The Mountain of Mourning

II Chronicles.3.1

Buildings do not last forever, just like us. Even the most precious and beloved ones.

The Jerusalem Temple was temporary too but it is also perpetual.

Its meaning lives beyond its bricks. And although there are those who want to literally rebuild it on the mountain where it once was - for most of it it’s the idea of its history and meaning that matters most. The idea of rebuilding the temple and restoring the sacrificial system is ridiculous and dangerous, politically problematic, and religiously reprehensible. For most modern Jews living today it is a vague vision of some grand page from the past.

And yet the temple that once was still looms large in the Jewish imagination.

Especially today.

On this day, the 17th of Tammuz, Jews fast in mourning, as we begin the three weeks of grief for the destruction of Jerusalem’s temple and the demise of the Judean society in the year 70 CE and during the other historical tragedies that we’ve endured before and after.

The 3 weeks culminate with the fast of 9th of Av, the day on which the second temple burnt down and the Roman empire conquered Jerusalem.

On this day back in the 6th century BCE, the Babylonian army’s siege on Jerusalem managed the first crack in the city walls - the symbolic start of the end - before the first temple toppled.

Two temples and two thousands years later -- the memory of this building and what it stood for still captures the longing, loss and love of many all over the world. Some want it rebuilt, most see it as a long gone metaphor.

How has the temple of Jerusalem, a lavish sacred center, operating for hundreds of years, used to slaughter animals, offer them as sacrifices while singing songs of praise to a deity who dwelled within its walls - endured in the Jewish imagination for all these centuries past its traumatic destruction?

What was it about this temple’s location and purpose that lingers even as so much of what Jewish life and legacy has radically changed?

Today, the Jewish calendar once again meets up with our Below the Bible Belt journey as the narratives inform each other, helping us piece together some of the puzzle.

The temple wasn’t important just because of what went on there - but also because of where it was -- and its precise location.

Today’s chapter in Chronicles adds a critical piece of information on this choice of location - linking the site to mythic space/time proportions.

Whoever wrote Chronicles, likely between the 4th-2nd Century BCE, were the first to directly link and associate the mountain in Jerusalem on which the temple was built -- with the biblical Mount Moriah, first mentioned in Genesis:

וַיָּ֣חֶל שְׁלֹמֹ֗ה לִבְנ֤וֹת אֶת־בֵּית־יְהֹוָה֙ בִּיר֣וּשָׁלַ֔͏ִם בְּהַר֙ הַמּ֣וֹרִיָּ֔ה אֲשֶׁ֥ר נִרְאָ֖ה לְדָוִ֣יד אָבִ֑יהוּ אֲשֶׁ֤ר הֵכִין֙ בִּמְק֣וֹם דָּוִ֔יד בְּגֹ֖רֶן אׇרְנָ֥ן הַיְבוּסִֽי׃

Then Solomon began to build the House of YHWH in Jerusalem on Mount Moriah, where YHWH had appeared to his father David, at the place which David had designated, at the threshing floor of Ornan the Jebusite.

II Chronicles.3.1

This verse names the known history of this mountain - its previous use by the local Jebusites who sold it to David. But it goes way farther back in real or imagined time.

Does Mount Moriah sound familiar? It is the name of the mountain on which Abraham was ordered to sacrifice his son Isaac, and offers up a ram instead. He is told to go to the land of Moriah and climb its tallest mount. Some suggest that the name is derived from one of the names for the sage plant - marva in Hebrew, Marwa in Arabic. Some suggest other etymologies but nobody knows what mountain range the story refers to.

Scholars suggest it is the story that ends the ancient time of child sacrifice and the evolution into offering animals to the deities instead.

There is no mention in Genesis that this mountain is in Jerusalem - there’s only a vague sense of where it may be -- but today’s chapter links the two together.

It is the assumed narrative these days - linking past and present.

But it seems to be a constructed narrative - that not all hold on to.

The Samaritans, who never accepted Jerusalem as the central site of worship (mostly because they were rejected by Ezra and Nehemiah at the beginning of the Second Temple period) picked another spot for the identification of Abraham’s test site -- they spell Moriah differently and claim it is near Shechem, modern day Nablus, where Mount Gerizim is the sacred site of the Samaritans, location of their temple and the place where Abraham lifted up his knife.

So how did the tradition that links Abraham to Solomon, Mount Moriah to Mount Zion - begin?

We will likely never know the steps and process by which this idea was suggested and eventually written down in this chapter, cementing it as reality.

A rabbinic midrash that discusses the destruction of the Temple looks back to its sanctification and brings together all the reasons for the site's holiness:

"Jeremiah the Prophet lamented, when he saw the destruction of the holy place—
It has been sanctified since the days of Noah, as it is written: ‘He shall dwell in the tents of Shem’ (Genesis 9:27);
It has been sanctified since the days of Abraham, and called Mount Moriah, as it is written: ‘On the mount where God is seen’ (Genesis 22:14);
It has been sanctified since the days of David, as it is written: ‘To build the house of YHWH in Jerusalem on Mount Moriah, where YHWH had appeared to David his father, which he had prepared in the place of David on the threshing floor of Ornan the Jebusite’ (2 Chronicles 3:1)”

This midrash adds the layers of mythic meaning that make Mt. Moriah into the nexus of history and the only reasonable location for the temple. From Noah and Shem, to Abraham and Isaac - and on to David and Solomon. This layered sanctity reflects a profound spiritual truth even if it is, most likely, historical fiction - holiness emerges over time, through the fusion of heaven and earth—actions taken by people, and encounters initiated by history or by God if this is how you view history -—and it is what renders a place truly sacred.

Whatever was -- today this mountain is a sacred site of Islam, where the mosques tower over the city that has known so many sacred stories and today still yearns for shared humanity and peace.

Today some of us fast and honor the history of the hurts and the hopes for healing that this Temple Mount represents, fact or fiction on the map of myth.

Chronicles will continue to narrate the building of this ancient temple on this site, lavish and larger than life. And as this war continues and the claims for this holy land rip so many of us apart -- it is a good day to weep for what happens when stories impose one truth and one claim over another instead of fusing the sacred offerings together, all children of one bit family, on one big enough holy land.

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