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Ancient beams discarded from Al-Aqsa Mosque may have been used in 2nd Temple complex.
Times of Israel:
Quote:
Did ancient beams discarded in Old City come from first and second temples?
Under a tarp in one little-visited corner of the Temple Mount in Jerusalem lies a pile of rotting timber that would hardly catch a visitor’s eye.
In a padlocked storage space under a building in the settlement of Ofra, in the West Bank, lies an even larger pile of similar beams, some with rusted metal nails. Still more of the same beams can be found in one of the rooms of the Rockefeller Museum, outside Jerusalem’s Old City.
Despite their unprepossessing appearance, the beams are unique and important to scholars because of their place of origin — the Al-Aqsa Mosque on the Temple Mount — and their age: Some were hewed from trees felled nearly 3,000 years ago....
....The first iteration of Al-Aqsa was built in the late 600s CE on the Temple Mount, known to Muslims as al-Haram al-Sharif, or the Noble Sanctuary. When the Muslim builders constructed the roof and supports they re-used timber that had been used in older structures nearby, common practice in the ancient world.
Those structures, scholars say, include not only materials dating to the time of the second Jewish temple in Jerusalem 2,000 years ago — but to the time of the first, as many as eight centuries before.
Many of the beams were removed from Al-Aqsa in the late 1930s, during a renovation that followed two earthquakes, and some were taken by British scholars to the Rockefeller Museum, where they remain. Other beams were removed in a later renovation of the structure’s dome under Jordanian rule in the 1960s.
In 1984, a scholar from Tel Aviv University, Nili Liphschitz, published a brief scientific paper looking at 140 of the beams in a Hebrew journal, Eretz Yisrael, along with two other scholars.
Liphschitz, a dendochronologist — a specialist in determining the age of trees — found that most of the beams she examined were of Turkish oak, with a smaller number of Lebanese cedars. There were also beams of cypress and several other types of wood.
By analyzing the tree rings and using carbon-14 dating, she found, unsurprisingly, that some of the wood was from the early Muslim period. One of the cedars, for example, was about 1,340 years old, or roughly the same age as Al-Aqsa. (The margin of error for the rather inexact dating process was 250 years.)
But others were older, dating to Byzantine times, and still others dated to Roman times, around the era of the Second Temple in Jerusalem.
Even more striking were her findings regarding one of the cypress beams. The age of the beam “was found to be 2,600 years,” she wrote, with a margin of error of 180 years. That placed it near 630 B.C.E. — around 50 years before the destruction of the First Temple.
And one of the oak beams was even older: 2,860 years. That meant the tree had been cut down around 880 B.C.E, early in the First Temple period...
...“The cypress timber, dated to the 1st century BC, was probably taken from a more ancient monumental construction, built in or around Jerusalem in that era,” the two scholars wrote. That was the time of Herod’s massive rebuilding of the Second Temple complex.
In this month’s article in Biblical Archaeology Review, Israeli archaeologist Peretz Reuven singled out another beam, among those currently kept on the Temple Mount, in a pile next to the Golden Gate. It was cataloged by British Mandate officials in the 1930s as number 13.
Beam 13, he wrote, not only has Roman-style decorations but also signs of columns at intervals of 10.8 feet. “There was a similar interval between the columns in Herod’s Royal Stoa, a magnificent basilica that stood on the southern end of the Temple Mount,” Reuven noted. That is where Al-Aqsa now sits.
Might some of the beams lying around Jerusalem and elsewhere be from Herod’s temple complex? “I believe the answer is ‘yes,’” Reuven wrote. “Some of the beams may even be from the Temple.”
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First Temple I'm not buying, but Herod's complex is not out of the question. I think the Stoa is a more likely source of beams than the Temple, though. Josephus says the Temple itself was burned to the ground, and the Mosque is right where the Stoa was.
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