Chapter 19 Where can I find the fifth part of glory? -2

excavate holy places The first question I set out to answer is the one I wrote in my notebook on Saturday, October 6: Have archaeologists ever excavated at Mount Nebo to substantiate the Jewish belief that it was the final resting place of the Ark of the Covenant? the legend of? I'll start with those excavations I had wanted to visit on the morning of October 8th.Although I can't go to the excavation site now, I can interview some of the archaeologists who participated in the excavation and study their findings. I was told that the official excavations began in February 1968, about eight months after Israeli paratroopers took control of Jerusalem in the Six-Day War.Although all of the excavations were outside the sanctuary area, the excavations have been a point of contention from the outset.The site director of the excavation, Mel Bendorf, said the initial objections came from members of the Muslim High Council, who believed the excavation was a conspiracy against Muslim interests.They complained: "This excavation is not actually a scientific expedition. The Zionist purpose of the excavators is obviously to destroy the south wall of the Temple Mount, which is also the south wall of the Al-Aqsa Mosque. Therefore they There was also an attempt to vandalize the mosque."

To Ben-Dorff's surprise, the Christians were initially equally opposed to the excavations.He said: "They believe that the purpose of the excavations is to lay the foundation stone of the Third Temple, and that all the archaeological expeditions are just a cover for a disgusting conspiracy. I can only say that if I hadn't heard these rumors with my own ears, They certainly come across as the product of a wild imagination. But, joking or not, I have been asked to my face more than once: Are you planning to rebuild the temple? And these are historians and archaeologists, Intellect and talent are exceptional."

The most vehement opposition to the excavation was that of the Jewish authorities.The government worked hard to get their consent before deciding to excavate. In 1967, when Professor Mazar of the Institute of Archeology at the Hebrew University negotiated with the chief rabbis of Shefadi Church and Ashkenazi Church, the two chief rabbis immediately rejected the proposal: Rabbi Nihim of the Shefadi Church disagreed with our plan on the grounds that the area we proposed to excavate is a holy site.I asked him to explain further, and he said that our excavations may prove that the Wailing Wall is not actually the Western Wall of the Temple Mount.He also asked, since the excavation work has nothing to do with scientific investigation, what is the point of such an excavation?

Utman, the chief rabbi of the Ashkenazi Church, worried that the excavation would involve some difficult problems of Jewish law.While thinking, he said, "If you found the Ark of the Covenant during this archaeological excavation, what would be the result? Jewish legends say that the Ark of the Covenant was buried deep under the earth." Professor Mazar had no idea Unknowingly replied: "That's a miracle!" However, the respected rabbi told the profound professor that it was exactly this that he was worried about.This is because, from the perspective of Jewish law, the children of Israel are "unclean" and are therefore forbidden to touch the ark.Therefore, before the savior came to the world, the idea of ​​excavating the Temple Mount was unimaginable.

The great rabbi's views on the ark of the covenant were entirely orthodox.Since the destruction of the Second Temple, Judaism has indeed considered all Jews unclean, and it is said that only the coming of the true Messiah can end this situation (see Encyclopedia of Judaism, edited by G. Wigold, pp. 695, 481- 483 pages).Such dogmas, therefore, present obstacles to the work of archaeologists. Nevertheless, they worked hard to get the approval of the rabbis, and also won the approval of two other monotheisms (referring to Christianity and Islam-Translator's Note), which all come from the belief in Yahweh in the Old Testament.

Excavation work began.Not only that, although the excavation site was located outside the Temple Mount, some artifacts were unearthed, which belonged to the period of the First Temple.Predictably, however, no sign of the Ark was found.A large number of unearthed artifacts belong to the end of the Second Temple period, the Muslim period and the Crusader period. So I can already say that the excavations of Professor Meir Bendorf certainly did not confirm the Jewish claims about the burial of the Ark of the Covenant.However, his excavations did not conclusively disprove those legends.There seems to be only one way to confirm them, and that is to carry out excavations inside the Temple Mount.

As the reader will recall, my feeling was that the Knights Templar had excavated the interior of the Temple Mount centuries before the science of archeology was born, and they hadn't been able to find the Ark of the Covenant.Still, I need to clarify one thing: Has anyone excavated the interior of the Temple Mount in modern times?If so, what did they find?I posed these questions to Dr. Gabi Bakay, an expert on the First Temple period at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He told me bluntly: "Since the birth of modern archaeology, no one has attempted to excavate the interior of the Temple Mount."

