The Bloodiest Holy Place on Earth

There is a rock in Jerusalem, barely a small mountain, and thousands of people have died to protect it for over 3,000 years. And it currently sits under a golden dome on a concrete platform about the size of a few city blocks. This is the Temple Mount. Jews believe it's where God gathered the dust to create Adam, where Abraham raised the knife to kill his own son and where God's presence physically touched the earth. Now Muslims believe it's where the prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him, was taken in the middle of the night where he ascended through the seven heavens and where he stood in the presence of God. And for Christians, it's the spot where the entire faith originated. Where Christ prophesied its destruction and declared he was the new temple. 12 empires over 3,000 years and three major religions centered around one rock. And not one of them has ever yet been able to hold onto it for good. Because this mountain has been built on burned down, buried, renamed, conquered, cleared out, crowned and gold and taken back over and over and over again. And today we are tracing all of it. From before Abraham through the Babylonian and Persian empires through the Crusades, World War II all the way up to today. And we are going to uncover what this place actually is and why it is so extremely important to all these groups of people. So if you were interested in Abrahamic theology and understanding why so many different religions are all fighting over this one piece of land. Well, this is the episode for you. So sit back, relax and welcome to Religion Camp. (chanting) What's up people and welcome back to Religion Camp. My name is Mark Gagnon and thank you so much for joining me in my tent where every single Sunday we explore the most interesting fascinating controversial stories from all religions from all time forever. Yes, that is what I do here in this very tent. 'Cause I try to understand what everybody on this giant big beautiful blue earth believes. That is what I'm trying to do here. Is I do this show for two reasons. One, I wanna understand what everyone is really doing here, right? Like I truly believe that for most people God is the center of their life. And even if you're just culturally a part of a religion, it is a part of you. And so for me to become a better human being on this earth, I wanna know what everyone believes. I hate meeting people with different religions and not knowing the essence of who they are and how they orient their life. So I try to be a better human being by doing the research. Furthermore, I try to take all the great things from every religion and I apply them to my own life so I can be a better human being. And I find these through lines across all the religions and I go, "Oh, this is what humanity is really all about." So I take the good stuff and I leave the rest. Now, today we have a fantastic episode. That is quite controversial. So before we jump in, I wanna say a few things. First off, I wanna thank you. I wanna say thanks to you, dude, for tuning into this episode or lady. Whoever you are, I wanna say thanks for clicking. Because every time you click an episode, YouTube's Spotify, you interact with the content, you comment, like, subscribe. Any of that stuff, you help the show grow, you keep the lights on in the tent and you keep the fire burning here at the campsite. Truly, I'm grateful for your time. Thank you very much. I'm also grateful for someone else's time. My good pal, (speaks in foreign language) How are you, my friend? - Great to disagree. - All right. Wait, the greedy disagree, what? - Nothing. - What? - Christus, you're already starting off so combative. Ugh, the Greek freak himself. He gets too close to the motherland. It comes back with all this tenacity. It's crazy. Now, let me just say before we begin, I am not a theologian. I'm not a religious scholar. I am just a standard comedian with a Wi-Fi connection and a great friend that helps me research stuff, shout out to Sophia. So I'm gonna be jumping into this episode. That is long contested. I mean, the topic we're discussing today is quite the barn burner. So I just wanna point this out, I am Catholic. I grew up Catholic and I don't, I don't profess to be an expert in any other faith. Even my own faith, I'm not an expert. I'm not a priest or a deacon or anything like that. I just am curious. So I'm trying to operate with this episode with good faith. I know it's extremely controversial and there's going to be a lot of people that feel very strongly about this specific topic. So what I'm trying to do today is try to go forward in good faith, like I said. I want to understand all the sides and I'm going to try to present every side in the best possible argument. I want every person that listens to this to feel represented and be like, oh yeah, he explains sort of my perspective pretty well here and ideally at the end of this, you can come away with your own conclusions. That's all I'm trying to do. So let me say, if there's anything that I miss or anything that I overlook, by all means, drop a comment, let me know. I would love to be informed. I have