Old City.  The Babylonians razed the city, including the Temple, and led the upper echelons of the society into exile.  (The fate of the Ark following these events is beyond the scope of this post.)

 

After the conquest of Babylon by the Achaemenid Persian Empire in 539 BC, many of the descendants of these Jerusalem elites returned to the home of their ancestors to rebuild the city and the Temple.  This rebuilt Temple we refer to today as the Second Temple.

 

Centuries later, a general named Herod (74 BC – ca. 4 BC), who would come to bear the moniker, “the Great”, came to power over the old territories of Judah and Israel by enlisting the help of the Romans, who were just then encroaching on the region, to overthrow his former employers (the Hasmonean dynasty) and claim the title of king.  To win over his new subjects and demonstrate his power, he ordered a massive expansion of the Temple.  It is from this time that the rectangular shape of the Temple Mount comes.  Massive stone blocks were used to build a retaining wall that allowed for the creation of a generous, level ceremonial site.  This was the Temple in which the scenes from the Gospels and Acts played out.

 

The project was not completed until several decades after Herod’s death, but only a few decades after that, the calamities of the Roman-Jewish War (AD 66-72) led again to the destruction of the city and the Temple (a fate that had also befallen several Greek cities, as well as others who dared to defy Rome).  After a second Jewish revolt was quashed in 135, the Emperor Hadrian ordered the construction of a new city on the ruins of Jerusalem, which he called Aelia Capitolina, in honour of his gens or clan, and of Capitoline Jupiter in Rome.  The Romans levelled the rubble of the old city and realigned its walls into a square.  This gave Aelia (as it came to be known for short, and from which the later Arabic name Ilya is derived) the shape and location on the landscape of the current Old City.

 

As to the Temple Mount, there is some dispute about what was put up there.  We know that one or two massive statues of Hadrian and perhaps his successor Antoninus Pius were placed at the east side of the platform, looking east, suggesting strength and vigilance against Rome’s most powerful enemy, the Parthian Empire.  Beyond that, some sources suggest the temple to Capitoline Jupiter was built there, as on an acropolis, which would have been an eminently sensible choice.  However, many more sources suggest that the Temple Mount was left in ruins as a warning.  Indeed, Hadrian prohibited Jews from living in or near Aelia, only permitting them to enter the city on the anniversary of the destruction of Jerusalem, and only to pray/mourn at the last remaining intact portion of Herod’s retaining wall, which thus came to be known as the Wailing Wall.

 

With the promulgation in 313 of the Edict of Milan, Constantine I changed the trajectory and identity of Aelia.  He sent his mother, Helena, to transform pagan Aelia into Christian Jerusalem.  From 326 to 328 she operated under the advice of various locals and Christians to identify places where things related to the Christian story had taken place.  Arguably, the most important of these was the site of the crucifixion of Jesus (Golgatha) and the tomb where his body was laid.  These were located under the Temple of Venus.  (These places associated with Jesus had originally been outside the walls, to the north of the city, prior to its realignment under Hadrian.)  At Helena's direction, Venus’ temple was pulled down and the site excavated.  The valuable porphyry columns from the temple were repurposed in the new massive Anastasis, a complex much larger than the current Church of the Holy Sepulchre.  It consisted of a long basilica, an outdoor courtyard where “The Golgotha” was, and a round, domed martyrium sheltering the tomb.  Helena had also identified the location of the True Cross, which was then housed in the Anastasis to become the Church’s most revered relic.

 

Meanwhile, under the rubric that the New Covenant in Christ had replaced the Old Covenant, the Temple Mount was left as a dumping/storage ground for all the unused building materials from demolished pagan temples and shrines.  Jews also continued to be barred and restricted under the same law put in place by Hadrian three centuries earlier.

 

The Roman-Sasanian War of 602-628 saw Jerusalem partially destroyed, with the armies of the Shahan-shah (Persian Emperor) Khosrau especially targeting Christian holy places, as the war had become an ideological one between Persian Zoroastrianism and Roman Christianity. The inhabitants of the city, a majority of whom were monastics, were led into slavery, and the True Cross was taken to Ctesiphon, the Sasanian capital.  The Anastasis was left in ruins.  After 26 years of war, the Sasanians were forced to surrender in a surprise attack on their capital by the Roman Emperor Heraclius and his army.

The domed rotunda of the Anastasis was rebuilt, and Heraclius returned the True Cross there, but, for lack of funds, the basilica was left a hollow, ruined shell.  (The current Church of the Holy Sepulchre, while built on older foundations, is largely the work of the Crusaders.)  Heraclius’ triumph was short lived.  By 638, Arabs and the armies of Islam controlled Jerusalem.

 

With the arrival of the Arabs, Hadrian’s 500-year-old anti-Jewish policy became null and void.  Jews could now live in Jerusalem once again.  The Arabs were also aware of various legends and traditions associated with the Temple Mount, (which they called and still call Haram al-Sharif, the Noble Sanctuary).  Most importantly for the topic at hand were the legends associating a particular rocky outcrop with the story of Abraham sacrificing Isaac.  In the Quran, this event is not portrayed in the dramatic and disturbing form it has in Genesis, but as a dream which Abraham reports to his son.  The Quranic narrative is ambiguous about whether the son is Isaac or Ishmael.

 

This rocky outcrop was also supposed to have been the location of the altar of the old Temple (remembering that this was not the Holy of Holies for the Ark of the Covenant, but an altar for burning sacrifices, outside the building of the Temple, in the Court of Israel).

 

That same rocky outcrop was said to be the one to which the Prophet Muhammed was taken in a vision (or perhaps in reality).  Thus, the first iteration of the al-Aqsa Mosque, a place of prayer, was built soon after the arrival of the Arabs, on the Temple Mount, in reference to these stories, not on the rock in question, but near it.  (The Crusaders used it to house the Knights Templar—thus the name of their order in reference to the old Jerusalem Temple.)

 

It was Abd al-Malik, the Umayyad Caliph, who ordered the building of the shrine of the rocky outcrop that we call the Dome of the Rock.  This took place during the Second Fitna (691-692), a period of unrest and civil war.  Islam was just beginning to seep into the conquered societies, but the majority of his subjects were still non-Muslims.  The shrine was meant to be a place where all people could come because it did not have the restrictions associated with an official place of worship.  However, his message was and is clear.  The texts emblazoned around the inside of the barrel of the dome are all calls for Christians to stop believing that Jesus is more than a prophet or is somehow God.

 

While non-Muslim ideologues or anti-Muslim trolls might disparage the Dome of the Rock, the structure preserves for us much from that time and before.  The octagonal building itself is modelled on the martyria of the day, bearing an especially close resemblance to the Church of the Seat of Mary that once stood between Jerusalem and Bethlehem, and whose ruins have been excavated.  Some of those porphyry columns from the Temple of Venus that had been reused in the Anastasis but which were now surplus because the basilica had not been rebuilt, were used in the construction of the Dome of the Rock.  Indeed, the columns in the Dome of the Rock do not match, suggesting that they came from various old pagan and Christian sites, perhaps by way of choosing those that were not damaged.

 

While it is officially a Muslim shrine, its cultural and historical value is far more than this.  It brings together Jewish, pagan, Christian, and Muslim legacies: a long panoply of some of the most significant and long lasting developments in that part of the world and beyond.