The Wailing Wall: Source of Jewish Idolatry
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It is written: “(Yah) shall arise and have mercy upon Zion, for the time to favour her, yes, the set time is come” (Psalm 102.13).
Messianic emotionalism became [highly] intense shortly before 70 CE,” the authoritative Standard Jewish Encyclopaedia tells us, “[with] the New Testament vividly reflecting the messianic ferment at this time” (Columns 1308, 1309). Luke informs us that according to Ya’akov (James), the brother of Our Lord Yeshua, there were “tens of thousands of [Jewish] believers [in Jerusalem] among the Judeans, and they [were] all zealots for the Torah” (Acts 21.20).
Messianic (Christian) Zealot activity in Jerusalem, which spearheaded the disastrous revolt against Rome, is the basic subject backdrop in both Kefa
(Peter) and Y’Hudah (Jude’s) epistles and in the War Scroll of the Yeshua Party (the scroll of Revelation). The despised and hated Romans conquered the Zealots and, according to the Jewish historian Josephus, the city of Jerusalem was not just completely obliterated but together with its walls “was so thoroughly laid even with the ground by those that dug it up to the foundation, that there was left nothing to make those that came thither believe [Jerusalem] had ever been inhabited” (War VII.I.I).
Titus prevented any further Messianic revolt by removing completely all traces that Jerusalem, perhaps the finest exponent of Greek culture in the ancient world, and concerning which city Titus had recognised was “richer than Rome itself” (War VII.I.2), had ever existed. So thorough was this
desolation that even the very foundations of the city with its walls were literally dug up. Jerusalem was ploughed over. Josephus tells us, “They had cut down all the trees that were in the country that adjoined to the city and that for [nearly ten miles] round about... the very view itself was a melan-choly thing. Those places that were before adorned with trees and pleasant gardens were now become a desolate country in every way, and its trees were all cut down. Nor could any foreigner that had formerly seen Judaea and the most beautiful suburbs of the city, and now saw it as a desert, but lament and mourn sadly at so great a change. For the war had laid all signs of beauty quite waste. Nor, if any one that had known the place before, and had come on a sudden to it now, would he have known it again. But though he were at the city itself, yet would he have enquired for it notwith-standing” (War VI.I.I).
Indeed, for six long months after the collapse of Jerusalem the Tenth Legion used Jewish slaves to “dig up” the ruins of houses, walls and the rubble of buildings looking for hidden caches of buried gold. “[Titus] could not but pity the destruction of the city...Yet there was no small quantity of the riches that had been in that city still found among the ruins, a great deal of which the Romans dug up: but the greatest part was discovered by those who were captives [the few survivors of the siege] and so they [the Romans] carried it away; I mean the gold and the silver, and the rest of that most precious furniture which the Jews had, and which the owners had treasured up under ground against the uncertainties of war.”
There was NOTHING left of the entirety of the city of Jerusalem, NOTHING left of the holy Temple, NOTHING left of the huge and formidable city walls, NOTHING left of the beautiful outlying sprawling suburbs. But one thing was left untouched by the Romans -- the adjoining Roman fortress Antonia (the present Haram esh-Sharif, located immediately north of the Temple and which adjoined it via double colonnades 600 feet long). Listen to what Eleazer, the final Zealot commander of the doomed Fortress Masada stated three years after the complete obliteration of the Holy City:
“And where is now that great city [Jerusalem], the metropolis of the Jewish nation, which was fortified by so many walls round about, which had so many fortresses and large towers to defend it, which could hardly contain the instruments prepared for the war, and which had so many ten thousands of men to fight for it? Where is this city that was believed to have God himself inhabiting therein? It is now demolished to the very foundations; and hath nothing left but that monument of it preserved, I mean the camp of those that have destroyed it, which still dwells upon its ruins; some unfortun-ate old men also lie upon the ashes of the Temple, and a few women are there preserved alive by the enemy, for our bitter shame and reproach...I cannot but wish that we had all died before we had seen that holy city demolished by the hands of our enemies, or the foundations of our holy Temple dug up after so profane a manner” (Eleazer, quoted in Yigael Yadin, Masada, Herod’s Fortress and the Zealot’s Last Stand, 1966, 235).
