The Rock: A Tale of Seventh-Century Jerusalem (Vintage International)

by Kanan Makiya

  12 Yoma 5:2 in the Mishna, as cited in F. E. Peters’ anthology, Jerusalem: The Holy City in the Eyes of Chroniclers, Visitors, Pilgrims, and Prophets from the Days of Abraham to Modern Times (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1985), pp. 29–30.

  13 The relevant biblical citations are: Genesis 22; I Chronicles 3:1; I Chronicles 21:14–17; and I Kings 5–7. Oleg Grabar makes this point in his important essay “The Umayyad Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem,” Ars Orientalis 3 (1959), p. 38.

  14 From F. E. Peters in his Jerusalem: The Holy City in the Eyes of Chroniclers, Visitors, Pilgrims, and Prophets from the Days of Abraham to Modern Times (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1985), p. 127.

  15 See “Midrash and the Destruction” in Alan Mintz, Hurban: Responses to Catastrophe in Hebrew Literature (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1996), p. 50.

  16 Makkoth 24a. I am indebted to my student Jonathan Stern for finding this story.

  17 The same Rabbi Akiba was a spiritual leader of the Bar Kochba revolt (132–135). He was brutally executed by the Romans a few years after the events. He was, therefore, in the story I have just cited, justifying his own people’s defeat in a fashion common to revolutionaries of all ideological persuasions.

  18 From John Wilkinson’s translation in Egeria’s Travels to the Holy Land (Jerusalem: Ariel Publishing House, 1981), pp. 156–157.

  19 From Jerome’s commentary on Zephaniah 1:15, which has been put into Sophronius’s words in “Finding the Cross.” Here, I have cited the translation used in Thomas I. Idinopulos, Jerusalem Blessed, Jerusalem Cursed (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1991), pp. 100–101.

  20 On the names of Ka’b, see Israel Wolfensohn’s dissertation Ka’b al-Ahbar und seine Stellung im Hadit und der Islamischen Legendenliteratur (Frankfurt, Germany: J. W. Goethe University, 1933). I am indebted to Chris Berdik for providing me with translations from parts of this work.

  Sources

  I once read somewhere that sources in a book are like dead ghosts inhabiting an empty house; their presence is what gives meaning to every stick and stone in the edifice. It matters hardly a jot whether or not you believe in ghosts. All that matters is that someone at some point in time did. As the majority of my sources are at least a century—more often than not, several centuries—removed from the events they describe, the use of a particular fragment, or record of a deed, can hardly be justified by its correspondence to historical fact alone (at least not by me). All that is required of a source from this book’s point of view is that it be plausible, even as an invention that might have been in circulation in the seventh century, and that it have found resonance with me. Where I have erred or indulged in anachronism—and I am sure that I have, for my purposes are not history—I have broken the rules that I set for myself for constructing this story.

  It is not always easy for readers to discern from the narrative whether a given story, or a particular detail within a story, or even a passage of scripture is Jewish, Muslim, or Christian in origin. This was the way things were in Ka’b’s time and place, if not in ours. Such ambiguities are hopefully resolved in the essay on sources below. Sources are identified in full at their first occurrence; thereafter, the author’s name is used, alone or with an abbreviated title for those authors with more than one work cited. If a source is used for the same purpose in more than one location in the book (for example, the various descriptions of seventh-century Jerusalem), then it is not repeated. Scripture is italicized, as are some passages of a prophetic or apocalyptic nature (for example, in the opening and closing pages). For citations from the Quran, I have used the numbering of A. J. Arberry in The Koran Interpreted (New York, 1996), with occasional modifications of the translation. For many of the events of this story, it should be noted, the Quran was not yet codified and compiled into its final form.

  In the Name of God …

  The opening italicized passages are adapted from the Quran (13:15, 16:4, 30:21) and the tenth-century historian and exegete Muhammad ibn Jarir al-Tabari’s introduction to his multivolume commentary on the Quran, Jami’ al-Bayan ’an Ta’wil ay al-Qur’an (Bulaq, 1905).

  The Creation story draws from Tabari’s multivolume Ta’rikh al-Rusul wa’l-Muluk, History of the Prophets and Kings, the English translation of which put out by the State University of New York Press I shall henceforth refer to as Tabari’s History. See General Introduction and From Creation to the Flood. vol. 1, (1989). The tradition that light and darkness were the first creations is attributed to Ibn Ishaq, the eighth-century biographer of the Prophet.

