Wellspring of Holiness Jerusalem: The Making of a Holy City


Wellspring of Holiness

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Jerusalem is the shrine of three faiths,

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Judaism, Christianity

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and Islam.

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It's a place of exquisite beauty, but also of ugly vulgarity.

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For some, this is the centre of the world

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and the home of God himself, but for others,

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Jerusalem is the best argument against religion there's ever been.

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Jerusalem's holiness has made it the most fought over city in history.

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Over the centuries, Jews, Christians and Muslims have competed viciously

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to commandeer and appropriate the history and the holiness

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of this place and as the competition has intensified,

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so has the holiness.

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All three religions have shared origins in the Old Testament

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and all have laid claim to Jerusalem.

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For many, the history of the city is more a matter of faith, than fact.

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But I believe you can piece together Jerusalem's fractured history...

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and that's the story I'm going to tell.

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It's a story of empires won and lost, of power and identity.

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Above all, it's a story of man's search for holiness.

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So, how did this craggy, remote obscure little stronghold

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become the Holy City, the prime place on Earth for God to meet man?

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I'm a historian,

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but I've also got a personal connection with Jerusalem.

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I've been coming here with my family since I was a boy.

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I've always been captivated by the city's spiritual aura,

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but also by the mystery of its origins.

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In the Bronze Age, around 3200BC, people lived in these hills.

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They existed in small square houses, they herded sheep

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and they buried their dead in the caves that have been found around Jerusalem.

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Over the next thousand years, this land, known as Canaan,

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became part of a province ruled by the Pharaohs in Egypt.

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On the fertile plains of the Mediterranean coast,

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there were already several thriving cities.

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But inland, the hill country, was a backwater.

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Before Jerusalem expanded in modern times, east and west,

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the ancient city was founded on two mountains - Mount Moriah and Mount Zion.

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But it all really started down there on that dry little ridge...

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the Ophel.

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The Ophel Hill was where the Canaanite settlers first began to build.

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Their settlement was named Urusalem which some believe means "founded by Salem" -

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the pagan god of the evening star.

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This small, arid little hillside may seem a strange place to build a city.

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It's far from the trade routes, distant from the Mediterranean,

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but it did have two distinct advantages.

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First, its steep ravines make it almost impregnable.

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And, crucially...

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..it had a spring.

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It was this combination that attracted the first settlers to build on the Ophel Hill.

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The earliest known Canaanite structures

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are the foundations of two stone towers.

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They were only discovered in the 1990s by archaeologist Ronnie Reich.

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Ronnie, why did they need this fortification here?

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It's to protect the water,

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the spring and the approach to the spring.

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And, since is the only spring in a very large radius here around,

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this was their lifeline - the spring itself.

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Do you think that the spring, in that period, with its high towers around it,

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also had the holy qualities that it later assumed?

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It is the only spring in the vicinity which points to

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the east, to the sun. If you come in the morning, the sun's rays hit the water.

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Today, it's full with tourists, but you can see it,

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and I can believe there was a sanctity attributed

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to the spring in early days already.

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So what we have here, amazingly, is the first link to holiness in the city.

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So, this is incredibly significant.

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Yes, I was happy to find it.

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So, long before the Christians, long before Islam,

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long even before the Israelites captured Jerusalem...

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this was already a holy place.

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But, for me, the history of Jerusalem really comes alive in 1350BC,

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when, for the first time, in the Amarna letters we hear the voice of a real, human Jerusalemite.

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Inscribed in delicate cuneiform characters,

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these letters were sent by the Canaanite king of Jerusalem, Abdi-Heba,

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to the Pharaoh in Egypt pleading for archers to help defend the city from attack.

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Alas, no more is heard of Abdi-Heba.

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We don't know if the Pharaoh came to his help or if he got his archers.

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And no more is heard of Jerusalem either for several centuries.

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All we know is that this small, provincial town not only survived the attack,

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but carried on growing,

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with several new buildings clinging to the slopes of the Ophel hill.

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If you're looking for a reason why this unremarkable Bronze Age settlement

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became the universal city, it's because of the story told

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by a book of unique and global prestige...

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..the Bible.

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The Bible has been studied and revered

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by millions of believers over thousands of years.

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It's made Jerusalem the most famous city in the world.

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I probably need a kippa.

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Ah, thank you.

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Many of the stories told in the Bible originated in the oral traditions of the Hebrew people.

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They were often only put down in writing hundreds of years

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after they were supposed to have happened.

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To some believers, the Bible is the fruit of divine revelation,

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fundamentally infallible in every detail, but for the historian,

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it's a troublesome, complex and subtle source.

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Some of it is undeniably factually correct,

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some of it is mythological,

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some of it is poetry of soaring beauty

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and much of it is absolutely mysterious to all of us.

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The Bible isn't only a mystical and sacred text.

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It also forms a chronicle of Jerusalem's history

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and a hymn to its holiness.

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It's not always reliable, but it can be useful

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when you can check it against other sources.

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The first reference to Jerusalem is in the book of Genesis

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which recounts how the patriarch Abraham visited what was then

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a Canaanite city, ruled by a Canaanite priest.

