Showing posts with label Maccabees. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Maccabees. Show all posts

Monday 10 December 2012

Muslim world denies the very existence of the two Jewish Temples

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).

Wikimedia Commons

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

Geoffrey Clarfield: Muslims in denial about the existence of the Jewish temple