  The story of Adam is based on the Muslim version, which incorporates many nonbiblical elements drawn from Jewish and Christian tradition. See “Khalq,” Encyclopaedia of Islam (Leiden: E. J. Brill), henceforth EI2. Jewish tradition tells of the clay used to shape Adam’s body in the Targum Yerushalmi to Genesis 2:7 and the Sanhedrin 38a. The beauty and length of the body are mentioned in the Quran 95:4, as well as in Jewish sources (Sanhedrin 38b; Bereshit Rabba 8:1, 12:6). Tabari’s recounting of the story of Adam can be found in his History, vol. 1. The bowing of the angels before Adam, except Iblis (Satan), is from the Quran (15:26–38); Iblis’s reply to Adam later on in the chapter is an interpretation attributed to the Sufi mystics Junayd and Hallaj. The importance in Muslim tradition of the first Arabic letter, alif, is discussed in Edward Lane’s Arabic—English Lexicon (Cambridge: The Islamic Texts Society, 1984). The reference to a fiery garment of light and the significance of Adam’s fall can be found in The Zohar; Gershom Scholem discusses The Zohar’s emphasis on the fall of Adam in his Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism (Schocken Publishing House, 1941). The story of Eve’s creation from Adam’s shortest and most crooked left rib is from the ninth-century collector of “sound” tradition, Muhammad al-Bukhari. See his Sahih al-Bukhari (Cairo, 1969). That God ascended from the rock to Heaven after the Creation is in Abu Bakr al-Wasiti’s eleventh-century Fada’il al-Bayt al-Muqaddas, as cited by Nasser Rabbat, “The Meaning of the Umayyad Dome of the Rock,” vol. 6, Muqarnas, 1989. The post-Fall status of Adam and his complaint to God are in Tabari’s History. The conversation between the Fish and the Eagle, and the angels’ burial of Adam, are from material attributed to Ibn Ishaq, as edited and translated by Gordon Darnell Newby in The Making of the Last Prophet: A Reconstruction of the Earliest Biography of Muhammad (University of South Carolina Press, 1989). A later version of the story of the Fish and the Eagle is attributed to Ka’b al-Ahbar by Muhammad ibn Abdallah al-Kisa’i, in his Qisas al-Anbiya’, Tales of the Prophets; see the translation by Wheeler M. Thackston (Great Books of the Islamic World, 1997). On the Jewish and Muslim tradition that has God rubbing Adam’s back and Adam ceding fifty of the thousand years alloted to him to the prophet David, see EI2 under “Adam.”

  Prologue

  The earliest Arabic name for Jerusalem is Madinat Bayt al-Maqdis (or al-Muqaddas), which I have translated as “the City of the Temple.” But it could just as well be “the City of the Holy House.” Bayt al-Maqdis derives from the Hebrew for the Temple, Bet ha-miqdash. Today’s Arabic name for Jerusalem, al-Quds, is a later derivation from Bayt al-Maqdis. Not until the end of the seventh century was the Temple area singled out from the rest of Jerusalem by the phrase al-Haram al-Sharif, the Noble Sanctuary. The narrator’s reference to the Temple Mount as the place of David’s repentance is based upon the Quran 38:15–24, which records that David sought the forgiveness of God by bowing and throwing himself to the ground on this site.

  The best general account of Ka’b is in EI2. See also Israel Wolfensohn’s dissertation Ka’b al-Ahbar und seine Stellung im Hadit und der Islamischen Legendenliteratur (J. W. Goethe University, 1933). The traditions of the origins of the Jews of the Yemen cited by my narrator, Ishaq, are in Reuben Ahroni’s Yemenite Jewry: Origins, Culture, and Literature (Indiana University Press, 1968). Jeremiah’s prophecy of doom that prompted the departure of the Jews is found in Jeremiah 38:2: “He who remains in this city shall die by the sword, by the fam
ine, and by pestilence; but he who goes forth to the Chaldeans shall live.” Baladhuri’s view of the origin of the Jews of Arabia, in his ninth-century Kitab Futuh al-Buldan (Leiden, 1968), is that they settled there after the destruction of Bayt al-Maqdis by Nebuchadnezzar. The expression “the most Jewish and the most Arab of all Jews” was coined by S. D. Goitein, the scholar of medieval Jewry, as quoted in A Mediterranean Society, vol. 5, The Individual (University of California Press, 1988).