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It says "And King Melchizedek of Salem welcomed him with bread and wine.

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"And he was a priest of God most high."

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The Bible goes on to tell us that, centuries later,

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Moses led the Hebrews out of Egypt to take over the promised land... Canaan.

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The book of Joshua tells how they occupied Canaan

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in a series of battles and massacres.

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There isn't much archaeological evidence of a violent conquest -

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there are hardly any ruined cities, or mass grave.

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But there is evidence of pastoral settlers building new villages in this countryside.

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The Israelites brought with them a new religion.

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They believed in just one god, Yahweh.

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And the first of the ten commandments was to reject

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the pagan gods of old.

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The Israelites may have been united by their faith,

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but politically they were divided.

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There were 12 distinct tribes lined up in two warring factions -

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the northern tribes known as Israel and the southern tribes of Judah.

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Uniting these warring tribes would take a visionary

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and charismatic warrior king...

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..David.

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The Bible presents him as a flawed sinner,

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adulterer and man of blood,

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but also as a sacred hero and poet.

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Just as the American founding fathers chose Washington DC as their capital

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to bridge the gap between north and south,

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so David chose Jerusalem as his neutral new capital.

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This strategic decision transformed a remote hilltop fortress into a capital city.

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There is archaeological proof that David himself existed

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and the Bible describes his Jerusalem as the magnificent capital of a large kingdom.

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But after years of archaeological research,

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there's very little evidence of a city built by David.

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And what evidence there is, is hard to interpret.

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This heap of stones is the most contested archaeological site

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in the most excavated place on Earth.

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Some archaeologists believe that these stones

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are the walls of the palace of King David himself.

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Other archaeologists believe that this may not be King David's actual palace,

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but it dates from King David's reign.

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And yet another group of archaeologists disagree with them

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and believe that this doesn't even date from the 10th century and King David's reign at all.

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The most influential of this more sceptical group

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of archaeologists is Israel Finkelstein.

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He believes these buildings were already here when David arrived.

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When he came here to Jerusalem

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from the fringes of... the highlands of the Judah...

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he found an existing settlement, not a big one,

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a small one which spread over an area,

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possibly between five and ten acres,

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with a modest population also around maybe five, six, seven hundred people,

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not more than that. It was a typical Bronze Age city.

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There is no evidence for palaces and things like that.

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Had there been a big city with monuments, with walls,

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with fortifications,

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I think archaeologists would have been able to find that.

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Why is David so controversial?

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The controversy, in my opinion, is driven, taken over,

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by modern debate, over Jerusalem, over the future of Jerusalem,

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over the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians.

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I think that this is senseless and I do not see this as important.

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I don't think that the past can decide the future.

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With all due respect to the past as an archaeologist, I'm telling you,

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I don't think the past can really decide the future.

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Both sides justify their claims to Jerusalem with contradictory interpretations of the past.

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For Jews everywhere, it was David who made this their holy city

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when he summoned the ark of the covenant -

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the chest containing the ten commandments.

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The Bible says he planned a temple to house them

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just above the Ophel Hill, on the summit of Mount Moriah.

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Whether myth or reality,

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this account would help make this site the Israelites' holiest place.

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It's likely this commanding location was already a shrine for the cults of the Canaanites,

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so that when David decided to build his temple up here,

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he was appropriating a holiness that already existed.

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Building the temple was deemed too sacred a task

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for the flawed character of David, so after his death,

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God chose his son to build it.

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The Bible presents Solomon as a study in superlatives.

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He was the ideal of the oriental emperor.

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Everything he had was bigger and better than any other king.

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He was richer, wiser and more powerful.

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He had 12,000 cavalry, he had 16,000 chariots

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and as if that wasn't enough, he had 700 women in his harem.

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But, overshadowing all these accomplishments,

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was the temple he's believed to have built on Mount Moriah.

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Solomon's temple probably stood right there.

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It's now the Islamic Haram al-Sharif, the sanctuary,

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and the Dome of the Rock stands on the site,

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so it's impossible to excavate.

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Although no remains of the first temple have been uncovered,

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its position is known, and even after 3,000 years,

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for Jews, it remains the place where God resides.

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The famous western wall was part of a later Jewish temple built on

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the same site. Its rabbi is Shmuel Rabinowitz.

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Today, the closest place to Solomon's holy of holies

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where Jews can pray is as remote from the glories of his temple as you can imagine,

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hidden in a cramped, humid tunnel.

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90 metres eastwards and upwards from here was the holiest place in Judaism

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and it still is the holiest place in Judaism -

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the foundation stone of King Solomon's temple.

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For Solomon, this was the holy of holies...

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this was where God actually resided, the house of God.

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For Jews ever since, this has been the place where God can meet man.

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For all the Abrahamic religions, Judaism, Christianity and Islam,

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this is the essence, this is the source

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of Jerusalem's holiness, right here.

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I'm not a very religious Jew, but, to me,

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this is one of the holiest places on Earth.

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Solomon's temple was the first Jewish temple.