"Why?" I asked. Please pay attention to more updated free e-books Please pay attention to more updated free e-books "Because it's the Holy of Holies. The Muslim authorities forbid all forms of scientific investigation there. They consider it the worst form of reading God. So the Temple Mount has always been a mystery to archaeologists. knowledge, mostly theoretical and explanatory. In archeology we only have those discoveries of Charles Warren and of course those of Parker. If I recall correctly, Parker did make an observation of the Temple in 1910 There were excavations inside the mountain. He wasn't an archaeologist, though. He was crazy. He was looking for the Ark of the Covenant."

I can't decide whether Dr. Bakay said Parker was "crazy" because Parker was looking for the Ark, or because Parker was crazy, or if Parker was clearly insane before digging inside the Rotunda symptom.However, it seemed like a good reminder to stop telling the professor that I was also looking for the Ark.I just asked the archaeologist where to find information about Parker and about Charles Warren, another name he mentioned. In the days since, I have been researching the archives and learned that Warren was a young aide-de-camp to the Royal Academy of Engineering in Britain, and that in 1867 he had been commissioned by the London-based "Palestine Development Fund" to excavate the Temple. However, he excavated in almost the same area, beyond the southern edge of the Temple Quarter, which was more thoroughly excavated a century later by Meir Bendorf and his colleagues.

The difference between the two excavations is that Varun, while also very aggressively seeking permission to excavate inside the Temple Mount, was rebuffed by the Ottoman Turkish authorities who controlled Jerusalem at the time.Not only that, once, Varun dug a tunnel extending northward, and was preparing to dig under the outer wall of the Temple Mount, but the noise of the sledgehammers and other tools used by the laborers alarmed the Egyptians above their heads. Prayers at Al-Aqsa Mosque.As a result, Varun and his men were attacked by a hail of stones from prayers, causing riots, and Izet Pasha, governor of Jerusalem, immediately ordered their excavations to be suspended indefinitely.

