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

by Kanan Makiya

  The poem cited by Sophronius was written by him between 614 and 630, just after the triumphant return of the Holy Cross to Jerusalem by the emperor Heraclius; it is known as the Anacreonticon 20; see Wilkinson (1977). Umar’s disdain for too much focus on building and architecture is in a tale by Ibn Sa’d (died 845), describing what the Prophet said to his wife, Umm Salama, when he discovered she had built an extension to her room “to shut out the glances of men.” The Prophet said: “O Umm Salama! Verily, the most unprofitable thing that eateth up the wealth of a Believer is building”; cited by K. A. C. Creswell, Early Muslim Architecture, part 1 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1932).

  The Gate of the Column, Bab al-Amud, is also known as the Damascus Gate. It is impossible to know exactly when Bab al-Amud came into use as a name. Since Muslims would not have been happy with the name Saint Stephen’s Gate, it is not unreasonable to assume they would have from very early on begun calling it by the name of the column that sat so conspicuously at its center. Saint Stephen’s Gate today is the east-facing gate, through which Umar and Sophronius entered the city. The martyrdom of Stephen is recorded in Acts 7:54–8:1. The description of what could be found on Jerusalem’s prime commercial street, the Cardo, is based on al-Muqadassi’s description of his native city written in 985.

  The highlight of Umar’s tour, Kanisat al-Qiyama to Eastern Christians, or the Church of the Resurrection, is more commonly known these days as the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. The description of the fourth-century Basilica (destroyed in the eleventh by a deranged Caliph) is a montage of different Christian accounts, beginning with the Church historian Eusebius, who was an eyewitness to the construction, and including the first Christian pilgrim known to have visited the finished building, the Pilgrim of Bordeaux in 333; his description is discussed in Jeffery. Sophronius and Umar visited other churches as well; Grabar (1996) notes the importance of the New Church of the Virgin Mary, known as the Nea, and the Church of Zion. But the Holy Sepulchre was by far the most important of the churches visited by Umar. It has had a continuous history of use from the second quarter of the fourth century until today. The political importance of the alignment of the Church of the Resurrection on a longitudinal axis facing east, overlooking the ruins of the Temple, is highlighted by Grabar in The Shape of the Holy using computer-aided reconstructions of the Church in relation to the seventh-century city. Christian tradition refers to the Rotunda over the tomb of Jesus by the Greek name of anastasis, or resurrection; the word “rotunda,” however, is ancient and was used by the pilgrim Arculf in the seventh century.

  Ka’b’s warning to Umar not to enter into the Church of the Resurrection is adapted from a remark made by Ka’b as cited by Al-Wasiti: “Do not come to the Church of Mary or approach the two pillars, for they are idols. Whoever goes to them, his prayers will be as naught.…

  Cursed be the Christians for not seeing the things to come. They could not find a place in which to build a church except in the valley of Jahannam [Hell].” The reference here is to the Church of Mary on the slopes of the Mount of Olives, and to the Church of the Ascension on the top of the same mountain, known as Kanisat al-Tur in Arabic; it had two pillars facing the north and south walls, according to the eighth-century pilgrim Willibald. Amikam Elad convincingly makes this connection by citing several versions of Ka’b’s words in his Medieval Jerusalem and Islamic Worship: Holy Places, Ceremonies, Pilgrimage (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1995).

  Sophronius’s comment to Umar regarding the two Jerusalems is adapted from a line by Cyril of Jerusalem in the fourth century (Grabar, 1996). Cyril proclaimed victory over Judaism with the phrase “Jerusalem crucified Christ, but that which now is worships him.” The interior of the Basilica is based on the description by Bishop Eusebius of Caesarea, who was born in Palestine around 275–280 C.E.; Eusebius was an eyewitness to the construction of the Basilica, which he describes in his Life of Constantine. The description of the Holy City’s “baptism” by rain is taken from an observation by the British pilgrim Arculf, who visited Jerusalem around 680.