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Pilgrims came from all over his kingdom to pray to their God, Yahweh,

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and their donations soon made the temple very rich.

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Worship in Solomon's temple was a religion based on sacrifice

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outside the holy of holies at the altar up there,

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and conducted by a priestly caste.

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David and Solomon are steeped in mythology,

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but the evidence shows that, within decades, a Jewish temple

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did stand here in the capital of a Jewish kingdom.

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When Solomon died, after a reign of forty years, the kingdom split up.

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The ten northern tribes, unhappy at the exorbitant taxation,

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broke away to form the kingdom of Israel,

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and Jerusalem remained the capital of the southern kingdom of Judah.

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With the Jews divided, Jerusalem became vulnerable.

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In the 8th century BC, the voracious empire of Assyria

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was expanding from its base in modern day Iraq.

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When the Assyrians conquered the northern kingdom of Israel,

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the Jews of Jerusalem knew they were next.

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As the Assyrians approached Jerusalem,

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the King of Judah received a warning from his prophet Isaiah.

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He said only a messiah would be able to protect the city.

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Isaiah prophesied that an anointed king would appear and bring peace

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and this is what he wrote.

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"Out of Zion shall come forth the law,

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"and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem,

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"and he shall be a judge among the nations."

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He imagined a mystical New Jerusalem,

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that would exist in a perfect state of peace and harmony, an idealised heaven on Earth.

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And in this astonishing vision, he would ultimately help inspire

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a new world religion and transform Jerusalem into the universal city.

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He was the first, but not the last to see two Jerusalems...

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one heavenly, one earthly.

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700 years later,

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his prophecy would become central to the teaching of Jesus.

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But in the meantime, King Hezekiah had a more immediate concern.

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Hezekiah dared to rebel against Assyria and now its king,

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Sennacherib, was advancing with a huge army.

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They deported thousands of captives, blinded hundreds of victims,

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and burned and flayed their enemies alive.

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Like Jerusalem's earliest inhabitants,

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Hezekiah had two priorities - first, defences.

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Knowing the Assyrian appetite for brutal conquest,

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Hezekiah built his walls 20' wide.

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And second...protecting the city's vital and sacred spring.

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The spring on the Ophel Hill was still the city's only source of water.

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But now it lay outside the new city walls.

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To ensure safe access to it in case of a siege, he decided

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to hack a tunnel through 1,700 feet of solid rock.

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And here it is and it's taken us 35 minutes to walk along it

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and, I can tell you, you never lose the wonder of this place.

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And, as you walk through here, you can actually feel

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the chisel marks of the excavators 2,700 years ago.

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The tunnel was dug by two teams starting at opposite ends.

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It was only rediscovered in the 19th century

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when a pair of curious schoolboys went exploring.

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One of the little boys got frightened and ran back to school,

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but the other one felt his way along the tunnel

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until he could feel that the blades of the excavators

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had changed direction. And, at that place, he found an inscription.

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And it reads, "Each quarryman hewed towards his fellow quarryman,

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"axe by axe. And then, when the tunnel was dug, the water flowed."

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And, amazingly, almost 3,000 years later,

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here is the tunnel and here the water is still flowing.

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No sooner had Hezekiah completed his fortifications,

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then Sennacherib of Assyria descended on Jerusalem like a wolf on the fold.

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He surrounded the city with his armies. All seemed lost.

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Then, at the last minute he abandoned the assault...

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leaving the city unharmed.

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To the Jews of Jerusalem his decision was a divine miracle.

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The truth is we don't know why he spared them.

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But there is a clue in Sennacherib's own account.

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He says he had Jerusalem "like a bird in a cage" and that

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he returned home after receiving gold, probably from the temple.

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Was it divine providence or just a mighty big bribe?

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The emergence of the Jews' faith in one God, Yahweh,

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had been plagued by the persistence of older pagan beliefs.

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When Hezekiah died, his son Manasseh turned his back on Yahweh.

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He brought pagan idols into Solomon's temple.

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And just outside the city walls, he introduced a much darker ritual...

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child sacrifice.

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Here, in the Valley of Hinnom, Manasseh placed the roaster,

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an altar at which innocent children were burned

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and killed to appease the many gods of the Canaanites.

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Israelites were appalled by this and gradually Hinnom or its Hebrew name, Gehenna,

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came to be synonymous with the practices of Hell itself.

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This Biblical story has also helped form our very concept of religious evil,

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and our map of heaven and hell.

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Just as the Temple Mount, in all its beauty and sanctity,

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was heaven on Earth, so Hinnom, right here, was Jerusalem's own hell.

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When Manasseh died, the Jewish religion was revived.

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Idols were cast out of the temple,

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and the child murderers put to death.

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The new king, Josiah,

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hoped to restore the glories of David and Solomon,

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but when he was killed, Jerusalem's hopes were crushed

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and its religion faced annihilation.

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A new empire emerged from the ruins of Assyria - Babylon.

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It too used spectacular cruelty and mass deportations to enforce its dominion.

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The Babylonian empire now controlled the whole Middle East.

