The Mysteries Of Solomon's Temple

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And the Temple? Muslim authorities forbid any archaeological digs at its most likely location--directly beneath the Dome of the Rock. Yet very few scholars doubt its existence, in part because the testimony to its destruction is so eloquent. By 715 B.C., Jerusalem had indisputably turned into the prosperous capital of a major Judahite kingdom, documentable through both archaeology and written accounts. By 586 B.C., it was rubble. A Babylonian chronicle at the time of King Nebuchadnezzar boasts that he "captured the city and ... took heavy tribute and brought it back to Babylon." Scripture recounts the same story almost word for word, but for "tribute" it substitutes "all the treasures of the Temple and the royal palace." Indeed, Jerusalem's fall and the Temple's loss reverberate throughout the second half of the Jewish Bible, from the book of Lamentations' gruesome descriptions of the desperate acts of the city's residents to the psalmist's lament: "O God, the nations have invaded your inheritance; they have defiled your holy Temple, they have reduced Jerusalem to rubble."

Whatever of the First Temple may eventually be dug up, its most glorious remnant will not be physical. Scholars quibble over whether what they call ethical monotheism had fully developed before the city's fall or was realized by the Jews only on their return from exile in Babylon. But it was in the Temple, or with the memory of its grandeur tempered by the harsh wisdom of the stateless, that the Jews refined their embrace of a God who was the only God, who involved himself in human history and who wanted his people to do right. That is the great Western religious insight, honored and unchallenged by Jesus and the Pharisees as they debated in Herod's Temple--or, for that matter, by Christians, Jews and Muslims as they have contended so bitterly since in the still sacred city. --By David Van Biema. Reported by Andrea Dorfman/New York and Haim Watzman/Jerusalem