  The New Temple

  This chapter’s physical descriptions of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre are based on the reconstruction by Father Charles Cousanon in The Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem (London: Oxford University Press, 1974). Sophronius quotes from John 16:33 when describing the slow death of Christ on the cross. The phrase “rock of refuge” is from Psalm 31. The famous words of Christ predicting the destruction of the Temple are found in Mark 13:1–2. Sophronius’s argument regarding the founding of the church on the body of Christ, and the discussion of the transfer of the center of the world from Moriah’s rock to the body of Christ, are based on the interpretations developed by McKelvey in The New Temple. The discussion of Sophronius concerning the end of Jewish sacrifices refers to the ending of the tradition of animal sacrifice carried out by the Sadducean priests in the Herodian Temple after Titus’s destruction of it in the year 70. See Busse (1984) for the ways in which the Church of the Holy Sepulchre was seen as a successor to the old Temple.

  Adam’s Tomb

  Saint Augustine discusses the burial place of Adam in De Civitate Dei (The City of God), in which he writes, “The ancients hold that because Adam was the first man, and was buried there, it was called Calvary, because it holds the head of the human race.” Sophronius’s sentence, “As in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be made alive,” comes from I Corinthians 15:22. The idea that Christ’s sacrifice affected the nature of death itself, as argued by Sophronius, is adapted from Saint Basil, who wrote: “Probably Noah was not ignorant of the sepulchre of our forefather and that of the first born of all mortals, and in that place, Calvary, the Lord suffered, the origin of death there being destroyed”; cited in the Reverend William Wood Seymour’s The Cross: In Tradition, History, and Art (New York: Knickerbocker Press, 1898).

  The words that Sophronius sings are a stanza from John Donne’s poem entitled “Hymne to God, my God, in my sickness.” John 19:17–18 refers to the meaning of Golgotha: “And carrying his cross himself he went out to the place referred to as ‘of a skull,’ which in Hebrew is Golgotha.” The opinion attributed to Ka’b concerning the real meaning of Golgotha comes from Saint Jerome, who lived in Jerusalem and studied its local lore carefully, and who said that in his own day the places where criminals were executed were called Golgotha. See S. Gibson and J. Taylor, Beneath the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, Jerusalem: The Archaeology and Early History of Traditional Golgotha (Palestine Exploration Fund Monograph, 1994). The distance between Moriah and Calvary, it should be pointed out, is under 600 meters.

  The Tree of Life is known to Arabs as the heavenly tree of Tuba. Another tree is mentioned in the Quran (37:60), called the Zaqqum; it is reserved for the damned, has fruit in the form of demons, and grows in the depths of the furnaces of Hell, like the tree that Seth saw in Sophronius’s story. The story of Seth, Adam, and the Tree of Life is from a fifteenth-century Dutch source, as retold by the Reverend Seymour (1898). The Muslim denial of Jesus’ crucifixion is referred to in the Quran 4:157. Unlike Jews, however, Muslims hold Jesus in very high regard and argue that, if he was not crucified, someone made to resemble him probably was. The caliph al-Mahdi is said to have explained to the Catholic Timothy I that God did not allow the Jews to crucify the Messiah because He esteemed him so highly that He took him up to Heaven before the deed could be done. The description of Adam’s role on the Day of Resurrection is taken from Kitab Muthir al-Gharam li-Ziyarat al-Khalil, Alaihi al-Salam, The Book of Inciting Desire to Visit Hebron. It was written in 1351 by Abu al-Fida Ishaq, preacher of the Hebron mosque, who died in 1429. Charles Mathews translated it as Palestine—Mohammedan Holy Land (Yale University Press, 1949).

  The Rock of the Cross

  Cousanon explains how, assuming that local memories kept alive the actual place of Jesus’ crucifixion, the Bible—in particular John 19:41, cited by Ishaq—might be reconciled with what is left at or below the foundations of the Church
of the Holy Sepulchre. The description of the tomb is based on the account of Photius, Patriarch of Constantinople, who wrote a detailed description sometime between 867 and 878. His account conforms in its broad outlines with what one can still see under the rotunda of the existing church. The description of the fifteen golden lamps comes from the English pilgrim Willibald, who visited Jerusalem between A.D. 724 and 730. Kanisat al-Qiyama, the Church of the Resurrection, is occasionally referred to in Muslim sources as Kanisat al-Qumama, the Church of the Dungheap. S. D. Goitein sees in this phrase a retaliation for the previous Christian desecration of the Temple site; see his “Jerusalem in the Arab Period: 638–1099,” in The Jerusalem Cathedra: Studies in the History, Archaeology, Geography and Ethnography of the Land of Israel, edited by Lee Levine (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1981). There is no evidence that Ka’b was responsible for this play on words as is stated in the narrative.