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The kingdom of Judah was a semi-independent state

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with Jerusalem as its capital.

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When the Judeans rebelled against the Babylonians,

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King Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon marched south

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and laid siege to the city.

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His men surrounded the walls. Inside, food started to run out.

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People starved.

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As the Jewish month of Ab began,

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it was clear they could hold out no longer.

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On 9th of Ab 586BC, Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon burst into the city.

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Nebuchadnezzar destroyed Jerusalem, he burnt it to the ground.

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He emptied its teeming streets.

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He demolished the temple and then he rounded up the Jewish elite

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and deported around 40,000 of them all the way to Babylon.

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Nebuchadnezzar's action created a theme that runs through the Jewish relationship with Jerusalem -

0:28:320:28:37

the idea of exile and the dream of return.

0:28:370:28:41

The book of Lamentations mourns the tragedy.

0:28:570:29:00

This tragedy became the template for the end of the world,

0:29:210:29:25

depicted in the Bible, for the Jews and also for the Christians.

0:29:250:29:29

Ever since, Jerusalem has been seen as the location of the final apocalypse.

0:29:310:29:36

The destruction of the temple must have seemed

0:29:410:29:45

like the death not just of a city, but of an entire people.

0:29:450:29:50

Surely the Jews would vanish from history,

0:29:500:29:53

like all the other peoples whose gods had failed them?

0:29:530:29:56

And yet that didn't happen. Somehow this experience transformed

0:29:560:30:00

the Jews themselves and it helped redouble the sanctity of Jerusalem too.

0:30:000:30:06

Exiled in Babylon, the Jews developed new religious practices

0:30:100:30:14

to preserve their identity.

0:30:140:30:16

They wore distinctive clothes, circumcised their sons,

0:30:160:30:19

observed the Sabbath and avoided certain foods.

0:30:190:30:22

It only lasted for 50 years, but the exile was a defining moment

0:30:270:30:32

in creating the Judaism we recognise today.

0:30:320:30:35

In 539BC Babylon was conquered by King Cyrus of Persia.

0:30:380:30:44

Cyrus let the Jews go back to Jerusalem

0:30:450:30:48

and even paid for them to rebuild their temple.

0:30:480:30:51

For the next 200 years,

0:30:560:30:58

the Jewish High Priests ruled Jerusalem as a theocracy

0:30:580:31:02

until the brilliant Macedonian king, Alexander the Great,

0:31:020:31:07

swept across the Near East bringing a new empire and a cultural revolution.

0:31:070:31:11

Alexander's empire didn't last long.

0:31:270:31:30

But his Greek culture became THE international culture,

0:31:300:31:34

just as the American is today.

0:31:340:31:37

In Jerusalem, even young priests started to exercise naked in the gym.

0:31:370:31:42

They even started to try to reverse their circumcisions.

0:31:420:31:46

They wanted to do everything the Greek way.

0:31:460:31:49

But this totally contradicted the ideals of Jewish purity.

0:31:510:31:55

After a century of benign Greek rule,

0:31:580:32:02

Jerusalem came under the control of king Antiochus Epiphanes -

0:32:020:32:06

god-manifest - who was as beautiful and crazy as he was ambitious.

0:32:060:32:12

When the Jews rebelled against him, Antiochus stormed Jerusalem.

0:32:140:32:19

He wasn't satisfied by just sacking the city,

0:32:210:32:25

he decided to wipe out the Jewish religion altogether.

0:32:250:32:27

He placed statues of Zeus and of himself in the temple and had them worshipped.

0:32:300:32:34

But, worse still, he sacrificed swine on the altar.

0:32:340:32:39

He forced the Jews to eat pork.

0:32:390:32:42

Mothers who circumcised their babies were thrown off the city walls with their infants.

0:32:420:32:47

Anyone caught reading Jewish holy books was burnt alive.

0:32:470:32:52

These deaths created the first cult of religious martyrdom.

0:32:520:32:57

When he demanded that the Jews worship him,

0:32:570:33:00

and not Yahweh, his sacrilege provoked a religious revolt.

0:33:000:33:05

In a small village outside Jerusalem, Antiochus's officers

0:33:070:33:11

tried to force an elderly Jewish priest named Mattathias

0:33:110:33:14

to sacrifice to Antiochus.

0:33:140:33:17

Mattathias refused, killed the Greek general, raised the flag of rebellion and fled to the hills.

0:33:170:33:23

He was joined by a group known as the Hasidim - the pious -

0:33:290:33:33

who were so religious, they would not fight on the Sabbath.

0:33:330:33:36

Needless to say, when battles were fought on Saturdays, they were slaughtered.

0:33:360:33:41

Here, on the outskirts of Modin, are the rock cut tombs where the fallen were buried.

0:33:440:33:49

But the fortunes of the rebels were to change when they found a new leader.

0:33:510:33:57

Mattathias's son, Judah, known as "the Hammer" -

0:33:570:34:01

or the Maccabee in Aramaic -

0:34:010:34:04

launched a successful guerrilla war against Antiochus and his Greeks.

0:34:040:34:08

His dynasty became known as the Maccabees.

