4-A: MYSTERIES Of ABRAHAM'S 4 ALTARS & SOLOMON'S 4 TEMPLES

Appendix 4: Mysteries of Abraham’s 4 altars & Solomon’s 4 Temples

The quest of Abraham, which started at Ur and arrived “on the third day” (22:4) to Mount Moriah, took place at the dawn of the third millennium (related to the Third Day of Genesis) when there starts the Age of the Torah (“Two thousand years torah” – Sanhedrin 97a, Avodah Zara 9a) and fixed the place from which there would issue Torah in/of the future, as stated “for out of Ẓiyyon shall go forth Torah” (Isaiah 2:3).

As related in chapter 3 (section 9), Abraham has built four altars in the Land of Kena’ạn, thereby marking clues to the riddle of the future Temple(s) in Jerusalem.

The first three altars (which are listed in the former Parashah – Lekh Lekha) were built when he was still called “Abram”, without the letter H’e of the Name of YHWH, and they seem to have already been sacred sites of the pagan religions of the time. The mention of Oak and Terebinth trees in two of the altar sites points to a sacred grove dedicated to a terrestrial god, even if YHWH appeared there or Abraham evoked His Name. The last, and different, altar was the altar that Abraham and Isaac built together at Mount moriah.

It appears as if the Torah gives us in this story a key to the riddle of the four Temples of King Solomon. For while everybody speak of “Solomon’s Temple” as singular, it is more exact to speak of “Solomon’s Temples” in the plural: "Then did Shelomoh build a high place for Kemosh, the abomination of Mo’av, in the hill that is before Yerushalayim, and for Molekh, the abomination of the children of Ammon. And likewise did he for all his foreign wives…" (I Kings 11:7-8). These shrines did function in Jerusalem until the time of the kings Hezqiyah and Josiah: “And the high places that were before Yerushalayim, which were on the right hand of the mount of corruption, which Shelomo the king of Yisra’el had built for ‘Ashtoret the abomination of the Ẓidonim, and for Kemosh the abomination of Mo’av, and for Milkom the abomination of the children of ‘Ammon, did the king defile” (II Kings, 23:13).

Does this mean that Shelomoh-Solomon, the builder of the Temple of Jerusalem, did not limit himself to the exclusive worship of YHWH? Did he become feeble-minded at his old age, as the scribes of the later kings claim? Are his women to blame (as was Eve in the garden)? But it could however be that Solomon’s cult was not that different from the popular religion in Israel at the time, as evident from the archeological find of shards of that period dedicated “To YHWH and His Asherah”.[1] This might have been the popular cult for another 300 years till the time of kings Hezeqiah and Josiah.

It can also be that Shelomoh, widely considered “the wisest of men”, had a long-range vision, and had reproduced the pattern that Abraham’s marked by altars over the whole land, and concentrated it in the new capital to make of Jerusalem a place of pilgrimage - tying the newly conquered people of Ammon and Moav to Jerusalem through the altars of Milkom and Kemosh, and his recent allies of Phoenicia through the altar to Ashtoret. The likely plan was that once they’d do pilgrimage to Jerusalem; they would eventually come to worship the (multifaced) One God of Abraham, of Yiẓḥaq and of Israel. We may guess that, in the spirit of the sacred architecture of the times, the shrines and altars were orientated between them, in ways that would enable rituals of relation and conjunction between the gods, or guardian angels of the people who comprise the growing Israelite nation. Had Solomon’s Israelite mini-empire survived, this might have worked. But after Solomon’s death his kingdom got divided, the people of Ammon and Mo’av got released from the Israelite kingdoms and the Phoenicians distanced themselves. By the time of Josiah these altars were no longer places of added pilgrimage to Jerusalem, but places of diverting the people of Judea from the monotheistic cult, and thus had better been destroyed.

Where were these shrines or altars that Solomon built, and in what pattern? The scriptures say that they were on the hills surrounding the Temple Mount. We shall presently discuss the legacy of Solomon’s main Temple and how it led to the still present Dome of the Rock, but it is also possible that his pluralistic design influenced later generations through the following millennia. According to the studies of the architect Tuviah Sagiv, there were three high places at Mount Moriah, which apparently served for the ancient rituals (we count them from North to South, as did Abraham): (1) at the site of “the Dome of the Spirits” (or “Dome of the Tablets”) 120 yards north of the Dome of the Rock, (2) at the Dome of the Rock, and Sagiv further proposes (3) that the site of the present Al-Aqsa Mosque, at the southern end of the precinct, was a higher place at the time of the kings. Sagiv claims, however, that the site of Jewish Temple was not at the Dome of the Rock or at a high place at all.[2] This fourth place in time order and the third on the north-south axis could have been a place that had not served as a prior sanctuary of idol worship because it was a lower place. The site of this “Hidden Temple”, claims Sagiv, is opposite the Wailing Wall and level with its present paving, under El-Kas fountain at the Temple Mount. If we regard the Temple Mount precinct as a kind of map of the whole land of Israel, then these marked places at the Temple Mount – which form a rough north-south alignment – map the four altars that Abraham built along the north-south axis of the land. This scheme thus suggests that the place of the current El-Aqsa Mosque is related to a still fifth shrine of Abraham.