  The description of the city of Jerusalem given in this and later chapters relies on Oleg Grabar’s The Shape of the Holy; Early Islamic Jerusalem (Princeton University Press, 1996) and John Wilkinson’s work based on pilgrim accounts, Jerusalem Pilgrims Before the Crusades (Warminster, Wilts.: Aris & Phillips, 1977). It also conforms with the most important source for the early-seventh-century city, the mosaic Madaba map in Jordan (excluding the Temple Mount area, which is hardly in evidence on the map). Throughout his narration, Ishaq uses “Mount Zion” interchangeably with “Mount Moriah” because that was Jewish tradition. See Jon Levenson’s Sinai and Zion: An Entry into the Jewish Bible (HarperCollins, 1985). Today’s Mount Zion is a different mountain altogether, to the west of Moriah.

  We know nothing about what the rock looked like at the time of the Muslim conquest. The Muslim sources belong to a much later period and will be cited in relation to what Umar and Ka’b found on the site when they first arrived. Clearly, a much larger part of the rock was visible than can be seen today inside the Dome, as can be surmised from what B. Bagatti saw when the pavement surrounding the rock was removed for repair work in 1959. In different parts of the text, I have borrowed from B. Bagatti’s description in his Récherché sur le site du Temple de Jerusalem, I—VII siècle (Jerusalem: Franciscan Printing Press, 1979).

  Stories about the cave beneath the rock are found in local Jewish and Muslim folklore. Zev Vilnay’s collection, Legends of Jerusalem (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1973), contains many of them. A Muslim tale not found in Vilnay concerns the question of why the rock, which used to hover above its mountain, no longer does so. “One day,” goes the tale, “a pregnant woman walked underneath the Rock. As soon as she reached the center of the Rock suspended above her head, she became afraid and dropped her child. So there grew around her this construction until she was safely concealed from the eyes of people.” From Al-’Uns al-Jaleel bi Ta’rikh al-Quds wa al-Khalil, as collected in A. S. Marmarji’s compilation of Arabic texts on Jerusalem, Buldaniyah Filastin al-’Arabiyah (Beirut, 1948). Rabbi Binyamin Lilienthal, who visited the Holy Land in 1847, had a different explanation of the origin of the walls supporting the floating Foundation Stone of Jewish tradition. He thinks Jerusalem’s Turkish rulers built the walls that reach up to the Foundation Stone, which is not fastened but “is suspended above the floor.” The Turks did this because “when the stone falls, it will be the sign that the Messiah comes. Therefore they have built a base and a support … to prevent the advent of the Messiah of Israel” (Vilnay, Legends).

  The treasures of Solomon’s Temple are thought to have been hidden inside an underground cave located beneath the cave. Local Palestinians call it bir al-arwah, “the well of souls.” In 1911, during archaeological excavations in the City of David, at the edge of Mount Moriah, a rumor spread that English excavators had penetrated the sealed cave at night, through hidden labyrinths, and made off with the treasures. The rumor caused days of apprehension and disturbances in Jerusalem. No treasure was found.

  The image of mountains as signs of God is adapted from a passage by the eleventh-century Muslim scholar al-Ghazzali, which I have since lost. The verse “We shall show them Our signs in the horizons and in themselves” is from the Quran 41:53.

  The Rock of Foundation

  The tradition of a midwife naming a child as she cuts the umbilical cord is an old Turkish custom recorded by Yahya ibn Sharaf al-Nawawi in Kitab al-adhkar (Cairo, 1894). For Ishaq’s general discourse on the importance of names I have borrowed from Annemarie Schimmel’s Islamic Names (Edinburgh University Press, 1989). Reference to the rock as a stumbling stone can be found in Isaiah 8:14. The phrase “Rock of Ages” is used in the hymn “Jesus: His Cross and His Passion,” composed in 1776 by A. M. Toplady. The idea of a name as proof of excellence is based on the Arabic proverb, “A multitude of names proves the excellence of their bearer.” The Quran addresses the importance of names in 49:12, “An evil name is ungodliness after belief.” Names are either enveloped by a taboo or carry baraka, the power of blessing. The argument concerning the relationship between the name of a thing and its essence is adapted from al-Ghazzali’s treatise on the ninety-nine names of God, Fi Sharh Asma’ Allah al-Husna, translated into English by D. Burrell and N. Daher as The Ninety-Nine Beautiful Names of God (Cambridge: The Islamic Texts Society, 1995).