0:34:080:34:11

To the Greeks, they may have seemed to be a fanatical bunch of Jewish Mujahideen.

0:34:140:34:20

To the Jews, they showed how a small band of brothers

0:34:200:34:24

could heroically resist the armies of a superpower and win.

0:34:240:34:28

They recaptured Jerusalem

0:34:320:34:34

and, in the process, triumphed in the first recorded Holy War.

0:34:340:34:38

One by one, the Greeks were losing control of their kingdoms

0:34:450:34:49

to a powerful new neighbour from the western Mediterranean.

0:34:490:34:54

The Maccabees kingdom was weakened by infighting.

0:35:000:35:04

Now, it was the Romans who decided who ruled Jerusalem.

0:35:040:35:08

In 40BC, the two rulers of the Roman world, Mark Antony and Octavian

0:35:120:35:17

appointed a brilliant young strongman, Herod, as King of Judea.

0:35:170:35:22

Half Jewish, half Arab, Herod was the ambitious son of a pagan convert to Judaism.

0:35:270:35:34

He was Jerusalem's own version of a cross between Henry VIII and Stalin.

0:35:360:35:41

As soon as he conquered Jerusalem,

0:35:500:35:52

Herod killed half the members of the Jewish council, the Sanhedrin.

0:35:520:35:57

He married ten times, and murdered his favourite wife by public garrotting.

0:35:580:36:04

Oh, and he killed three of his own children.

0:36:040:36:07

But this monster had impeccable taste.

0:36:120:36:16

He had a vision to build a temple and a Jerusalem

0:36:160:36:19

as glorious as that of Solomon.

0:36:190:36:22

And this is what it would have looked like.

0:36:220:36:24

Despite his pagan roots,

0:36:350:36:38

Herod built the most majestic Jewish temple.

0:36:380:36:40

It was a vast enterprise.

0:36:450:36:46

It took 80 years, 1,000 priests had to be trained as builders,

0:36:460:36:51

since only priests could enter the inner courts.

0:36:510:36:55

Whole quarries of golden blocks of limestone had to be brought here to build it.

0:36:550:36:59

And whole forests of cedars had to be sailed down from Lebanon

0:37:010:37:07

to embellish this remarkable building.

0:37:070:37:09

To this day, there are remnants of Herod's Jerusalem visible all over the city,

0:37:150:37:21

most famously, the huge stones of the supporting western wall of the temple.

0:37:210:37:26

But some of the best preserved parts of Herod's Jerusalem are actually

0:37:300:37:35

down here in these tunnels.

0:37:350:37:37

During the 1980s, the first archaeologist to document these tunnels, was Dan Bahat.

0:37:430:37:48

What a room. What is this?

0:37:500:37:52

We are now in the Herodian Hall which was built by Herod the Great.

0:37:520:37:57

It is the best preserved structure in Herodian Jerusalem.

0:37:570:38:03

Herod tried to glorify his city.

0:38:030:38:06

He did it by rebuilding the temple,

0:38:060:38:08

he built streets,

0:38:080:38:10

which we see lavishly paved with enormous stones,

0:38:100:38:14

really, everything to make Jerusalem look beautiful.

0:38:140:38:18

In some ways he created modern Jerusalem, modern Holy Jerusalem?

0:38:180:38:23

Yes, one must remember that Herod the Great was not a great believer

0:38:230:38:27

for whom the temple as such was an important thing.

0:38:270:38:31

He did it because he believed in case he beautified the Temple Mount,

0:38:310:38:36

the nation would accept it with favour and start to like him.

0:38:360:38:41

The fact is that they did not, the fact is they did not.

0:38:410:38:44

Herod was hated by his own sons.

0:38:490:38:52

They planned to grab his kingdom and he murdered any who challenged him.

0:38:520:38:58

Herod the Great, in old age, suffered a most terrible death.

0:39:020:39:07

The lower part of his body, his belly and scrotum, swelled up, suppurating fluid.

0:39:070:39:12

Into this fluid, flies laid eggs, which, to the horror of everyone,

0:39:120:39:16

including Herod himself, gave birth to worms.

0:39:160:39:19

His scrotum and his intestines swelled up.

0:39:190:39:23

He died in terrible, terrible agony.

0:39:230:39:25

Somehow this gruesome end matched Herod's record of barbaric sadism.

0:39:250:39:33

His death provoked chaos.

0:39:360:39:39

Three messianic Jewish kings rebelled

0:39:390:39:41

and were crushed by the Romans.

0:39:410:39:43

Herod's kingdom was divided between three of his sons.

0:39:430:39:47

The one who inherited Jerusalem was so oafishly inept

0:39:470:39:52

that the Romans took control of Judea

0:39:520:39:55

which they ruled in alliance with the high priests.

0:39:550:39:58

In this febrile atmosphere, a child was growing up in Galilee.

0:40:050:40:10

His father, though a carpenter, was descended from king David,

0:40:110:40:16

a lineage both royal and sacred.

