Plainly, then, however much Science wishes to leave God behind, it has found it impossible not to borrow the language of zeal from Religion. For in atheism there can be no “tingling of the spine” or “catch in the voice.” Such categorizations and emotional responses are foreign and nonsensical to atheism. But readers are titillated, and so miss the fact that Sagan is saying that dirt has emotion.
Much of this romanticized message about space gained momentum in America in the late 1960s through the 1970s. The country was weary of the dead end war in Vietnam, of race riots at home, of political strife and corruption, and of an Establishment whose religions seem to provide young people no answers and certainly less solace than sex, drugs, and rock and roll. It was the perfect storm. People needed an answer that transcended their differences and disillusionment if they were to have any unity at all. Something to look up. Enter the Cosmos. It demanded nothing. It was the material equivalent of the perfect God so content with Himself that He needn’t anything outside himself, including the worship of others. And thus the parallel. People contemplating the Cosmos was a form of the Cosmos contemplating itself (a win win). Apparently Sagan was right. It was fascinating, wonderful, breath-taking dirt, after all.
And no more than when it was the Big Bang. The emphasis on the Big Bang thus came to sanitize in general the kind of small-scale catastrophism Velikovsky had preached 25 years prior and been persecuted for. Science was waking up. It wasn’t only uniformitarianism that got us here. Or uniformitarianism at all. Some things could happen all at once, like huge jumps in the complexity of life. And so the field was ripe for Eldridge and Gould to sow their seed about evolution via “punctuated equilibrium.” At first Established Science greeted their theory with denial. But then the Old Guard went through the five stages of grief over the loss of uniformitarian explanations, until at last there came acceptance, namely, that Eldridge and Gould were the new reality, and that they were finally getting the monkey off their back of a fossil record showing no trans-species evolution. And so in time punctuated equilibrium was accepted, since there was no alternative. And thus was portended the future of all evolutionary theory, in which the observation of anything else visible might also be non-essential.
And so in recent decades the scientific method has been subtly downplayed, meaning the vigor for paleontology for over a century had only been an Oxford young man’s game of misguided energy. Yet, because of a sympathetic Academy, evolutionists still find themselves in the elder’s armchair of respectability, dreaming up solutions to stubborn problems through ever increasing theorization, which in turn relies upon whatever evolutionary-friendly assertions will serve the idea that “evolution must be true, because we’re here.” Thus, e.g., gravity is appealed to when the evolutionist supposes it is an advantage, with ‘dark matter’ fudge-factoring in as a kind of Darwin-of-the-gaps when the advantage fails.10 Needless to say, this ensures that evolutionary theory will have the enviable plasticity of heads I win; tails you lose for a long time to come. And this is what I mean elsewhere when I said that the problem today is that History follows Science, not Science History, and that therefore where there is false science there will be false history.
We can only hope the reader will see through the sophisticated facades that pose as explanations set forth by scholars who have circled the wagons. Meantime, the tragedy continues. Professorial voices intimidate the student until he convinces himself that what at first seemed ridiculous to him must be the truth. Nevertheless, if instead he trusts that the Bible is reason, he may at least hope to salvage, if nothing else, that unique part and tiny, valuable corner of the Cosmos that is himself.
WHERE WAS SOLOMON’S TEMPLE?
(CHALLENGES TO THE SACRED CUBIT RE: TEMPLE LOCATION)
While certain of the Endnotes explain further why the 25” cubit is an evidence supporting prophecies like Daniel 9, along with why these prophecies should be read with “micrometer” precision, someone might still object that such a long sacred cubit (compared to the 17.45” ± .03” “medium cubits” of the Jews) does not accord with present day archaeological evidence. And so we will address that objection here.
The most frequent challenges to a 25.0265” length for the sacred cubit come indirectly from professional historians, archaeologists, architects, etc., and their various proposed locations for the First and Second Temples, some based on alleged temple remains on the Haram esh-Sharif platform (a.k.a. the Temple Mount, or the Moriah Platform), a.k.a. The Dome of the Rock (DOR). This trapezoid platform covers about 35 to 36 acres in present day east Jerusalem, and the DOR sits nearly center upon this platform.
The three most prominent theories of where the original temple site(s) were located all focus on the Moriah Platform, though at different locations on it, i.e., northern, central, and southern. The proposed northern location is advocated by the history professor Asher Kaufman, the central location by the archaeologist Dan Bahat and the archaeological architect Leen Ritmeyer, and the southern location by the architect Tuvia Sagiv. Apart from these is a theory of lesser prominence by the late Ernest L. Martin. Martin was a history professor and amateur archaeologist who worked with the renowned Israeli archaeologist, Benjamin Mazar, on excavations at the base of the southern walls of the Moriah Platform. For our purposes here, these four theories will be divided into (1) the three focused within the Moriah Platform, and (2) Martin’s view focused outside it.