no fear of being corrected and ultimately I am pursuing truth. So if there's anything that I miss, please drop a comment. Just be nice about it. Okay, we got a nice little enclave on the internet and I like to keep it that way. So just try to keep it civil if you can. And even if I don't respond to the comment, I'm sure someone else will see it and it'll be productive to them and their journey. So the Temple Mount, where do we even start? This is such a massive topic. It's really hard to even know where it begins because it is such a massively important place to like everyone, really. Like it's so many people are connected to this place and a lot of people feel strongly about it and they may not even really know where it is or what it is. So let's just start there, right? Like what is the Temple Mount physically? Okay, it is a giant raised platform in the southeast corner of the old city of Jerusalem. About 37 acres, all total, flat on top, like a table and it sits on top of a hill that the Peaboo Bible calls Mount Moriah. Hey, real quick, most people who watch this channel aren't subscribed and when you subscribe, you help the channel grow and you stay in the loop with every new drop, religion camp, history camp and camp gagged on it. Now let's get back to it. Now I keep saying that word platform and I used that word for a specific reason. It's important and we're gonna come back to that later. It's very significant. Now up on that platform, there are two buildings that you have absolutely seen pictures of. There's a picture of it on the screen right now. And even if you don't really know what I'm talking about, maybe you come from a totally different faith tradition or you're not super tapped into geopolitics, you've probably seen this. The first is the giant golden dome, gleaming, the sort of octagonal right in the center and that is the dome of the rock. And this is the single most common mistake that people will make about this place. The dome of the rock is not a mosque. It's a shrine built over one specific sacred rock and we will get into why that rock specifically is so important. The actual mosque is the other building, the silver gray dome off to the south side. That is the al-oxa mosque. So to be clear, al-oxa is the mosque. The golden dome, that's the shrine. Two different buildings, two different things. And this kind of trips people up, where you know, you hear the news, they talk about like clashes at al-oxa and a lot of times like they're using al-oxa as like a nickname for the whole compound, which just makes it more confusing. And you know, the news will kind of conflate them sometimes just to like be easy. They'll show a picture of like the golden dome. They'll be like al-oxa. So there's a difference. And one more piece of this, down at the base of that platform, on the western side, there's a stretch of ancient stone wall. You have absolutely seen this. And this is where people will press their heads to the stone and perhaps they'll, you know, tuck little pieces of paper with prayers into the cracks. That is the western wall. Now here's the key thing. It is not a wall of the temple. It is a piece of the wall holding the entire platform up. Now, here's where things will get very tense. The Jews have a name for this place. They call it Har-habait. This is the mountain of the house. And the Muslims have a totally different name for it. They call it Haram al Sharif. This is the Noble Sanctuary. And those are just two translations of the same thing. They are two fundamentally different claims about what this ground is like on a categorical level. 'Cause the name of place is to kind of claim it in a way, right? Like if you name something, you kind of have ownership over it. And for three thousand years, people have been fighting over these rights to these 37 acres. Why? What is the significance of this platform of these stones of this, you know, relatively small plot of land? Well, that is where we're going next. So we're gonna go all the way back to the beginning. And I mean like literally the beginning, long before there was ever a temple there at all. Now, this is something that surprised a lot of people. We tend to think that the story starts with a temple, right? Like the one that King Solomon builds, lots of gold, Ark of the Covenant, all that good stuff. But the sacredness of this spot, according to ancient Jewish tradition, actually goes way back, way farther back than the temple. Now, what I'm going to tell you about is sacred tradition. This is religion camp after all, okay? We are going with what the rabbinic sources say. It is not a documentary of verified historical events across all sources. So this comes from a very specific people and a very specific religious tradition hence the name of the show. So I'm going to try to flag details like that whenever we get up to like that line that way you know what we're actually talking about. So here is what the Jewish tradition holds. According to rabbinic sources, this exact rock, the one under the golden dome, isn't just where a temple stood, it is the center of creation itself. They say it is where God gathered the dust to form Adam. Be