0:40:160:40:19

He was steeped in knowledge of the Jewish scriptures

0:40:220:40:26

and everything he did was a conscious fulfilment

0:40:260:40:29

of the Jewish prophecies.

0:40:290:40:32

In particular, he saw himself fulfilling the prophecy of Isaiah

0:40:320:40:35

that an anointed king would bring forth the word of the Lord from Jerusalem.

0:40:350:40:41

His name was Jesus.

0:40:410:40:43

When he started preaching, up country in Galilee, his message

0:40:430:40:47

was direct and dramatic.

0:40:470:40:50

Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.

0:40:500:40:53

The essence of his ministry was the imminence of the Apocalypse

0:40:530:40:57

and he soon attracted a devoted following.

0:40:570:41:00

Jesus was a practising Jew, so Jerusalem

0:41:020:41:05

and the temple were central to his beliefs.

0:41:050:41:09

He never actually claimed to be the Messiah,

0:41:090:41:11

but his apocalyptic message

0:41:110:41:13

and his mocking of the pro-Roman temple establishment

0:41:130:41:17

were a clear challenge to their authority and to Roman rule.

0:41:170:41:22

In about 33AD, he arrived in Jerusalem for the Passover festival.

0:41:270:41:31

The city was at its most tense.

0:41:310:41:33

It was crowded with hundreds of thousands of Jewish pilgrims

0:41:330:41:37

and the authorities, both the Romans and the high priests alike,

0:41:370:41:41

feared another outbreak of messianic rebellion.

0:41:410:41:45

On the day before Passover, Jesus came to the temple, crowded with pilgrims.

0:41:520:41:57

Now Jesus entered the temple's royal portico,

0:42:010:42:04

where pilgrims could change money to buy animals for sacrifice -

0:42:040:42:08

oxen for the rich, doves for the poor and sheep for the squeezed middle.

0:42:080:42:13

And, there, he attacked the temple establishment,

0:42:130:42:16

overturning the tables of the money changers

0:42:160:42:18

and telling them they had turned God's house into a den of thieves.

0:42:180:42:24

By confronting the temple priests in such a public way,

0:42:270:42:33

Jesus was asking for trouble.

0:42:330:42:37

That night, Jesus was arrested

0:42:390:42:41

and brought before the Roman Prefect, Pontius Pilate.

0:42:410:42:45

The Romans had executed all previous rebel prophets

0:42:480:42:51

and now Pilate sentenced Jesus to the same end - death by crucifixion.

0:42:510:42:57

After Jesus's crucifixion,

0:43:050:43:06

his followers gave him a traditional Jewish burial.

0:43:060:43:10

They laid him in this rock-cut tomb

0:43:100:43:12

and then they sealed the entrance with a large stone.

0:43:120:43:15

Three days later, the gospels tell that Jesus rose from the dead

0:43:240:43:28

and appeared to his amazed followers.

0:43:280:43:32

They became known as Nazarenes after the place Jesus came from.

0:43:320:43:37

The Nazarenes continued to worship as Jews in the Jewish temple.

0:43:380:43:42

In fact, they didn't regard themselves as a different religion at all.

0:43:420:43:46

It would be another 30 years before the Nazarenes

0:43:540:43:57

established a separate identity.

0:43:570:44:00

In 66AD, Roman corruption, incompetence

0:44:000:44:04

and brutality provoked a massive Jewish rebellion.

0:44:040:44:08

The Jewish warlords were determined to overthrow Roman rule.

0:44:100:44:14

When the Roman Emperor Nero heard about the rebellion,

0:44:140:44:17

he was at the Olympic Games in Greece.

0:44:170:44:19

He immediately despatched his trusted general Vespasian

0:44:190:44:22

and his son Titus to wipe out the rebellious Jews.

0:44:220:44:27

Titus advanced on Jerusalem with a massive army of 60,000 men.

0:44:270:44:33

As the legionaries surrounded the city, many of the Jews

0:44:370:44:41

trapped inside tried to escape by sneaking past the Roman lines.

0:44:410:44:46

The escaping refugees would swallow their coins to protect their wealth,

0:44:490:44:54

but the legionaries discovered this and started to eviscerate every escaping Jew,

0:44:540:44:59

sifting greedily through their intestines in the search for treasure.

0:44:590:45:04

Even Titus, hardly a squeamish man, was shocked by this.

0:45:040:45:09

He banned it, but the practice continued.

0:45:090:45:12

Titus ordered that every refugee escaping from Jerusalem should be crucified.

0:45:120:45:17

At its height, 500 Jews were being crucified a day.

0:45:200:45:23

The hillsides around Jerusalem were a forest of crucifixes,

0:45:230:45:27

and the legionaries made it worse by deliberately crucifying Jews in grotesque and comical poses.

0:45:270:45:34

Truly, this was a scene from hell.

0:45:340:45:37

Those trapped inside the city

0:45:420:45:44

did everything they could to keep the Romans out.

0:45:440:45:49

Yuval Harari has studied their methods.

0:45:490:45:52

Jerusalem at the time had three different sets of walls

0:45:520:45:56

and, also, the defenders, when they saw that one of the walls was about to crumble,

0:45:560:46:02

sometimes they built makeshift walls behind it,

0:46:020:46:07

so the Romans are faced by multiple walls and fortifications.

