On the 25th day of the lunar month of Kislev (Dec. 8), Jews around
the world will celebrate the eight-day holiday of Hanukah. Hanukah
commemorates the rededication of the Jerusalem Temple in the second
century BCE by Jewish freedom fighters (the Maccabees) who resisted the
Macedonian regime in Damascus. The regime had violently attempted to
enforce its polytheistic Hellenistic religion on the inhabitants of
Judea — a people who held the then extraordinary belief in the one
invisible God of all humankind and whose temple was in Jerusalem.
The story is told in great detail in the Book of Maccabees I and II,
which, originally written in Hebrew, now survives in Greek and Latin
versions in the Christian Bible. The Jews have kept the story alive
through the Hanukah festival itself and the retention of the scroll of
Hanukah (the Megillat Antiochus).
For over a decade the Muslim authorities (the Waqf) who now control
the Temple Mount have been despoiling its archaeology through illegal
excavations and site destruction according to
Israel Matzav. Nevertheless, the physical evidence
that they have discarded, and which Israeli archaeologists pore over
like forensic scientists at a crime scene, shows signs of the temple’s
existence, the most recent being coins minted by the Hasmonean rulers of
Judea who were the royal and priestly heirs of the Maccabees, as well
as coins minted during the first Jewish revolt against the Romans in 70
AD. It was these pagan conquerors who burnt the temple and brought its
sacred treasure back to Rome, and whose golden menorah was beautifully
reproduced on the Arch of Titus. A three-dimensional copy of this
menorah now stands in front of the Israeli parliament in Jerusalem,
walking distance from where the original once stood, 2,000 years
earlier.
Continue reading:
Muslim Temple denial continues
