The False Sign of the Jews 3rd Temple 2
Part 2-The False Sign-the Giant Misstep
“Be thou removed and be thou cast into the sea.”
Let's take a closer look at the history of Jerusalem to get a clearer picture of the why and how of “the giant misstep.”
First of all the Jerusalem of today resembles nothing like the Jerusalem of the time of King David (1000 B.C.) The walls around the old city today, and around what is commonly called the Temple Mount was not the Jerusalem of those days. The real old city of Jerusalem was the city of David. The city of David was synonymous with the city of Jerusalem. They were one and the same.
The city of David/Jerusalem is several hundred meters south of the southern wall of the commonly called Temple Mount area. It was only re-discovered one hundred and fifty years ago. But even with the archaeological rediscovery of the city of David the prevailing view and location of the Temple Mount had been firmly established for many centuries.
Where the tree falls
One of the great proverbs of Solomon is “where the tree falls that is where it lies.” And this is certainly applicable to the issue of the Temple Mount, and the conundrum of where the temples were actually built.
The idea of this scripture is that many issues in life are weighty in nature. The proverb paints a picture of a tree as a metaphor of this fact. A tree is very heavy so if one were to cut it down and had made a mistake where it would fall, there would be the problem of dealing with where it lies.
It would take a great deal of work to chop it up into pieces and remove. So is the case of the Temple Mount dilemma. Where the tree falls that’s where it lies. Yet even though the city of David had been rediscovered one hundred and fifty years ago the tree has been laying there still after four centuries. But a simple logical consideration should cause one to take pause about at least the possibility that maybe, just maybe, the temples were not built on the so-called Temple Mount, but rather in the city of David. “Where the tree falls, that's where it lies!”
But the momentum of the confusion commenced long ago.
How did the confusion begin? Let us go back and exhume and review the evolution of the history that caused the giant misstep and what has resulted in today’s prevailing bias.
The beginning of the confusion commenced after the destruction of the first temple. This was some six hundred years before Christ. The Jews had been carried off to Babylon around six hundred B.C. Then after seventy years in bondage they were allowed to return and rebuild their temple.
But first they rebuilt the walls surrounding the temple square and astonishingly, according to the book of Nehemiah, they accomplished the feat in just fifty two days.
“So the wall was completed on the twenty-fifth of the month Elul, in fifty-two days.”
Most people would never stop to ponder and then consider this important fact of history. But this fact sheds great light on where the temple(s) formerly stood. It is a very significant historical fact.
The Impossibility
It is simply not humanly possible that the Jews could have laid both the foundation and then built back the walls surrounding the city and temple in just fifty two days. No way!
When the Jews returned from Babylon to Jerusalem they merely gathered the massive rocks of the wall that had been knocked down and strewn about in the Kidron valley, and put them back on their original foundations which Solomon had formerly laid. This took only fifty-two days. No problem.
So what? Here is the point.
Since the time of the Babylonian destruction there is no record that the walls were ever again torn down, at least not until the Roman destruction of the walls in 70 AD.
Until the time of the Roman destruction, in 70 AD, which Jesus predicted, the walls had remained intact for centuries. What that meant is that the stones that the Jews replaced after their return from Babylon some six hundred years before Christ would have remained intact still standing on Solomon’s original foundation stones.
When the Romans destroyed the temple and the city almost seven hundred years later in 70 AD, they would have been tearing down the original walls which would have been still standing on Solomon's original foundation stones.
So what is the point?
The stones that make up the foundation stones around the Temple Mount today were laid there by the Romans. How could stones that formerly formed the walls of the city after the Babylonian captivity in 600 B.C., have been placed on foundation stones that would not have been laid until the Roman era six hundred years into the future?
This one fact in and of itself proves that the current so-called Temple Mount was not the site of either the Solomon temple nor the Zerubbabel temple. How can you insert underneath the rebuilt walls by the Jews on their return from Babylon with the newer Roman foundation stones and thereby replacing Solomon’s foundations? The walls that had been built six centuries earlier were clearly built on Solomon’s original foundation stones. So how on earth can anyone explain how those rebuilt walls ended up on Roman foundation stones?
This simple lost fact is the beginning for understanding the evolution of the misstep.