The Roman military camp which properly adjoined Jerusalem, and indeed overlooked it, was left untouched by Caesar’s conquering hordes. They had no reason to touch it. After all, it was Roman property. Any Jews fighting within its walls were systematically eliminated, the Roman buildings left completely unscathed. Eleazer, three years after the fall of Jerusalem, testified that Fort Antonia was still standing -- the only thing in the vicinity that
was.
Yeshua had correctly predicted that “not one stone [of the city of Jerusalem] would be left standing upon another.”
“As Yeshua was coming out of the Temple, one of his talmidim [disciples] said to him, ‘Look, Rabbi! What huge stones! What magnificent buildings!’ ‘You see all these great buildings?’ Yeshua said to him, ‘They will be totally destroyed - not a single stone will be left standing!’” (Mk 13.1,2).
“And as he went away from the Temple, one of his talmidim [disciples, students] said to him, ‘Rabbi, see what great buildings are here!’ Yeshua replied to him, ‘You see these great buildings? There shall not be left one stone upon another, that shall not be thrown down” (Mt 24.1,2 cf Lk 21.5,6).
“When Yeshua drew closer to a point where he could clearly see the city, he wept over it, saying, ‘If you only knew today what is needed for shalom! But for now it is hidden from your sight. For the days are coming upon you when your enemies will set up a barricade around you, encircle you, hem you in on every side, and dash you to the ground, you and your children within your walls, leaving not one stone standing on another - all because you did not recognise your opportunity when God offered it!’” (Lk 19.41-44).
It is clear from the biblical narrative that Yeshua and his disciples were outside the Temple walls -- the outer walls that enclosed the Holiest Place on
earth! It is equally clear that the Messiah believed the entire city, outer walls and all, was to be utterly demolished. Yeshua, Josephus, Titus Caesar and the Zealot Eleazer ALL testified that the entire City and Temple environs (including walls) were to be totally dismantled if not completely and thoroughly destroyed. Certainly, Josephus made the issue abundantly clear to his Roman readership.
“Now the Romans set fire to the extreme parts of the city [the suburbs] and burnt them down, and entirely demolished its [Jerusalem’s] walls” (War VI.9.4).
Again, “When he [Titus] entirely demolished the rest of the city and overthrew its walls, he left these towers [three towers which were also later destroyed] as a monument of his good fortune which had proved [the destructive power of] his auxiliaries, and enabled him to take what could not
otherwise have been taken by him” (War VI,9,1).
Present scholarly opinion notwithstanding the Haram esh-Sharif is not, and never was, the Temple Mount!
The four walls which today make up the Haram esh-Sharif (which means the Noble Enclosure) contain 10,000 + Herodian stones and in some places in the eastern wall the stones are clearly pre-Herodian. But the Haram esh-Sharif was never a part of Jewish Jerusalem. The “Wailing Wall” never was a remnant of the Temple! Rather, the wailing wall, which contains about 450 Herodian stones, remains part and parcel of the ancient pagan idolatrous centre for the heathen legions of the hated Imperial Roman occupation forces.
According to The Temples That Jerusalem Forgot, by historian Dr Ernest L. Martin, quoting the work of Meir Ben-Dov, Mordechai Naor, and Zeev Aner “there are eight more courses of Herodian stones underneath the soil down to the ground level that existed in the time of Herod and Jesus. Even below that former ground level, there are a further nine courses of foundation stones. If that whole section of the Wailing Wall could be exposed, one could no doubt count around 1250 Herodian stones (probably more) of various sizes. Most stones are about three to four feet high and three feet to twelve feet long, but there are varying lengths up to 40 feet (with the larger stones weighing about 70 tons). One stone has been found in the Western Wall that has the prodigious weight of 400 tons...All of these [10,000+] stones in those four walls survived the Roman/Jewish war of AD 70-73.”