0:46:070:46:12

So what systems did the Romans use to break into the city?

0:46:120:46:16

They tried to go under, they dig tunnels under the walls.

0:46:160:46:20

Then you have attempts to go through the wall with huge rams,

0:46:200:46:25

which is basically a big tree, with a big iron head,

0:46:250:46:29

which they swing and hit against the wall.

0:46:290:46:34

Finally, the Romans have artillery, which fires huge balls of rock.

0:46:340:46:42

They fire it over the walls, into the city.

0:46:420:46:45

It's not a way to take a city, but it's a way to terrorise the civilian population inside.

0:46:450:46:51

Either way, you were pretty sure to die somehow.

0:46:510:46:56

By the time the Romans are around the city,

0:46:560:46:58

the chances of survival of the civilian population is very bad.

0:46:580:47:04

Four months into the siege, Jewish resistance was weakening.

0:47:110:47:15

On 9th of the Jewish month of Ab,

0:47:180:47:20

the very day almost 500 years earlier

0:47:200:47:23

when Nebuchadnezzar had stormed Jerusalem,

0:47:230:47:26

Titus prepared to attack the Temple.

0:47:260:47:29

That night, his men broke through the last and strongest of the city's defensive walls.

0:47:350:47:40

The ensuing battle was witnessed by a renegade Jewish general

0:47:450:47:49

who'd defected and was travelling in Titus' entourage.

0:47:490:47:53

Josephus describes the horror of the battle for the Temple Mount.

0:47:560:48:02

"Around the altar, the heap of corpses grew higher and higher,

0:48:020:48:05

"while down the holy of holies steps, poured a river of blood

0:48:050:48:09

"and the bodies of those killed at the top slithered to the bottom."

0:48:090:48:13

And then the soldiers let rip in the city.

0:48:180:48:21

The soldiers were like men possessed - running,

0:48:260:48:27

galloping through the streets, killing men, women and children

0:48:270:48:34

and burning every house they could see.

0:48:340:48:37

Josephus tells how, at dusk, the slaughter finally ceased.

0:48:430:48:47

But now, the flames and the fire gained mastery over the holy city.

0:48:470:48:52

Through the roar of the flames could be heard the sound of these cracking stones,

0:49:010:49:06

the screaming of men, women and children, the screaming of burning people.

0:49:060:49:11

It was the sound of the greatest city of the East dying.

0:49:120:49:16

So ended the siege of Jerusalem.

0:49:180:49:22

The next day,

0:49:350:49:37

Titus ordered his men to destroy what was left of the temple.

0:49:370:49:40

Some of the stones still lie where they fell.

0:49:440:49:47

Unlike after the Babylonian destruction,

0:49:500:49:52

the temple was never to be rebuilt.

0:49:520:49:54

The treasures that he looted were paraded through Rome

0:49:570:50:01

where Titus's triumph was celebrated by the building of a monumental arch.

0:50:010:50:06

As many as 600,000 Jews were killed

0:50:090:50:12

and those who were left were banned from Jerusalem.

0:50:120:50:16

60 years later, the emperor Hadrian decided to annihilate Judaism altogether.

0:50:170:50:23

When the Jews rebelled, he crushed them with genocidal brutality.

0:50:230:50:27

This was a turning point for the Jewish people and the Jewish faith.

0:50:290:50:33

They had to get used to life and faith without Temple Mount and without Jerusalem.

0:50:330:50:40

From now on, Jerusalem remained the holy city for the Jewish people.

0:50:400:50:45

But it also became the lost motherland,

0:50:450:50:47

an ideal, a sacred talisman.

0:50:470:50:50

Hadrian renamed the province of Judea as Palaestina,

0:51:110:51:15

after the Jews' enemy, the Philistines.

0:51:150:51:18

He rebuilt Jerusalem as a typical Roman pagan city,

0:51:180:51:22

with a new main street and two forums.

0:51:220:51:26

There are fragments of Hadrian's Jerusalem hidden all over the city,

0:51:300:51:35

some of them are in the most unlikely places.

0:51:350:51:37

Hi. Can we go and look at the wall and the arch at the back? Thank you.

0:51:370:51:42

This archway and this pillar were once part of Hadrian's forum...

0:51:520:51:58

It is rather exciting to find them here

0:51:590:52:02

in the back of a Palestinian patisserie, in the back storeroom,

0:52:020:52:07

lost and forgotten here.

0:52:070:52:09

And, look, all their tools and bits of building material and old chairs turned over.

0:52:090:52:15

This is very Jerusalem. I love it here.

0:52:150:52:18

Jerusalem was pagan for over a century

0:52:220:52:24

with a shrine to Aphrodite on the site of Christ's crucifixion

0:52:240:52:30

and a statue of Hadrian himself on the Temple Mount.

0:52:300:52:34

After the destruction of the temple, the Nazarenes had separated

0:52:360:52:40

from the Jewish mother religion to become a distinct new religion...