very first human. Some traditions say Adam was created in this very spot. They say it is where Cain and Abel brought the first sacrifices in human history. They say it's where Noah built his altar after stepping off the Ark into a washed, clean world. So in this view, it's not just Holy Ground, it is like the foundation of the entire world as we know it. Like the literal point where heaven and earth touch, the seam of the universe. You could think of it that way. According to these religions in this tradition. Now does archeology back up the claims about Adam Noah? Technically no. Those are theological claims, not historical ones so we can keep that in mind. But here's what archeology does tell us. And it's pretty wild in its own right. Apparently there is evidence of people living on and around this hill that dates back to like the early, bronze age. We're talking before 3000 BC. So this ground is already ancient, like it was already ancient even at the time of the building of the temple, right? It was already occupied, already worked by human hands, thousands of years before Abraham even was supposed to have showed up, right? Now, speaking of Abraham, this spot, again, according to tradition, is where arguably the single most gut-wrenching story in the entire Hebrew Bible takes place, and it is called the binding of Isaac. This is the story where God basically tests Abraham. If you went to Sunday school, he probably heard of it. He tells him to take his son. His only son, the son he waited for a lifetime for, up a mountain and sacrifice him. And Abraham, though he's agonized and tormented by this request, he obeys the Lord. He builds an altar, binds his son, raises the knife to kill his child, and at the last possible second, an angel stops his hand. And the mountain where that happened is, according to Jewish literature, Mount Moriah. Now, picture that story, a father, a son, a knife, sacrifice, mountain, all that stuff, because it is about to matter very much to three different religions, all of whom look at the same rock, the same piece of land, Mount Moriah, and all of them see something that they cannot give up, which brings us to the first group, the first religion who actually built something there. Now, we're going to step out of the sacred tradition for a little bit and onto, I guess you could say, like firmer historical ground, not totally firm. Mind you, ancient history rarely is, you know, concrete, but this is where generally scholars agree that the record starts to back things up. Around 3000 years ago, a king named David captured Jerusalem and he makes it his capital. And his son, Solomon, builds the first great temple in Jerusalem on this mount. Best estimates put it around like 10th century BC. And this first temple, it's a big one. They do a pretty good job with this one. In Jewish belief, this is where God's presence physically dwelled on earth in a sacred inner chamber called the Holy of Holies. And inside of it was the Ark of the Covenant. This is like a golden box made with gold and acacia wood. And it held the tablets of the Ten Commandments. It held mana. It held the budded staff of Aaron. And it represents so many things for not only Jews, but Christians as well, and even to an extent Muslims. This one room was the most sacred space in the entire religion. And only one man, the high priest, was allowed to enter it just once a year, and that's it. And he had to go through a whole purification process before he could do it. So you can see this is the spiritual center of gravity for an entire people. And then around 586 BC, the Babylonians came and they burned it to the ground. Yeah, they sacked Jerusalem, they destroyed Solomon's temple, and they dragged the Jewish people off into exile in Babylon. And after that is when the Ark of the Covenant simply just vanishes from history. No one knows officially what happened to it is just gone. And that's a whole other episode. And write that down actually. We should absolutely do an episode just on the Ark of the Covenant. So decades later, the Jewish exiles are now allowed to return back to Jerusalem. And they're not in charge of Jerusalem anymore. At this point, the Persians are still under the leadership of two Jewish figures named Ezra and the Amaya. They try to rebuild what Solomon had done and they make the second temple. And to be honest, it's way more of a modest building. They didn't have the resources or the manpower or the money that Solomon had the first time around. The glory days were, you know, maybe behind them in terms of what they could build. And, you know, they stay that way for about 500 years until a very ambitious, very paranoid and very wealthy king shows up. His name is Herod the Great. If you know your Bible stories, you probably remember him from the New Testament. And there are two important things to know about Herod for this story. First, by his time, the Persians are long gone. Now it is Rome that is officially running the show in Jerusalem, Judea. And Herod isn't an independent king. He is what they call a client king. Basically, that means Rome lets him rule Judea, where the Jews in Jerusalem are. As long as he