The Fifth Temple of Abraham

In Parashat vaYera we learn about the fourth altar that Abraham built, together with Yizhaq, at mount Moriah. Later on in history, when the Qur’an would be written, it will hint at a fifth altar, the one at Mecca, which it claims, was built together by Abraham and Ishmael. The casting away of Ishmael to the desert therefore connects between the Moriah of “vaYera” to the Ka’aba in Mecca. One, hinted in va’Yera (“would be seen”) is characterized by sight and vision, the other – as indicated by the name of Yishma’el, the one who will hear – is characterized by hearing Shemi’ạh - and by discipline – Mishma’ạt. Discipline is yielding, which is what the very word “Islam” means. Thus there formed an axis of tension – and of binding – between the two shrines, between Mecca and Jerusalem (which we shall discuss below), between the children of Ishmael and the children of Isaac. The relations between the children of Abraham are aligned and measured upon this axis (which is perpendicular to the Axis between the Pyramid of Gizeh and Mount Moriah, as we have discussed earlier regarding “The Abraham Triangle).

More than two billion people, Jews Christians and Moslems, accept the Biblical stories about Abraham and are likely to regard the places consecrated by Abraham as veritable holy places. About half of them, the Qur’an believing Moslems, also believe in what is written in the second Sura of the Qur’an – that Abraham built, with the help of his son Ishmael, a shrine for God (Allah) also in Mecca, a shrine that stands there in glory till this day and serves as the chief place of worship for Islam, a place that every Moslem wants to visit at least once in his lifetime.

Due to very special circumstances in the first century of Islam this axis became marked by the building of the Dome of the Rock and soon later the early El-Aqsa Mosque. Keen historical research shows that the reason for building the dome of the Rock was very different from what is taken for granted almost universally nowadays. It was not built to commemorate the visionary Ascent of the Prophet Mohammad through the seven heavens (this explanation came centuries later), but to respond to particular needs of the young Moslem empire which were later almost completely forgotten.

In the most recent authoritative scholarly compilation about the Temple Mount,[3] the writer about the early Moslem phase,[4] Andeas Kaplony, separates the conception of the Temple Mount for the short-lived Umayyad dynasty and the later Abbasid and Fatimid rules of Islam. For the first, their self image was of heirs to David and Solomon. As he states: “Moslem traditions identify the Haram again and again with the Temple of David and Solomon, from where the Ark of the Covenant and God’s presence had been removed… To cut a long story short: this is the former Temple rebuilt, the Qur’an is the true Torah, and the Muslims are the true People of Israel”. Such claims would seem outrageous now to the Palestinian authority, which denies that the Jewish Temple ever stood there, but when the Umayyad Caliph Abd el-Malik ordered the building of the Dome of the Rock on the deserted esplanade, he saw himself as the heir to king Solomon and his artisans as the masons of the Temple.

The founder of Islamic Studies in Europe, Ignaz Goldzieher, raised a still more outrageous reason why did Abd al-Malik built the Dome of the Rock, based on Muslim historian (al-Yaqubi). At the time, there was a revolt against the Umayyad led by Ibn Zubayr who controlled Mecca and pressed the pilgrims to swear alliance to him against Abd El-malik. So the Caliph built the Dome of the Rock as substitute to divert the pilgrimage from Mecca to Jerusalem. Later scholars argued against such an outrageous claim (for Muslims), but recent studies by researcher Amikam Elad,[5] based on newly discovered earlier documents (by al-waqidi, Hisham and his father Muḥammed ibn al-sa’ib), have confirmed this thesis. If so, we can see in the very design of the dome of the Rock a declaration that it is superior to the Qa’ba in Mecca (see below). 

The Dome of the Rock Connections to Abraham and King Solomon

At the period when Islam appeared, there were throughout the Middle East, and especially in the deserts between Syria and Arabia, groups with beliefs different from those of the ruling Christianity – such as Gnostics, the remnants of the original Jerusalem church and proto-Sufis.[6] According to the testament of the late Sufi leader Idris Shah[7] there were among them also a group of “Sufi Freemasons” who regarded themselves as adherents of King Solomon and of the Temple of Solomon, and who moved to Jerusalem as soon as it was conquered by Islam and when the Dome of the Rock was commissioned, they joined the endeavor. It is quite likely that the basic story of the contemporary “Freemasons”, who relate themselves to the builders of Solomon’s Temple, and who number nowadays millions of members, issues from these stories and traditions. The occasion of building a shrine upon the Temple Mount (explained below) was a once-in-a-millennium opportunity. When the Dome of the Rock was built there was still no certainty that Islam would remain, and there was certainly the possibility that Jerusalem would come under the rule of another religion (as indeed happened in history). Thus there was a need to build a shrine that could serve any religion and that the secrets of the shrine would be coded not in easily burned books, but within the very fabric of the shrine in a way that is visible to all, yet only “those who have eye would see” the hidden message.

