The Once and Future Temple, Part I

This is part one of a two-part essay on the depiction of the Temples in Jerusalem in art made primarily for Christians. Part two, focused on specific examples of concepts outlined in part one, is here.

It’s 1979, and I’m in Israel for the first time. I am there on a Zionist tour for high-school seniors. We’ve gone to the Western Wall for Friday evening services, where I’ve had my initial experience of the male-bonded intensity of yeshiva-style dancing. Our group is now being hosted for dinner at the home of wealthy Americans who have emigrated to Israel. They live in a vast apartment directly overlooking the Temple Mount. Before dinner, I am assisting the maid in preparing plates of gefilte fish at the kitchen counter, and I find myself directly in front of an arched window, framed in Jerusalem stone. Through the window is a view so iconic as to seem positively unreal: highlighted against a sky of dark blue velvet and dramatically moonlit, is the golden Dome of the Rock—the Qubbat al-Sakhrah—the mosaics on its octagonal architrave so vivid and close that, had I been able to read Arabic, I would have been able to understand the words so beautifully figured upon it.