Were there Jewish temples on “Temple Mount”? No
By Assad Abdi • Oct 14, 2016
Was there once a Jewish temple in Jerusalem? Yes. Does any scholar genuinely doubt there was? No. But was there a temple in the area called Haram al-Sharif, which Israelis refer to it as Temple Mount? The simple clear answer is: No.
Even Israeli archeologists can’t prove the Temple was built on Haram al-Sharif. But apparently the only way to prove it is by “excavating” the entire area. This practically amounts the total destruction of both Al-Aqsa Mosque and Dome of the Rock in order to perhaps discover underneath them some stones that may or may not be from either the First of the Second Temple.
A case in point is below from an article in Haaretz, Oct 21, 2015:
Archaeologists cannot conclusively point to stones they know comprised the Second Temple, let alone the first one. But as Prof. Israel Finkelstein, a world-renowned expert on Jerusalem archaeology, spells out in an email to Haaretz, “There is no scholarly school of thought that doubts the existence of the First Temple.”
All the archaeologists Haaretz spoke with for this article believe that if Temple Mount could be excavated — which it never has been — such evidence would be found, even if many of the stones were repurposed over the centuries. But concrete finds definitively from the Temple exist in abundance, says Bar-Ilan University Prof. Gabriel Barkay, an archaeologist who has spent many years working in Jerusalem, and the area of Temple Mount in particular.
The history of the First and Second Temples is not what’s in dispute here. Under the guise of historical research and archeology, it’s clear that it’s just another attempt to wipe Palestinian history from the land and erase all symbols of Palestine’s history and culture that also go back to hundreds and thousands of years.