In my article “Three Religions under One Dome” (http://www.global-report.com/thehope/a58-three-religions-under-one-dome) I bring a few of the surprising findings about the Dome of the Rock and its design. Let me add here that there is a very subtle connection, and possible dialogue, between the Qa’ba and the Dome of the Rock. The Qa’ba is what its name means – a cube in three dimensions. The design of the Dome of the Rock, intended to draw the pilgrims from Mecca to itself, pronounced in a subtle way that it is “one up” compared with the Qa’ba. It is not possible to build a solid structure in 4D, but the Dome of the Rock has the characteristics of the four-dimensional hyper-cube spelled in its structure,[8] and can evoke 4D perception in the keen pilgrim.

The history of the Dome of the Rock contains many clues for its esoteric destiny to serve the reconciliation of the three religions of “The Children of Abraham” of their times. Thus according to the late Chief Rabbi Shlomoh Goren book about the Temple Mount, the dome of the Rock was designed to serve not as a mosque, but for Jewish worship on the Temple Mount, and that it served Jewish worship for quite a long time. According to Amikam Elad’s research through ancient Moslem sources, when the Dome of the Rock was built, its builder, the Caliph Abd el-Malik, sent to bring to Jerusalem Jewish families from Tiberias, budgeted and commissioned them to serve and burn incense inside the Dome of the Rock, whose doors opened to the public on Mondays and Thursdays (the days Jews read in the Torah during the week).

Other researchers point to the writings from the Quran that circle the inside of the Dome, which are those that challenge Christian belief in the divinity of Jesus, and see the place as intended to draw in the Christians, impress them with the glory of the shrine and then redirect them towards the El-Aqsa mosque and to Islam.

When Jerusalem was conquered by the Crusaders, who came with the expressed aim to liberate the church of the Holy Sepulcher, they did not destroy the Moslem shrines, even though they could definitely be seen as defying the Church of the Holy Sepulcher. Quite the opposite, they accepted the lingering association between these shrines and the early Temple. As the whole Temple Mount was given to the care and (almost exclusive) use of the Order of the Knights Templar – who chose to call themselves “The Poor Knights of the Temple of Solomon”. They renamed the structure of the El-Aqsa Mosque “The Temple of Solomon” and used it as their quarters and christened the dome of the Rock as “Templo Domini” (Christ’s Temple) and held their rituals there. Many of the churches that the Knight Templar built for their rituals in Europe were round as emulating the Dome of the Rock. These hidden rituals were eventually declared by the papacy as heretical, and to these days there are many speculations what these really were. Thus, for example, in the famous book by Umberto Eco “Foucault’s Pendulum”, which is a parody on these speculations, the speculation is raised that the aim of the Knight Templar was to bring a reconciliation between Christianity and Islam (and it is also hinted there that the weakness of those speculations issues from their disregard of the Jewish factor and of the Jewish Qabbalah).

Whereas these rich “Poor Knight of the Temple of Solomon” got suppressed and seemingly disappeared, they apparently resurrected through secret societies, notably the Freemasons, whose founding myth is that they are the heir to the builders of the Temple of Solomon. In terms of the original Temple of Solomon, this myth has no foundation, but in terms of builders of the Dome of the Rock, this is quite possible and even likely. The freemasons were the first organization in Europe that was open to all adherents of the “Abrahamic Faiths”, those who believe in one supreme deity, the master architect of the universe – Christian, Jewish and Moslems.

Message for our times

Within the Israeli-Arab conflict, the problem of the Temple Mount is the most complex and stubborn. Jew pray for the rebuilding of the Temple, Evangelical Christians need the Jewish Temple in order for Jesus to make his “Second Coming” appearance, Muslims also reserve the place for the events of the Qa’ima – the Moslem version of the Apocalypse and Day of Resurrection and Judgment - and meanwhile retain full rule over the whole Temple Mount (while nowadays denying that the Jewish Temple ever stood there).

Some proposed solutions suggest having several shrines on the Temple Mount, catering for different branches of the Abrahamic religions. The current discussion lends support to this approach. There has been a plurality in the places of cult of Abraham himself, similar plurality of Solomon’s shrines around Jerusalem and could be that pattern for four shrines on (and above) the Temple Mount. Like the plurality of 4 in the Tetragrammaton, the four letters Name of YHWH, that make up the Name of the Holy One, such four shrines could serve a greater Unity.