Sixty years after the total destruction of Jerusalem in 70 C.E. by the Imperial forces of the Pax Romana, Simon bar Kosiba (bar Kochba) and Rabbi
Akiva led a successful revolt against the pagan garrison of the Tenth Legion Fretensis stationed at what was once Jerusalem. For three years this “official Messiah” held the city against overwhelming military might. Finally, as history tells us, the revolution was utterly crushed, and “the bloody suppression of that rising [revolution] and the annihilation of political nationality put an end both to the apocalyptic faith and to the militancy of the Jews” (Norman Cohn, The Pursuit of the Millennium, 1957, 6) at least until the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia in the early twentieth century. In its place, and using the massive toppled Herodian stones of the once proud Jewish capitol, was established a new centre of Roman heathen idolatry -- the new city Aelia Capitolina. A temple to Zeus was erected on the site of the Temple Mount. Jews were barred from entering the region for centuries.
Today, one is staggered that on what was once denuded sand dunes, major cities rise. Where there was virulent mosquito-ridden swamp, farms and communes thrive. Where there was desert, flowers bloom. As predicted by the prophets of Israel and Judah, and Our Lord Yeshua himself, the Jews are back!
Intriguingly, as Jews continue to wail at the western wall of the ancient heathen military centre, praying and bowing to an idolatrous fortress wall that epitomised brutal Roman Imperialism and rank paganism, they inadvertently face directly toward the Mount of Olives where their rejected Messiah YESHU was crucified on a tree in an orchard so long ago for the sins, not just of Israel, but the whole world.
Perhaps there is an irony here that yet touches our hearts.
The Jewish people and nation of Israel do not have long to wait before they begin wholesale to question seriously the role their Lord Yeshua played in Jewish history.
At that time, just around the corner, the Jewish people will re-evaluate Jerusalem’s stones in order to truly appreciate them.
“The set time has come, for Your servants hold dear her stones” (Ps 102.14).
Then, “[Yah] shall arise and have mercy upon Zion, for the time to favour her, yes, the set time is come” (Ps 102.13).
Recommended Reading:
Ernest L. Martin, The Temples That Jerusalem Forgot, 2000 (ASK Publications)
John A.T. Robinson, Redating the New Testament, 1976, (SCM Press)
Messianic emotionalism became [highly] intense shortly before 70 CE,” the authoritative Standard Jewish Encyclopaedia tells us, “[with] the New Testament vividly reflecting the messianic ferment at this time” (Columns 1308, 1309). Luke informs us that according to Ya’akov (James), the brother of Our Lord Yeshua, there were “tens of thousands of [Jewish] believers [in Jerusalem] among the Judeans, and they [were] all zealots for the Torah” (Acts 21.20).
Messianic (Christian) Zealot activity in Jerusalem, which spearheaded the disastrous revolt against Rome, is the basic subject backdrop in both Kefa
(Peter) and Y’Hudah (Jude’s) epistles and in the War Scroll of the Yeshua Party (the scroll of Revelation). The despised and hated Romans conquered the Zealots and, according to the Jewish historian Josephus, the city of Jerusalem was not just completely obliterated but together with its walls “was so thoroughly laid even with the ground by those that dug it up to the foundation, that there was left nothing to make those that came thither believe [Jerusalem] had ever been inhabited” (War VII.I.I).
Titus prevented any further Messianic revolt by removing completely all traces that Jerusalem, perhaps the finest exponent of Greek culture in the ancient world, and concerning which city Titus had recognised was “richer than Rome itself” (War VII.I.2), had ever existed. So thorough was this
desolation that even the very foundations of the city with its walls were literally dug up. Jerusalem was ploughed over. Josephus tells us, “They had cut down all the trees that were in the country that adjoined to the city and that for [nearly ten miles] round about... the very view itself was a melan-choly thing. Those places that were before adorned with trees and pleasant gardens were now become a desolate country in every way, and its trees were all cut down. Nor could any foreigner that had formerly seen Judaea and the most beautiful suburbs of the city, and now saw it as a desert, but lament and mourn sadly at so great a change. For the war had laid all signs of beauty quite waste. Nor, if any one that had known the place before, and had come on a sudden to it now, would he have known it again. But though he were at the city itself, yet would he have enquired for it notwith-standing” (War VI.I.I).