keeps, you know, things sort of orderly and in line. And, you know, as long as he's productive and helpful to the Roman authority and stays loyal to them. Second, this is very important for the whole story. Herod's subjects don't really accept him as their real king or as their real leader, right? Like, or as a real Jew. You see, Herod's family were edumians or edumians, depending how you pronounce it. These are people from just south of Judea, who had been converted to Judaism a couple generations earlier, kind of by force. So, in the eyes of a lot of religious Jews, Herod was not genuinely Jewish. He was more like a Roman puppet who had been put in place to control them and to kind of pose as like one of them in order to, you know, rule the land. So his subjects called him a fake and Herod knew it. But then here's the part that everyone kind of skips over. Herod does something crazy. In about 20 BC, he revamps the Jewish temple. So now, why would a king that the Jews resented want to build them a bigger, more beautiful temple, more beautiful than they had had in centuries? Well, it was his move to win legitimacy with them. Remember, they did not like him, right? They didn't consider Herod to be an insider or like, legitimate. So this was his big move to prove like, yo, guys, I'm one of the boys. I'm going to y'all, I'm going to build a sick temple. See, we're all family. He was trying to win their loyalty by giving them the most magnificent house of God that the world had ever seen. Now at this point, you're probably wondering, did he have to tear down the second temple and build a new one, which would technically make it the third temple? Well, no. And here's why that matters. You see, when Herod pitched this whole idea, the Jewish priests at the time, they panicked. They were terrified like, oh, he's going to demolish our temple and then never actually build a new one. And then we would be left with nothing. So he made them a deal. He would expand it. But he was never actually allowed to tear it down. Worship never even stopped. Priests kept the sacrifices going the entire time while construction was happening all around him. So it stayed officially the second temple just expanded and supercharged. And here's the twist that I promised you earlier. Remember how I said the mountain was a platform and how that would be important? Well, Herod didn't just upgrade the temple. He rebuilt basically the whole mountain. The natural hilltop of Mount Mariah was too small for what he wanted. So Herod's engineers basically built a giant box essentially around the entire hill. These massive retaining walls and some of the stones weighed over like a hundred tons and then, you know, filled it in and paved this colossal flat platform over the top of it. Remember I mentioned that earlier how the mountain is a platform and that the word was really significant. Well, that's why Herod doubled the size of this sacred mountain by engineering it out of stones and filling it in. And now those massive retaining walls that, you know, he built to hold it up. Well, one of them is still standing to this very day and it's called the Western wall. You probably heard of it. It is the holiest prayer site in all of modern Judaism. You've probably seen photos of it. People come from all over the world. They press their hands to the stone. They pray and they weep. Sometimes it's called the whaling wall. But it's not a wall of the temple. It's one of the walls that Herod built to hold up this, you know, platform on the mountains, so to speak, which somehow makes it more remarkable in a way because it means that when you touch those stones, you are touching the actual physical ground of the ancient world. Mount Moriah itself still standing over 2000 years later. And here's why it's so impressive that it's still there because in 70 AD, the Romans burned down the second temple. To this day, the Jewish people remember that catastrophe every single year on a day of mourning and fasting. It's called Tisha Bav where they grieved their holy temple and it's been gone for two thousand years and they've gone on every year remembering this date. And that destruction that fire in 70 AD, it didn't just end an era for the Jewish people. It rewrote the future of a brand new religion that had been quietly growing in the shadow of that temple, a brand new religion that God basically didn't need a temple anymore because God became a man. And they said that this man was Jesus Christ. Now, Christianity's claim to the site is not as intense as the other two. It's not as, you know, as important, you could say, to to Jews and to Muslims. So you won't really see church denominations fighting to control the platform or anything, but its significance is woven right into the gospels more than I think most Christians really realize. For example, the gospels describe Jesus teaching in the temple courts and it would be the one that, you know, Herod built. They also described one of the only moments where we see Jesus actually get angry. It's the story where he walks in. He sees the merchants and the money changers basically turning the temple into a marketplace and he gets