Despite the difficulties, Varun is still not discouraged.He managed to convince the Turks, and the excavations resumed.Later, he made several surreptitious attempts to tunnel under the Temple Mount.He plans to draw a map of the locations of all ancient ruins he might come across.But he was unable to realize this ambition, and only dug the foundations of the outer walls of the temple district.He certainly didn't find the Ark—though there's no evidence that he ever intended to find it, either.His main interest was in the Second Temple period, and in this context he made many archaeological discoveries of lasting scholarly value. However, the situation with Montague Brownslow Parker was different.Parker was the son of the Earl of Murray (John Murray, 18381923, British politician and writer-translator's note). He went to Jerusalem in 1909 and publicly said that he was looking for the Ark of the Covenant.He has not made any academic contributions. The noted archaeologist Kathleen Kenyon later described Parker's expedition as "remarkable by any standards."The idea for that expedition came from a Finnish mystic named Walter H. Juvelius. In 1906, Juvimis submitted a thesis to the University of Sweden offering insights into the destruction of Solomon's Temple by the Babylonians.He said he had credible information about the location where the "gold-filled ark" was hidden, and that it was within the Temple Quarter.He also said that his careful study of relevant passages in the Bible confirmed the existence of a secret tunnel leading from a certain part of the city of Jerusalem to the interior of the Temple Mount.After studying Charles Warren's excavation report, he was convinced that the secret passage was just south of the El-Aqsa Mosque, in the area where Warren had already excavated. Juvelius believes that the value of the ark, if found, is roughly equal to $200 million.So, using the $200 million as bait, he sought investors to fund an excavation expedition, the purpose of which was to locate the secret passage and clear it so that the Ark of the Covenant could be retrieved. His fund-raising campaigns were initially unsuccessful until he met Montague Brownslow Parker in London.Parker, then 30, was supportive of Juvelius' cause.Parker enlisted the support of nobles in England and abroad, and soon raised a very useful sum of $125,000.So excavations began, and by August 1909 they had established the headquarters of the excavation expedition at the Mount of Olives.Below the Mount of Olives is the Temple Mount. They started excavating directly from the place where Warren had worked so hard to excavate.Not only that, Parker and Juvelius were reluctant even though they knew that the famous pioneer had not made any significant discoveries.Instead, they continued their work with optimism, as they hired an Irish psychic remote viewer to help them find the so-called "secret tunnel". As the days passed, their excavations were predictably met with protests from devout members of all religious denominations.When winter came, the weather became very harsh, and the excavation site was full of mud and water.Parker is understandably discouraged.He ordered a temporary stoppage and did not resume excavation until the summer of 1910.In the following months, they worked desperately, but the secret tunnel still refused to show up.At the same time, voices from all walks of life opposed to the entire excavation plan became louder and louder. By the spring of 19if, Baron Edmond de Rothschild himself was out in opposition to the excavation, which threatened to jeopardize Judaism's holiest site.The baron was a Zionist, a member of the famous Rothschild international banking family.In order to end the excavation, Baron Rothschild directly threatened Parker by buying the land adjacent to the excavation site. The young nobleman Parker was disturbed by this situation.Therefore, in April 1911, he abandoned his plan to search for the secret passage and began to use more reckless means to achieve his goal. At that time, Jerusalem was still in the hands of the Ottoman Turks, and the Governor Amousse.Bei Pasha was also not known for being discreet and faithful.With a bribe of $25,000, Parker got the pasha to approve his operation.He paid another small bribe for Sheik Khalili, the hereditary Warden of the Round Temple.Khalili agreed to take Parker and his party into the holy place and turned a blind eye to their activities there. For obvious reasons, Parker and his party worked late at night.The treasure hunters, disguised as Arabs, spent a week digging near the Al-Aqsa Mosque, south of the Temple Mount.Both Parker and the Irish remote viewer believed that the Ark of the Covenant was buried there.However, this effort came to nothing.So, just before dawn in the middle of the night on April 18, 1911, Parker turned his attention to the Dome of the Rock, to the legendary deep cave under the "Foundation Stone of the World". At the time, the steps leading to the Well of Souls hadn't been built there yet, so Parker and his men had to hoist themselves and their equipment down the hole with ropes.One end of the rope is firmly tied to the "foundation of the world".They entered the cave, lit the lanterns, and began to walk along the floor of the cave, hoping to reach the final resting place of the Ark of the Covenant. Before they could figure out if there were any other caves below, disaster struck.Although they bought Sheik Khalili, the hereditary guard, another assistant guard of the mosque unexpectedly appeared.It is said that he decided to spend the night at the Temple Mount because his house was full of guests that day.He heard the sound of excavation coming from the ground of the Circular Temple of the Rock, and hurried into the temple, peeping under the "Well of Souls", he was horrified to find several foreigners with wide-eyed eyes, digging the sacred ground with pickaxes and shovels. Both sides reacted immediately and violently.The terrified assistant guard of the mosque let out a piercing roar, then ran, disappearing into the darkness, to gather the worshipers.The British also wisely realized that the gamble was over, and