Indeed, for six long months after the collapse of Jerusalem the Tenth Legion used Jewish slaves to “dig up” the ruins of houses, walls and the rubble of buildings looking for hidden caches of buried gold. “[Titus] could not but pity the destruction of the city...Yet there was no small quantity of the riches that had been in that city still found among the ruins, a great deal of which the Romans dug up: but the greatest part was discovered by those who were captives [the few survivors of the siege] and so they [the Romans] carried it away; I mean the gold and the silver, and the rest of that most precious furniture which the Jews had, and which the owners had treasured up under ground against the uncertainties of war.”
There was NOTHING left of the entirety of the city of Jerusalem, NOTHING left of the holy Temple, NOTHING left of the huge and formidable city walls, NOTHING left of the beautiful outlying sprawling suburbs. But one thing was left untouched by the Romans -- the adjoining Roman fortress Antonia (the present Haram esh-Sharif, located immediately north of the Temple and which adjoined it via double colonnades 600 feet long). Listen to what Eleazer, the final Zealot commander of the doomed Fortress Masada stated three years after the complete obliteration of the Holy City:
“And where is now that great city [Jerusalem], the metropolis of the Jewish nation, which was fortified by so many walls round about, which had so many fortresses and large towers to defend it, which could hardly contain the instruments prepared for the war, and which had so many ten thousands of men to fight for it? Where is this city that was believed to have God himself inhabiting therein? It is now demolished to the very foundations; and hath nothing left but that monument of it preserved, I mean the camp of those that have destroyed it, which still dwells upon its ruins; some unfortun-ate old men also lie upon the ashes of the Temple, and a few women are there preserved alive by the enemy, for our bitter shame and reproach...I cannot but wish that we had all died before we had seen that holy city demolished by the hands of our enemies, or the foundations of our holy Temple dug up after so profane a manner” (Eleazer, quoted in Yigael Yadin, Masada, Herod’s Fortress and the Zealot’s Last Stand, 1966, 235).
The Roman military camp which properly adjoined Jerusalem, and indeed overlooked it, was left untouched by Caesar’s conquering hordes. They had no reason to touch it. After all, it was Roman property. Any Jews fighting within its walls were systematically eliminated, the Roman buildings left completely unscathed. Eleazer, three years after the fall of Jerusalem, testified that Fort Antonia was still standing -- the only thing in the vicinity that
was.
Yeshua had correctly predicted that “not one stone [of the city of Jerusalem] would be left standing upon another.”
“As Yeshua was coming out of the Temple, one of his talmidim [disciples] said to him, ‘Look, Rabbi! What huge stones! What magnificent buildings!’ ‘You see all these great buildings?’ Yeshua said to him, ‘They will be totally destroyed - not a single stone will be left standing!’” (Mk 13.1,2).
“And as he went away from the Temple, one of his talmidim [disciples, students] said to him, ‘Rabbi, see what great buildings are here!’ Yeshua replied to him, ‘You see these great buildings? There shall not be left one stone upon another, that shall not be thrown down” (Mt 24.1,2 cf Lk 21.5,6).
“When Yeshua drew closer to a point where he could clearly see the city, he wept over it, saying, ‘If you only knew today what is needed for shalom! But for now it is hidden from your sight. For the days are coming upon you when your enemies will set up a barricade around you, encircle you, hem you in on every side, and dash you to the ground, you and your children within your walls, leaving not one stone standing on another - all because you did not recognise your opportunity when God offered it!’” (Lk 19.41-44).
It is clear from the biblical narrative that Yeshua and his disciples were outside the Temple walls -- the outer walls that enclosed the Holiest Place on
earth! It is equally clear that the Messiah believed the entire city, outer walls and all, was to be utterly demolished. Yeshua, Josephus, Titus Caesar and the Zealot Eleazer ALL testified that the entire City and Temple environs (including walls) were to be totally dismantled if not completely and thoroughly destroyed. Certainly, Josephus made the issue abundantly clear to his Roman readership.