pissed and he goes and he starts flipping the tables and he drives them out saying literally, you've turned my father's house into a den of thieves. You've probably heard that story. That was at the second temple on the platform on Mount Mariah. But here's how it all connects. There's another story in the gospels where Jesus looked at that magnificent gleaming temple, Herod's masterpiece, the pride of the entire nation. And he predicted its total destruction. Not one stone, he said would be left on another. And then in 70 AD, it happened. The Romans completely burned it down. For the early Christians, that was a earth-shaking revelation. The temple falling actually confirmed a whole new theology for them that called back to Jesus' words. It's this idea that God's presence was no longer tied to a building. That because of Jesus Christ, God himself was now among the people in the flesh like Jesus becomes the new temple. And then after Jesus ascends into heaven, he sent the Holy Spirit to be with his followers, which is the Spirit of God that the New Testament also says dwells within its believers. That's actually the origin of the popular phrase, "Your body is a temple." It comes from this Christian teaching from Jesus that God doesn't need the temple anymore because he dwells within us. So yeah, Christians don't have the same kind of sacred attachment to this piece of land to the temple mount because of that reason. But that being said, it is still sacred to Jews as the site of the temple and the center of creation, it's woven into Christianity as the place of Jesus' final teaching and a very significant prophecy being fulfilled. So that is two of the three great Abrahamic faiths already layered on top of each other on the same 37 acres. But the third one hasn't arrived yet officially. And when it does, it will change the temple mount forever because a mosque is about to be added to the skyline. So before Islam arrives, there is a gap of a few hundred years. And this gap is very important and it actually gets left out of almost every version of the story. So after the Romans destroy the temple in 70 AD, they didn't stop there. A few decades later, after yet another Jewish revolt, the emperor Hadrian decided to basically erase Jewish Jerusalem entirely and he renamed the entire city. Today's episode is sponsored by Incogni. There is a religious idea that God knows everything about you, whether you are Christian or Muslim or Jewish. God knows all. He knows your mistakes, your thoughts, what you've done, what you're going to do. And that's really comforting when it's coming from God. It's a little less comforting when it's some random company that you've never heard of that happens to own all your data. 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The sweepstakes ends September 18, 2026. And official rules apply. Go check out Brunt. Now let's get back to the show. He basically goes, "Hey, this isn't Jerusalem anymore." And he calls it Aliyah Kapitalina. He moved after himself and a Roman god. He banned Jews from even entering the city. And on the sacred sites, he built pagan Roman shrines. And then history turns again. And this is crazy because Rome itself becomes Christian. And Jerusalem transforms not into a Jewish city and not yet an Islamic one, but for a time into a Christian holy city and it lasted that way for centuries. So when Islam finally arrives at this mountain and it's coming in a minute here, it's not building on top of a functioning Jewish temple. Now of course, to Jews, they say this is our holy place, this is where God created Adam. But technically in the historical record, Christian and Christian Romans are kind of in charge of it. So the Jewish temple had already been gone for almost 600 years, six centuries. That's like the same amount of distance in time between us today looking back at like before Columbus sailed. So by the time Islam arrives in Jerusalem, the temple was kind of an ancient memory. The mount itself, according to several accounts, had been left as a neglected ruin, even used as a garbage dump during the Christian centuries. So that ground was holy, demolished, abandoned, and then holy again, then demolished again, and then sort of ignored for several centuries. And that detail matters enormously for the arguments that people are still having about it today, which brings us to the next part of the story. And it begins with what they call the night journey. So in the early 600s AD in Arabia, there's a man named Muhammad, peace be upon him, which for the record, I'm really going to say his name a lot. I'm just going to say peace be upon him one time that way we can keep going. He began preaching a new faith and that faith is Islam. And there's one night, according to Islamic tradition, that ties this new religion directly to Jerusalem. And it's called the Isra and the Medra. It's the night journey. And the tradition basically tells it like this. And once again, as a disclaimer, this is a theological analysis and not necessarily a verified historical one. So according to Muslims and a single miraculous night, the prophet Muhammad is carried from Mecca to the farthest mosque, riding