What apparently divides these views, as seems inevitable in such matters, is what historical sources are regarded as most credible. In such instances a professional academician A says it is a collection of evidences S, a second academician B says, no, it is the collection of evidences T, and a third academician C says it is not quite either of these but a series of facts U, etc. (In fact, Martin noted at least 11 competing claims for the location of the temple, while Chuck Missler, a popular Christian thinker, stated during a 1995 seminar on the subject of the temple’s location that there were at least 14.) And so, for example, Martin prioritizes Josephus, the Bible, and historical accounts he regards as supportive. These we will look at in a moment. On the other hand, in various degrees the others rely less (if at all) on the Bible and Josephus, and so come to different conclusions than Martin. Kaufman, for example, relies on such things as (1) an interpretation by the famous 12th century Jewish philosopher, Maimonides, of temple description in Middot 4:7;11 (2) remains on the Moriah platform he claims belong to the First and Second temples (the 10th century BC Solomonic and the 5th century BC Zerubbabelic as modified centuries later by Herod the Great); (3) the angles of these stone remains; (4) a single 3rd or 4th century AD gold glass fragment from a Roman catacomb showing a trapezoid-like design of the temple; and (5) various onsite measurements aimed at establishing the three types of “medium cubits” used by the Jews (at some point or points in their history), based mainly on center to center measurements of a few socket holes and dimensions of a crypt- like depression. Because Kaufman’s view, like the Bahat/Ritmeyer and Sagiv views, places Solomon’s Temple on the Moriah Platform, some of my criticisms aimed against Kaufman regarding the Platform will be applicable to all three.
Now, I have to admit that after reading the March/April 1983 issue by Kaufman in Biblical Archaeology Review and looking at his diagrams, and then comparing Martin’s arguments based on the contemporary accounts of Josephus and the Bible and supporting historical statements, I had definite concerns. Kaufman’s evidences of a few ‘bones’ of remains at 9º ‘pigeon-toed’ angles on the DOR seemed the archaeological parallel to the infamous 1920s case of the evolutionary buildup of Nebraska Man from what turned out to be a peccary’s tooth. For Kaufman so wholly disregards Martin’s historical arguments as to leave it well short of his [Kaufman’s] confident conclusion about his own theory, that “The result precludes any other interpretation.” Let us see the key argument of Kaufman (Biblical Archaeology Review, Mar/Apr ’83; p.50):
Most scholars had previously assumed that the plan of the Second Temple, like that of the First Temple, was rectangular.
However, it should be noted that Maimonides, the great Jewish scholar and physician of the Middle Ages, drew the Hékhal in the form of a trapezium [trapezoid] because, in his view, a simple interpretation of Middot 4:7 required this. Certainly, the literary sources do not preclude a trapezium shape for the Temple courts.
Maimonides
Kaufman in his article is maddeningly vague on this point, never explaining what in Middot 4:7 led to Maimonides’ “simple interpretation.” This is a crucial point, so we will look at all of mishna 7 of Middot 4 to see if we can determine it.
Before we do, it is important to know there are three meanings (or dimensions) of the Hékhal found in Middot 4:6 and Middot 4:7.12 Also, one should be aware there are ‘peripheral’ temple features (i.e., walls, cells, mesibbah, water descent, etc.) mentioned in the mishna.
The first dimension of the Hékhal of Herod’s temple is found in Middot 4:6[1]. It states that it is 100 x 100 x 100 cubits high:
(1) The Hekhal was a hundred cubits by a hundred with a height of a hundred.
The second dimension of the Hékhal is derived from Middot 4:7 [sub-points 1a, 2a]. And the third dimension of the Hékhal is given in Middot 4:7 [main points 1, 2, 3, 4]. Here is Middot 4:7 in its entirety:
1) From east to west was a hundred cubits:
a) The wall [wall’s thickness] of the porch five cubits, the porch itself eleven, the wall of the Hekhal six cubits and its interior forty, a cubit for the space between, and twenty cubits for the Holy of Holies, the wall of the Hekhal six cubits, the cell [room] six cubits and the wall of the cell five.
2) From north to south was seventy cubits:
a) The wall of the mesibbah [“a ramp that would go up from the west to the east to the roofs of the cells and the upper level of the Sanctuary”] five cubits, the mesibbah itself three, the wall of the cell five and the cell itself six, the wall of the Hekhal six cubits and its interior twenty, then the wall of the Hekhal again six and the cell six and its wall five, then the place of the water descent three cubits and its wall five cubits.
3) The Porch extended beyond this fifteen cubits on the north and fifteen cubits on the south, and this space was called the House of the slaughter-knives where they used to store the knives.