“Now the Romans set fire to the extreme parts of the city [the suburbs] and burnt them down, and entirely demolished its [Jerusalem’s] walls” (War VI.9.4).
Again, “When he [Titus] entirely demolished the rest of the city and overthrew its walls, he left these towers [three towers which were also later destroyed] as a monument of his good fortune which had proved [the destructive power of] his auxiliaries, and enabled him to take what could not
otherwise have been taken by him” (War VI,9,1).
Present scholarly opinion notwithstanding the Haram esh-Sharif is not, and never was, the Temple Mount!
The four walls which today make up the Haram esh-Sharif (which means the Noble Enclosure) contain 10,000 + Herodian stones and in some places in the eastern wall the stones are clearly pre-Herodian. But the Haram esh-Sharif was never a part of Jewish Jerusalem. The “Wailing Wall” never was a remnant of the Temple! Rather, the wailing wall, which contains about 450 Herodian stones, remains part and parcel of the ancient pagan idolatrous centre for the heathen legions of the hated Imperial Roman occupation forces.
According to The Temples That Jerusalem Forgot, by historian Dr Ernest L. Martin, quoting the work of Meir Ben-Dov, Mordechai Naor, and Zeev Aner “there are eight more courses of Herodian stones underneath the soil down to the ground level that existed in the time of Herod and Jesus. Even below that former ground level, there are a further nine courses of foundation stones. If that whole section of the Wailing Wall could be exposed, one could no doubt count around 1250 Herodian stones (probably more) of various sizes. Most stones are about three to four feet high and three feet to twelve feet long, but there are varying lengths up to 40 feet (with the larger stones weighing about 70 tons). One stone has been found in the Western Wall that has the prodigious weight of 400 tons...All of these [10,000+] stones in those four walls survived the Roman/Jewish war of AD 70-73.”
Sixty years after the total destruction of Jerusalem in 70 C.E. by the Imperial forces of the Pax Romana, Simon bar Kosiba (bar Kochba) and Rabbi
Akiva led a successful revolt against the pagan garrison of the Tenth Legion Fretensis stationed at what was once Jerusalem. For three years this “official Messiah” held the city against overwhelming military might. Finally, as history tells us, the revolution was utterly crushed, and “the bloody suppression of that rising [revolution] and the annihilation of political nationality put an end both to the apocalyptic faith and to the militancy of the Jews” (Norman Cohn, The Pursuit of the Millennium, 1957, 6) at least until the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia in the early twentieth century. In its place, and using the massive toppled Herodian stones of the once proud Jewish capitol, was established a new centre of Roman heathen idolatry -- the new city Aelia Capitolina. A temple to Zeus was erected on the site of the Temple Mount. Jews were barred from entering the region for centuries.
Today, one is staggered that on what was once denuded sand dunes, major cities rise. Where there was virulent mosquito-ridden swamp, farms and communes thrive. Where there was desert, flowers bloom. As predicted by the prophets of Israel and Judah, and Our Lord Yeshua himself, the Jews are back!
Intriguingly, as Jews continue to wail at the western wall of the ancient heathen military centre, praying and bowing to an idolatrous fortress wall that epitomised brutal Roman Imperialism and rank paganism, they inadvertently face directly toward the Mount of Olives where their rejected Messiah YESHU was crucified on a tree in an orchard so long ago for the sins, not just of Israel, but the whole world.
Perhaps there is an irony here that yet touches our hearts.
The Jewish people and nation of Israel do not have long to wait before they begin wholesale to question seriously the role their Lord Yeshua played in Jewish history.
At that time, just around the corner, the Jewish people will re-evaluate Jerusalem’s stones in order to truly appreciate them.
“The set time has come, for Your servants hold dear her stones” (Ps 102.14).
Then, “[Yah] shall arise and have mercy upon Zion, for the time to favour her, yes, the set time is come” (Ps 102.13).
Recommended Reading:
Ernest L. Martin, The Temples That Jerusalem Forgot, 2000 (ASK Publications)
John A.T. Robinson, Redating the New Testament, 1976, (SCM Press)