retreated hastily.Without even returning to their own camp, they left Jerusalem immediately and ran to the port of Jaffa, where fortunately a motorboat they rented was moored.No sooner had they fled than a hysterical crowd arrived on the Temple Mount.Parker and his party escaped the crowd, and the fate of the unfortunate Sheik Khalili was unspeakable. In the early hours of that morning a great riot broke out in Jerusalem, and Amousse Bey Pasha, suspected of being an accomplice of foreigners (which did not wrong him), was denounced and reviled.He responded by ordering the immediate blockade of the Temple Mount and signing several orders to arrest those foreign treasure hunters as soon as they arrived in Jaffa.He took this step, no doubt to appease his own guilty conscience.However, rumors spread immediately that Parker had found and abducted the Ark of the Covenant.As a result, the leaders of Muslims and Jews protested loudly, demanding that the holy relic should never be taken out of the country. Emergency telegrams were received by the Jaffa police station and customs authorities, who arrested the British who had fled here, seized all their belongings, and conducted an extremely thorough search.However, they found nothing.This result put them in a dilemma.So they confiscated the British's luggage, but agreed to let the British go back to their boats to create a healthy atmosphere in which to continue their interrogation.As soon as Parker and his comrades were safely aboard, however, he ordered the sailors to set sail. A few weeks later, Parker returned to England.He failed to find the Ark, but spent the $125,000 that Anglo-American investors handed him.Kathryn Kenyon concluded many years later that neither the incident nor the excavation helped to enhance the reputation of British archaeology. However, British archaeologists were not involved in the next excavations to find the Ark, which began in the 1920s and focused on Mount Nebo. "The Maccabees" says that before Solomon's temple was destroyed, the prophet Jeremiah hid the ark of the covenant on Mount Nebo. The chief initiator of this excavation was an eccentric American explorer who liked to wear arabesques and, though a man, had the strange name of Antonia Friedrich Volter.He thoroughly surveyed Mount Nebo (and nearby Mount Piga) and, with truly awe-inspiring ingenuity, announced that he had discovered a secret passage.The passage was closed by what looked like a wall, and Volter had no intention of knocking it down.However, when he inspected the wall with a flashlight, he found an ancient inscription, which he copied verbatim, and took it back to Jerusalem.He found a "scholar" at the Hebrew University who helped him decipher the hieroglyph.The inscription is: Here lies the golden ark of the covenant Regrettably, Volter was unwilling to disclose the name of the scholar who provided the translation; and in the ensuing sensation, no one came forward to accept this honor.Later, Volter could not produce the original copy of the inscription he copied down.After that, he never returned to Mount Nebo to take the Ark out of the secret passage. Half a century later, a new victor emerged to pick up the baton that Volter had dropped.That winner was also an American explorer named Tom Closter, whose previous "discoveries" included the Tower of Babel, Noah's Ark, and Adam's City. In 1981, this gentleman, relying on very tortuous means, obtained some papers left by Volter, which apparently included a brief sketch of the blocked secret passage on Mount Nebo, where the Ark of the Covenant is said to be. Buried in that mountain. Mount Nebo was in modern Jordan, so Kloster flew to Jordan.He was accompanied by enthusiastic colleagues from an organization called the International Institute of Restorative History, headquartered in Winfield, Kansas, USA.Their mission, of course, was to rescue the Ark of the Covenant.To do this, they camped for four days on Mount Nebo—much to the dismay of the Franciscans at the Terra Santa church on the mountain.They guard the Byzantine church that is said to have been built on the site where Moses was buried.Over the past few decades, these monks have conducted careful and professional archaeological excavations of the Mount Nebo area. Needless to say, the Franciscans never found the Ark.The same goes for Kloster—at least not around Mount Nebo.However, after Kloster's excavations at Mount Nebo were completed, he and his expedition moved to nearby Mount Pisgah (which Voltel had also visited in the past).They discovered a ditch in the mountain and believed that following it would lead to the "secret passage" drawn in Voltaire's sketch. The ditch was partly blocked by a stone slab, which made them even more excited. On the night of October 31, 1981, they removed this weak obstacle, and they found a passage in front of them.They descended about 600 feet underground along the passage (which, according to them, was about 4 feet wide and about 7 feet high).There they saw a wall that was exactly like the one Voltel had described.Without hesitation, they knocked down the wall. Behind the wall was a rock-hewn cavern, about seven feet square, in which, according to Kloster, was a rectangular gold-covered chest measuring 62 inches long, 37 inches wide, and 37 inches high.It is said that there are two poles next to the box, which are exactly the same as the poles for carrying the ark of the covenant mentioned in the Bible.There is also a cloth bag on one side of the box, and Kloster guesses that inside it is a statue of a winged angel, which was previously placed on the mercy seat (that is, the rejection cover). These Americans concluded that they had found the sacred Ark of the Covenant.They didn't move it, touch it, or open it.They took color pictures of it with a camera with a flash.They then left Jordan, returned to the United States, and immediately notified UPI of the discovery.As a result, the international newspaper syndicate published a story that its responsible reporter said was "more dramatic than anything I've covered in my life." So, has the Ark really been found?The photographs taken in that stone