  “There was no heaven, no earth, no height, no depth, no name” is the opening line of “The Babylonian Poem of Creation.” See N. K. Sanders, Poems of Heaven and Hell from Ancient Mesopotamia (Penguin Classics, 1971). In this Creation story, which dates to the second millennium B.C.E., Babylon, Jerusalem’s nemesis, is the fulcrum of the cosmos. The city is named “The House of Foundation Between Heaven and Earth,” an idea later associated with Jerusalem and implied in the story of David and Ahithophel told in “The Fundaments of the Universe.” The position of God on His throne upon the water during Creation is mentioned in the Quran 11:7. Tabari cites traditions he attributes to Ibn ’Abbas (who may have been Ka’b’s student), which contend that God was seated on His throne above the heavenly waters before Creation and that the first thing He created was the pen. The idea of the Rock as originating as a jewel underneath God’s throne is in The Zohar; see Vilnay, Legends. The words Ka’b attributes to wisdom and the idea that it was by wisdom that God founded the earth are from Proverbs 8:22–27 and 3:19. James L. Kugel, in The Bible as It Was (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 1997), argues that Ka’b’s reasoning was commonplace among interpreters of the Bible from the beginning of the Common Era. The idea of a site or sacred structure as the navel of the universe and the focal point of Creation was prevalent in the ancient Middle East; its application to Jerusalem can be found in many midrashic texts, like the third-century Midrash Tanhuma with which Ka’b concludes the “Rock of Foundation.” See Mircea Eliade’s The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion (Harcourt Brace, 1987). Luis Stadelmann discusses the Hebrew notion of the center of the world in The Hebrew Conception of the World: A Philological and Literary Study (Rome: Pontifical Biblical Institute, 1970).

  Locusts and Christians

  The description of the rock in Solomon’s Temple is based on those descriptions given in the Talmud and repeated by rabbinic commentators from the second century onward. See Thomas Chaplin, “The Stone of Foundation and the Site of the Temple,” in Palestine Exploration Fund, Quarterly Statement (London, 1876). Ancient Yemenite Jewish marriage practices are discussed by Ahroni, who notes that these continued well into modern times. The descriptions of life in the Yemen, in particular the scourge of locusts, are adapted from those recorded by Ahroni following interviews he made with Yemeni Jews arriving in Israel in the late 1960s. The reasons for Ka’b’s departure from the Yemen at a very advanced age (by one accounting he would have been eighty-two years old upon arriving in Medina) are not known.

  The verses cited in the recounting of the Dhu Nuwas story are from the Quran 85:4–9. The description of the Dhu Nuwas massacre is from one of the earliest Arabic sources, Ibn Ishaq’s Sirat Rasul Allah, an eighth-century biography of the Prophet, edited by Ibn Hisham and translated by A. Guillaume under the title The Life of Muhammad (Oxford University Press, 1955). I shall henceforth refer to this book as Ibn Ishaq’s Life. The massacre is confirmed in Christian sources, although there are no Jewish accounts. Dhu Nuwas’s death is recorded in Tabari, vol. 5, The Sasanids, the Byzantines, the Lakhmids, and Yemen. The saying “If you fatten your dog, he will eat you” is attributed to the Meccan Abdallah ibn Ubayy, who
was insulting the Prophet shortly after the hijra, the Prophet’s forced emigration from Mecca to Medina in September 622. It is cited in Nabia Abbott, Aishah: The Beloved of Mohammed (London: Saqi, 1985). Early Muslim adoption of Jewish practices, such as praying toward Jerusalem and keeping the Day of Atonement, are discussed by W. Montgomery Watt in his Muhammad: Prophet and Statesman (Oxford University Press, 1974). The Christian Church historian Sozomen, writing in the fourth century, was already well aware of how closely Arab religious practices resembled those of the Jews; see F. E. Peters, Mecca: A Literary History of the Holy Land (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1994).

  Ka’b’s tale of the false messiah leading followers over a cliff is based on an incident that occurred in Crete at the end of the fifth century, as presented by Jacob Marcus in The Jew in the Medieval World, A Source Book: 315–1791 (Meridian Books, 1960). Ezra’s curse on Yemeni Jews was recorded by the Yemenite Rabbi Schelomo ’Adani in his sixteenth-century work, Maelecket Schelomo. The passage concerning Jabbar and Antar is adapted from Steven M. Wasserstrom’s Between Muslim and Jew: The Problem of Symbiosis under Early Islam (Princeton University Press, 1993). The envoy sent by Muhammad to the Yemen was Ali ibn Abi Talib. The ninth-century chronicler al-Waqidi records an encounter between him and Ka’b that led to the latter’s conversion; see Kitab al-Maghazi (Oxford University Press, 1966).