Jerusalem’s Temple Mount

Wikipedia:

Leen Ritmeyer (b. 1945) is a Dutch-born archaeological architect who currently lives and works in Wales, after having spent 22 years (1967–89) in Jerusalem.

In Gershom Gorenberg’s words, “[w]hen archeologists speak today of solid scientific research on the Temple’s location, they’re most likely to refer to Leen Ritmeyer”, referring to his work on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. He presented solid arguments based on archaeological evidence collected over at least a century of research for the location of Solomon’s Temple, the emplacement of the Ark of the Covenant on the Foundation Stone, and the location of the platform as extended in the First Temple period, probably during the time of Hezekiah described as a square of 500 cubits in Mishnah Middot 2.1.[clarification needed] He has demonstrated that one of the steps leading to the Dome of the Rock is actually the top of a remaining stone course of the pre-Herodian Western Wall of the Temple Mount platform.

Ritmeyer Archaeological Design:

Leen Ritmeyer, originally from Holland, is an archaeological architect who has been involved in all of Jerusalem’s major excavations. He was chief architect of the Temple Mount Excavations directed by the late Prof. Benjamin Mazar and of the Jewish Quarter Excavations in the Old City of Jerusalem directed by the late Prof. Nahman Avigad, both of the Hebrew University.

He directed prestigious restoration and reconstruction projects such as the Byzantine Cardo and the Herodian Villas in Jerusalem. He has also participated in numerous excavations all over Israel, producing site plans and reconstruction drawings.

His work has been published in many journals, magazines and books about Biblical Archaeology and has been shown in eminent museums, including the Israel Museum.

An excerpt from, “Misunderstandings About Jerusalem’s Temple Mount” By George Wesley Buchanan, Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, August 2011:

While it has not been widely published, it assuredly has been known for more than 40 years that the 45-acre, well-fortified place that has been mistakenly called the “Temple Mount” was really the Roman fortress—the Antonia—that Herod built. The Dome of the Rock and al-Aqsa Mosque are contained within these walls. The area is called the Haram Al-Sharif in Arabic.

The discovery that this area had once been the great Roman fortress came as a shock to the scholarly community, which had believed for many years that this ancient fortress was the place where the temple had been. This news was preceded by another shock, when the English archaeologist Kathleen Kenyon discovered in 1962 that the entire City of David in the past had been only that little rock ridge on the western bank of the Kidron Valley. Less than 10 years later the historian Benjamin Mazar learned that the Haram had undoubtedly been the Roman fortress.

In biblical times the Haram was not a sacred place. Instead it was the place that Orthodox Jews considered defiled and the most despised place in the world. Within these walls were found no remnants of any of the earlier temples but rather an image of Mars, the Roman god of war. The 1st century Jewish Roman historian Titus Flavius Josephus said the Romans always kept a whole legion of soldiers (5,000-6,000) there, and that there were stones in its walls that were 30 feet long, 15 feet thick, and 71/2 feet high. While excavating the area, Mazar found these very stones there in the Haram—not in the temple.

He and the local Muslims also discovered there three inscriptions, honoring the Roman leaders in the war of A.D. 66-72—Vespasian, Titus, and Silva—and Hadrian in the war of A.D. 132-135, for their success in defeating the Jews in the wars. Appropriate inscriptions for a Roman fortress, but impossible for a temple that had been destroyed in A.D. 70—65 years before the inscriptions had been made. Mazar shared these insights freely with other participants in the excavation, such as Herbert Armstrong and Ernest Martin.

Wikipedia:

By the opening of the 20th century the stories of the Creation, Noah’s ark, and the Tower of Babel—in short, chapters 1 to 11 of the Book of Genesis—had become subject to greater scrutiny by scholars, and the starting point for biblical history was regarded as the stories of Abraham, Isaac, and the other Hebrew patriarchs. Then in the 1970s, largely through the publication of two books, Thomas L. Thompson’s The Historicity of the Patriarchal Narratives and John Van Seters’ Abraham in History and Tradition, it became widely accepted that the remaining chapters of Genesis were not historical. At the same time, archaeology and comparative sociology convinced most scholars in the field that there was little historical basis to the biblical stories of the Exodus and the Israelite conquest of Canaan.

By the 1980s, the Hebrew Bible’s stories of the Patriarchs, the Exodus from Egypt and Conquest of Canaan were no longer considered historical, but biblical histories continued to use the Bible as a primary source and to take the form of narrative records of political events arranged in chronological order, with the major role played by (largely Judean) kings and other high-status individuals. At the same time, new tools and approaches were being brought to bear on scholars’ knowledge of the past of ancient Canaan, notably new archaeological methods and approaches (for example, this was the age of surface surveys, used to map population changes which are invisible in the biblical narrative), and the social sciences (an important work in this vein was Robert Coote and Keith Whitlam’s The Emergence of Early Israel in Historical Perspective, which used sociological data to argue, in contradiction to the biblical picture, that it was kingship that formed Israel, and not the other way round).

Then in the 1990s a school of thought emerged from the background of the 1970s and 1980s which held that the entire enterprise of studying ancient Israel and its history was seriously flawed by an over-reliance on the biblical text, which was too problematic (meaning untrustworthy) to be used even selectively as a source for Israel’s past, and that Israel itself was in any case itself a problematic subject. This movement came to be known as biblical minimalism.

Wikipedia:

Dame Kathleen Mary Kenyon, DBE, FBA, FSA (5 January 1906 – 24 August 1978) was a British archaeologist of Neolithic culture in the Fertile Crescent.

Her work at Jericho, from 1952 until 1958, made her world-famous and established a lasting legacy in the archaeological methodology of the Levant. Ground-breaking discoveries concerning the Neolithic cultures of the Levant were made in this ancient settlement. Her excavation of the Early Bronze Age walled city and the external cemeteries of the end of the Early Bronze Age, together with her analysis of the stratified pottery of these periods established her as the leading authority on that period. Kenyon focused her attention on the absence of certain Cypriot pottery at City IV, arguing for an older destruction date than that of her predecessors. Jericho was recognized as the oldest continuously occupied settlement in history because of her discoveries. At the same time she also completed the publication of the excavations at Samaria. Her volume, Samaria Sebaste III: The Objects, appeared in 1957. Having completed her excavations at Tell es-Sultan in 1958, Kenyon excavated in Jerusalem from 1961 to 1967, concentrating on the ‘City of David’ to the immediate south of the Temple Mount.

Although Kenyon had no doubt the sites she excavated were linked to the Old Testament narrative, she nevertheless drew attention to inconsistencies, concluding that Solomon’s “stables” at Megiddo were totally impractical for holding horses (1978:72), and that Jericho fell long before Joshua’s arrival (1978:35). Consequently, Kenyon’s work has been cited to support the Minimalist School of Biblical Archaeology.

Video Title: Where will the Jewish Temple be Rebuilt? | Dr. Leen Ritmeyer | InGrace. Source: InGrace with Jim Scudder, Jr. Date Published: December 22, 2022. Description:

Join Jim Scudder, Jr. on this thought-provoking episode of InGrace, as he sits down with renowned expert Dr. Leen Ritmeyer to discuss the controversial topic of the rebuilding of the Jewish Temple. 

As a leading authority on the archaeology and history of the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, Dr. Ritmeyer provides valuable insights into the potential location of the new temple. He shares his extensive knowledge of the historical and archaeological evidence surrounding the Temple Mount and the potential implications for the rebuilding of the Jewish Temple.