cave are obviously the key pieces of evidence.If qualified archaeologists had had the opportunity to study the photographs, they would have confirmed the claims of the Americans to be true.It's hard to understand, then, that Kloster has been refusing to show those photos to anyone.He said that according to God's command, these photos can only be seen by London banker David Rothschild, because this person is a direct descendant of Jesus Christ and was chosen by God to build the third temple. The Ark of the Covenant will be taken from its hiding place and placed in the Third Temple. Rothschild, who was also part of the same international banking family that opposed Parker's excavation of the Temple Mount in 1910, icily refused to accept the photos.Those photos are still kept by Kloster at his home in Winfield, Kansas.He still refuses to let people see them, but only to select visitors. One visitor who was lucky enough to see those photographs in 1982 was the respected archaeologist Siegfried H. Horn.He is an expert on the Mount Nebo area and has authored more than a dozen scholarly books.He spent some time examining the photographs Kloster had taken.Sadly, those photos were developed in terrible quality: Except for two of them, there is nothing on them.Of the two images, one is blurry, but it does show a stone chamber and a yellow box in its center.The other image was fairly clear, showing the front of the box. (Journal of Biblical Archeology, May-June 1983, p. 68) As soon as Herth left the Klosters' house, he made a sketch of the box (he was very skilled in drawing) from the reverse film he had just seen.Some of the metal parts on the outside of the case, he thought, were brass rather than gold; moreover, the diamonds on the case seemed to have been machined.However, by far the most criticized feature is that the nails on the case have modern-style heads that protrude from the upper right corner of the front of the case.Horn concluded: I don't know what that thing is, but the pictures convince me that it's not an ancient artifact, but a modern artifact with machined decorative stripes and a thin metal core inside. from fiction to reality After studying the archaeological records of Jerusalem, I have been unable to find any other information indicating that other people conducted excavation expeditions to verify the Jewish legends about the final resting place of the Ark of the Covenant. Scholars I interviewed agreed that the data on this subject were indeed very limited: Charles Warren, and later Mer Ben-Dorff and his expeditions, had excavated the Temple District (although their purpose not looking for the Ark of the Covenant); Montague Brownslow Parker (who Dr. Gaby Bakay says is not an archaeologist but a "crazy man") has excavated the interior of the Temple Mount but found nothing; Antonia Frederick Volter believed that the Ark of the Covenant was hidden in Mount Nebo, and indeed found a secret passage in Mount Nebo, but did not continue to investigate it; finally, Tom Closter claimed to have found the real covenant in a passage. Cabinet—however, that passage was moved from Mount Nebo to Mount Piga less than 50 years after Volter's discovery. That's all there is to it.These are, as it is often said, boiling points that have caused sensation after sensation.There is only one exception, and that is my own investigation activities.what am i doingOf course, I was after the Ark of the Covenant.I must admit that the fact that the men who had preceded me in this venture were either messianic dreamers or rash-minded eccentrics really disturbed me. I think I have a redeeming quality: I have no interest in the Third Temple, nor do I believe that the Ark of the Covenant was ever buried in the Rotunda, Mount Nebo, or Mount Piga.I know that it is practically impossible to prove that there are no further secrets in those places.But I am as satisfied now as ever to know that the lost ark was not in the places mentioned in the Jewish legends—it was neither taken by the Egyptians nor by the Babylonians; destroy. Therefore, the disappearance of the Ark of the Covenant is more and more like a puzzling mystery. As Richard Elliot Friedman, a professor of Hebrew and comparative religion at the University of California, said, it It is "one of the great mysteries in the Bible". All my work in 1989 and 1990 had strengthened my belief that the answer to this mystery must lie in Ethiopia.However, in the various stages of my investigation, a difficult problem that I have not faced is: the basis for the Ethiopian saying that they have the Ark of the Covenant is actually very weak, just like the "Apocrypha Book of Baruch" or " The same as The Maccabees. To be honest, I have begun to feel that the statement boldly emphasized in "The Glory of Kings" is not enough as historical evidence, so it does not make me decide to go to the holy city of Axum-I will risk my life for that trip Danger. "The Glory of Kings" has always stated that the Queen of Sheba was an Ethiopian, and she had a son with King Solomon, and later this son abducted the Ark of the Covenant from Jerusalem.But these claims look more like outlandish fiction than plain fact. To be precise, I've found a lot of evidence in Ethiopia, a lot of convincing evidence, and they all really support the idea that the Ark of the Covenant might really be in that chapel in Axum.Now, I am quite sure of this: nowhere else is Axum more convincing as the final resting place of the Ark of the Covenant.The reason why I came to this conclusion is not because I believe more in the "King's Glory" account of the passage of the Ark to Ethiopia, but because several other accounts are less tenable in comparison. So, before I finally resolved to go to Axum, I felt compelled to find an explanation more convincingly than the Glory of the Kings, which could explain the "covenant which the Bible regards as the most important sacred object in the whole world." How the Cabinet" found its final resting place in the heart of Africa. When I left Jerusalem in mid-October 1990, I had found such an explanation.I will elaborate on this explanation in the next chapter of this book.