  Ka’b’s angry assertion that the empire allowed Helena to have her way and Christianize the world is adapted from the words of Ambrose, the fourth-century Bishop of Milan, and Philostorgius (mid-fifth century), as cited in Jan Willem Drijvers, Helena Augusta: The Mother of Constantine the Great and the Legend of Her Finding the True Cross (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1992).

  Finding the Cross

  There is no evidence that the historical Sophronius would have told the story of Helena’s discovery of the true cross of Christ in quite the form that I have him telling it. The legendary versions of the story (the only ones that any Christian believed in before modern times) seem to have originated in Jerusalem shortly after the empress’s death in the year 328. I have based Sophronius’s account on a version known as the Judas Cyriacus legend, which originated in or around the Syrian city of Edessa sometime in the fifth century. Of the three versions of the legend identified by scholars, this was by far the most widespread; it is also the only one that is anti-Jewish, a factor which explains its considerable popularity in medieval Europe. All three versions are translated and discussed by Drijvers.

  Inside the main frame of the Judas Cyriacus legend, I have made several insertions. Sophronius’s description of the Jewish presence in Jerusalem on the day of the destruction of the Temple is taken from Saint Jerome’s commentary on Zephaniah 1:15. A pilgrim who arrived in Jerusalem from Bordeaux in 333 informs us that Jews, although banned from the city, were still visiting the site of the Temple and anointing the rock. This Bordeaux Pilgrim, as he has become known, has provided the earliest travel account of the emerging Christian geography of the Holy Land. Some anti-Jewish passages spoken by Sophronius are from Ambrose, the Bishop of Milan. Helena’s self-aggrandizing declaration of intent regarding the finding of the cross, in which she compares her role to that of Mary, is also adapted from Ambrose; his account of the discovery of the cross in 395, which is the first official account provided by the Church, is translated in Louis De Combes, The Finding of the Cross, vol. 10 (London: International Catholic Library, 1907). Helena’s physical features are based upon a representation of the empress on a medal in the British museum, shown at the end of “The Rock of the Cross.” The prayer of Judas, asking God’s help and promising conversion in return, is found in Drijvers, as is the recounting of the miracle that followed. Cyril, a later Bishop of Jerusalem, claimed to witness the miraculous light that emanated from the cross. He recorded the event for posterity in a letter to the emperor in 351, believing it to be proof of divine support for the emperor and his military campaigns. Many different variations on this miracle exist in the literature. The verse containing Christ’s prophecy is based on Matthew 23:37–39, 24:29–31. The discovery of the cross under a temple to the Goddess of Love, Venus, is based on The Life of Constantine, by the Church historian Eusebius, an eyewitness to the building of the Church who was born in Palestine at the end of the third century. The conversion of Judas and his re-christening as Judas Cyriacus is the origin of the name given to this fifth-century tale of the discovery of the cross—the Judas-Cyriacus legend.

  Not long after Helena’s departure, a piece of the cross was carefully mounted in a casket of pure gold and precious stones. It was placed in a silver shrine around which had been built a great mausoleum. On Good Friday of every year, the casket containing the piece of the Holy Cross would be opened. The description of the yearly display and veneration of the wood is taken almost verbatim from the fourth-century observations of Sister Egeria, who witnessed the ceremony (Wilkinson, 1971).

  Finding the Rock

  All sources, Muslim and Christian, agree that, when Umar came to Jerusalem, he was intent on seeing a specific site that had nothing to do with the Christian holy places. He wanted to see the place where the Jewish Temple had stood, or what the Quran (38: 20–21) refers to as David’s mihrab, or prayer place. Both formulations amounted to the same thing. See Oleg Grabar, “The Umayyad Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem,” Ars Orientalis 3 (1959), and Grabar, The Shape of the Holy (1996). It stands to reason that Umar thought of this site as the first qibla, or sacred axis of Islam, which he was visiting for the first time.