0:52:400:52:46

Christianity.

0:52:460:52:47

They kept alive the traditions of their holiest site,

0:52:510:52:54

where Jesus had died and been buried.

0:52:540:52:56

Even in the centuries when this was a pagan temple,

0:53:000:53:03

Christians still used to sneak into these caves and secretly keep this place alive as a Christian shrine.

0:53:030:53:11

And take a look at what they wrote here...

0:53:110:53:13

"Domine Ivimus" - "We come to the Lord".

0:53:130:53:17

Christians were sometimes tolerated,

0:53:200:53:23

but at other times viciously persecuted.

0:53:230:53:27

They were forced to keep their rites secret while the city was under pagan rule.

0:53:270:53:32

Without the Jews, and with the Christians lying low,

0:53:320:53:36

Jerusalem ceased to be a religious centre altogether.

0:53:360:53:39

Without religion, it was just another small, provincial town of the Roman East.

0:53:390:53:46

The population fell to 10,000, less than half its former size.

0:53:480:53:55

The walls crumbled.

0:53:550:53:56

Until the fate of the city was transformed by the caprice of one extraordinary man.

0:54:010:54:08

Constantine was a rough, tough soldier who slashed his way to power,

0:54:150:54:20

but Jerusalem was to benefit from his brutality.

0:54:200:54:24

In 312AD, the Roman Emperor converted to Christianity

0:54:270:54:31

and set about rebuilding Jerusalem as the religious centre of his Christian Empire.

0:54:310:54:36

Here, at the place where Jesus was crucified,

0:54:400:54:43

Constantine knocked down Hadrian's pagan temple

0:54:430:54:46

and built a Christian church.

0:54:460:54:49

He sent his beloved mother, Helena,

0:54:500:54:53

who'd also converted to Christianity, to rebuild Jerusalem.

0:54:530:54:57

When she came, the Empress Helena heard from local Christians

0:54:590:55:02

that parts of the true cross - the actual wood on which Jesus had been crucified - was buried up here.

0:55:020:55:08

When she started to dig, she found not one but three crosses.

0:55:150:55:19

She did not know which one was the true one, so she presented each one to a dying woman.

0:55:190:55:24

When the woman recovered, she knew which one was the true cross on which Jesus had been crucified.

0:55:240:55:32

Relics of Jesus's life became increasingly important in Christianity,

0:55:340:55:40

none more so than the life-giving wood of the true cross.

0:55:400:55:45

It had to have a special guard because pilgrims tried to bite chunks off when they kissed it.

0:55:450:55:50

Jerusalem was a totally Christian city.

0:55:500:55:53

Pilgrims could follow every step of Jesus's life through its shrines.

0:55:530:55:58

But the Christians also inherited the holiness

0:55:580:56:01

and the ancient Jewish stories of Jerusalem itself.

0:56:010:56:04

One of the fascinating things about this place, the Church of the Holy Sepulchre,

0:56:060:56:12

is that, over time, the Christians simply took some of the stories

0:56:120:56:15

of the Jewish Temple Mount

0:56:150:56:17

and moved them to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.

0:56:170:56:21

Now, they came to believe that Adam was buried here and his skull is beneath the church.

0:56:210:56:27

They came to believe that Abraham almost sacrificed his son Isaac here,

0:56:270:56:32

not on the Temple Mount.

0:56:320:56:33

And they came to believe that this was the true centre of the world.

0:56:330:56:38

Just as the early Israelites appropriated the Canaanites'

0:56:410:56:44

sacred places, the Christians too borrowed the holiness

0:56:440:56:48

attached to the Jewish temple, but they turned the Temple Mount itself

0:56:480:56:52

into a rubbish dump to celebrate their victory over Judaism.

0:56:520:56:58

Where once Jewish pilgrims came from all over the East

0:56:580:57:01

to celebrate Passover in the temples of Solomon and Herod,

0:57:010:57:06

now Christian pilgrims came at Easter to worship at the Holy Sepulchre.

0:57:060:57:10

The Jews themselves were still banished from Jerusalem.

0:57:200:57:25

Persecuted by the Christian emperors,

0:57:250:57:27

they were allowed onto the Temple Mount once a year,

0:57:270:57:29

to be mocked by the Christians who saw their lamentations

0:57:290:57:34

as proof of Jesus's prophecies that the temple would fall.

0:57:340:57:38

By the 6th century, Rome had fallen

0:57:420:57:45

and Jerusalem was now ruled from Byzantium,

0:57:450:57:48

the capital of the Eastern Roman empire.

0:57:480:57:51

But the holiness of the city was about to make it the coveted prize

0:57:510:57:56

of a new religion and a new empire.

0:57:560:57:58

As the Byzantine hold on the Middle East was waning, weakened by war and corruption,

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out of the deserts of Arabia, was about to burst forth

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a new revelation that would change the course of human history

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and transform the face of Jerusalem.

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The new revelation was Islam.

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And Jerusalem was in its sights.

0:58:220:58:24

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd

0:58:450:58:49

E-mail [email protected]

0:58:490:58:53

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