4) The Hekhal was narrow behind and broad in front, resembling a lion, as it says, “Ah, Ariel, Ariel, the city where David encamped” (Isaiah 29:1): Just as a lion is narrow behind and broad in front, so the Hekhal was narrow behind and broad in front.
Thus the second dimension of the Hékhal (its base footprint) is defined from the outer walls described in 1)a and 2)a, or 73 cubits long x 32 cubits wide. This length includes the outer walls, the 40 x 20 Holy Place, the 20 x 20 Holy of Holies, and a cubit separating the Holy Place from the Holy of Holies.
Finally, the third dimension of the Hékhal (its base footprint) is based on Middot 4:7 main points 1) and 2), which state that the Hékhal is 100 x 70. This is further elaborated in 3), which explains why the Porch is 30 cubits wider, and thus concluding in 4) that the Hékhal is “narrow behind and broad in front,” i.e. the 100 (w) x 70 (l) dimensions mentioned under main points 1) and 2). Thus the third dimension is like an inverted “T,” with the broad, horizontal cross of the “T” 100 cubits wide, and the stem of the “T” behind it 70 cubits long. The cross of the “T” represents the Porch (P) and the wall in front of it. The stem behind the “T” is the two rooms more narrow in width than the (P). Again, the first is 20 x 40 cubits (w x l) called the Holy Place (HP) and entered daily by the priest, followed by a one cubit wall, after which comes a smaller room of 20 x 20 cubits called the Holy of Holies (HOH) and entered only once a year and by the high priest only. This last room is where the Ark of the Covenant resided. In short, the term Hékhal in the Middot may mean any one of these three definitions, with the reader left to adduce from the context what kind of Hékhal is being described. One supposes this makes the matter confusing to most western thinkers, who (if like me) prefer what seems to them less dependency on a word’s surrounding description than an out-and-out definition for the word. At any rate, Kaufman’s diagram shows that he conforms the Outer Court to what he believes was the trapezoidal shape of the Hékhal.
But note that in Middot 4:7 there is no suggestion whatsoever that the 100 x 100 x 100 cube of the Hékhal described in 4:6[1] is truncated, which is what Asher Kaufman claims in his diagram. Kaufman truncates the cube (or at least the base footprint), so that the walls of the courts outside the Hékhal will mirror the walls of part of the Hékhal. This is because he believes he has identified a remnant of the wall of the courtyard. But Kaufman shows none of the subdivisions of the walls and cells surrounding the outer walls forming the Hékhal; (note Kaufman’s diagram and the outlined portion he designates “Hékhal (main building of the temple compound).” Moreover, nothing in all the points and sub-points of Middot 4:7 suggests that the Hékhal is trapezoidal. For any truncation would require two, not one, dimensions of width to show there was a narrowing of the ‘stem’ of the inverted “T” of the Hékhal. The actual descriptions only give single widths for all the components of the ‘stem’ of the “T,” thus Middot 4:7[2a]:
The wall of the mesibbah five cubits, the mesibbah itself three, the wall of the cell five and the cell itself six, the wall of the Hekhal six cubits and its interior twenty, then the wall of the Hekhal again six and the cell six and its wall five, then the place of the water descent three cubits and its wall five cubits.
Where is there any tapering in all this description to prove Kaufman’s point? If Kaufman is right, there ought to be some kind of description to show this, e.g., “and the cell at the east six and narrowing at the west four.” But there is nothing at all. And so Kaufman simply asserts the case is otherwise: “Certainly, the literary sources do not preclude a trapezoid shape for the Temple courts.” But unfortunately for Kaufman, everything in the literary sources of the Middot disproves his claim. Likewise Middot 5, with its description of the outer court dimensions, does not help Kaufman’s cause.
1) The whole of the courtyard was a hundred and eighty-seven cubits long by a hundred and thirty-five broad.
Observe, then, how there is but one measurement given for the width of the courtyard. Yet had the overall design of the courtyard been of the irregular form that Kaufman proposes, then three, not two
Asher Kaufman’s conception of Temple location on Moriah Platform. Halfway down on far left is eastem portion of the octagonal-shaped Dome of the Rock. The trapezoid shape is not supported by literary sources. (courtesv BAR)
measurements would have been given here, i.e., one for the length, but one for the width at its widest and one for the width at its narrowest. For example, if Kaufman were correct, Middot 5:1 should read something like:
The whole of the courtyard was 187 cubits long, by 135 cubits wide at the front, by 105 cubits wide at the back.
Simply put, then, the descriptions of all these sections in the various mishnas do not support Kaufman’s and Maimonides’ trapezoidal lay-out for the temple area. Nor is Kaufman’s claim supported by anything else in the other chapters of the Middot. In short, his assertion is not at all a hermeneutic that invites confidence.