  When Umar arrived, writes Jamal al-Din Ahmad, “There was over the Rock of the Holy City a great dungheap, which completely masked the Mihrab of David, and which the Christians had put here in order to offend the Jews, and further, even, the Christian women were wont to throw their cloths and clouts.… Now when Umar had come to the Holy City and conquered it, and saw how there was a dungheap over the Rock, he regarded it as horrible and ordered that it should be entirely cleared. To accomplish this they forced the Nabateans [native peasantry] of Palestine to labor without pay. On the authority of Ja’far ibn Nafir, it is related that when Umar first exposed the Rock to view by removing the dungheap, he commanded them not to pray there until three showers of heavy rain should have fallen. It is related … that Umar entered by the Gate of Muhammad, crawling on his hands and knees, he and all those with him, until he came up to the Court of the Sanctuary. There he looked around to right and to left, and, glorifying Allah, said: ’By Allah, verily this—by Him in whose hand is my soul!— must be the Mosque of David.” (Le Strange, 1890). With the exception of the last sentence, which I attribute to Ka’b, not Umar, I have stuck closely to the spirit of this “classical” Muslim account, which, as Peters (1985) notes, “appears to embody … some very early Muslim perceptions about Jerusalem.”

  I surmise that the gate through which Umar and Sophronius would have entered the Temple Mount, the Gate of Muhammad in the Muthir, was the Double Gate facing Mecca on the southern edge of the sanctuary. This gate, whose construction dates to Herodian times, was blocked in the Middle Ages and has since remained useless as a means of access to the Haram. More on the gate can be found in Rosen-Ayalon (1989). Busse (1984) makes important observations on the prayers of Umar on the Temple Mount in his “Omar b. al-Hattab in Jerusalem.”

  On other details in this chapter: The phrase “Heaven is as close as one’s sandal-straps, and so is Hell” is attributed to the Prophet, not to Umar, in the tradition. The legend of the pillars of the Temple, carried off by Titus’s soldiers, weeping every year on the ninth of Ab can be found in Vilnay’s Legends of Jerusalem. Other legends in this chapter from Vilnay are associated with the existence of a perfect heavenly counterpoint to the Temple. The description of Titus’s persecution of the Jews takes from Mujir al-Din, medieval Jerusalem’s Muslim historian writing in 1496. Mujir al-Din records Helena’s singling out of the rock for desecration by designating it as a dumping ground for manure. The theme of desecration through sewage and waste, particularly women’s menstrual cloths, is constant in Muslim sources. It should be noted that, to this day, one of the Gates to the Haram is called the Dung Gate.

  Christian sources incline to the view that Umar chose the Temple Mount to build upon based on Christian advice. According to Said Bitriq, Umar said to Sophronius, “You owe me justice and a guarantee of safety. Show me where I can build my mosque” (Busse, 1984). Eutychius, the later patriarch of Alexandria who wrote
toward the end of the ninth century, suggests in his account of the Muslim takeover that Sophronius persuaded Umar to build in the general area of the Jewish Temple in exchange for leaving the rest of Jerusalem free of mosques. A large area was needed, and Umar was committed by treaty to not confiscate churches; the abandoned empty space of the Temple would have been a suitable location from both parties’ point of view. However, I am not convinced that this “utilitarian” approach fully resolves the religious tensions involved. In a collection of edifying tales, for instance, collected by a monk named Anastase of Sinai between 630 and 690, the archdeacon Theodore, a contemporary of Sophronius and eyewitness to the construction, tells Anastase: “Atheistic Saracens entered the Holy City of Christ our God … in punishment of our negligence which was considerable, and, running, they reached the place called the Capitole [the Temple Mount]. Some men they took with them by force, others with their full consent, in order to clean this place and to build this damned thing intended for their prayers which they call a mosque.” From an article by Bernard Flusin, “L’Esplanade du Temple a L’Arrivee des Arabes, D’Apres Deux Recits Byzantins,” in Bayt al-Maqdis: Abd al-Malik’s Jerusalem, part 1, edited by Julian Raby and Jeremy Johns (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992). The most intriguing glimpse into Umar’s mindset, however, comes from the exchange between him and Ka’b that ends with Umar’s rebuke, and the decision to build south not north of the rock. The earliest version, to whose spirit I have remained faithful (but in which Sophronius is not present) is in Tabari’s History, vol. 12. This exchange, often interpreted as a conscious Muslim repudiation of its Jewish antecedents in the very place where it most needed doing—the site of the Temple—is the kernel from which this book was first conceived.