a heavenly winged creature called a burakh. And from that spot, a rock on a small mountain, he ascends up through the seven heavens, meets the earlier prophets, including Abraham, Moses, and Jesus. And then comes into the presence of Allah, into the actual presence of God. And that rock that he has said to have ascended from, it's not just a random mountain, yes, it is the temple mount. So the obvious question, did God tell the prophet Muhammad to build a mosque there? Well, technically no. Nothing in the story is a construction order. God never tells Muhammad directly like, hey, build something right on the temple mount in Jerusalem. In the tradition, he's there for one night and then he's gone. He dies in Arabia in 632 AD, never having actually ruled in the city of Jerusalem. And here is some important nuance. The Quran itself tells us next to nothing about this night. There's really only one verse that talks about it and we'll get into it in a second. All the vivid details about this story, like the giant flying creature, the seven heavens, feeding the prophets, praying to them, all these come from the Hadith, the collected reports of Prophet Muhammad's words and actions while on earth compiled after his death. So the Quran gives the seed, but the Hadith is ultimately what elaborates. So Islam building on this mount didn't come directly from Muhammad at all. They come later from the caliphs that ruled after him. But let's go back to that verse from the Quran. It's chapter 17, verse 1. It says, the Prophet Muhammad was carried to the farthest mosque. So in Arabic, the farthest mosque is al-Masjid al-Aqsa. And that right there is where the name al-Aqsa comes from. Al-Aqsa is the name of the mosque built on the temple mount. It's the silver gray dome on the south end of the platform. That is the working house of prayer. And the dome of the rock is a totally different building. It's a golden dome placed dead center on the platform and built directly over the sacred rock. And it is not a mosque. It never was. It was built as a shrine, a place you go to see and honor a holy thing. Not the place the community gathered for prayer and we'll talk more about that building in just a second. So the two Islamic buildings, the same platform, they have different jobs. Now remember, the Quran said that Muhammad was carried to the farthest mosque. That Quranic verse doesn't actually contain the word Jerusalem. It just says the farthest mosque and the traditional understanding and interpretation of that included Jerusalem. And I want to be really clear about what that does and doesn't mean because obviously this is a very sacred and sensitive topic for a lot of people. So while the text doesn't explicitly say Jerusalem, the traditional understanding of of that did. come to include Jerusalem, like quite early in its development. And it wasn't just like a later add on. It's an understanding that had been embedded and agreed upon in Islamic tradition for 14th century, basically. And to be honest, this is completely normal for how these sort of ancient sacred texts work. Remember that Hebrew Bible calls the mountain Mariah, and Jews had to work out that Mariah meant this hill too. Like scripture names a place, and then the tradition is ultimately what defines it. That's the standard process for basically all these religions. And I'm breaking down the mechanics behind this because knowing how a claim got established in tradition is just as important as understanding the text and understanding where the text is saying that it's supposed to be. It's not to poke holes in it. It's to understand more fully and more honestly how these places became so important. Now here's another detail that most people probably never heard. In the earliest days of Islam, when Muslims prayed, they didn't face Mecca. They actually faced Jerusalem. The direction of prayer is called the Kibla. And Jerusalem was Islam's first Kibla before it shifted to Mecca. That's how central this city was to the young faith of Islam. So how did Muslims actually end up taking control of the mountain then? Wasn't it under Christian rule? Well, in 637 AD, five years after the Prophet Muhammad's death, Muslim armies arrived at Jerusalem, which of course had been Christian under Roman rule and then later under Byzantine rule and had been that way for centuries. The city's first Christian patriarch, Sofronius refused to surrender to a general. He'd only hand over the keys to the caliph himself. So the caliph at the time, caliph Umar, traveled there personally to accept it. And the confrontation didn't end in massacre. It was just kind of surrendered. And here's what the caliph Umar does. Under new Muslim rule, he doesn't expel the Christians. He doesn't seize their churches or make them slaves or anything. He actually signs an agreement protecting their lives and their property and maybe most importantly, their right to worship in exchange for attacks. So the Christians stayed, their church is stayed and they were generally safe with their rights protected. And then Umar went right up to the temple mount and remember what the Christians had left up there that neglected kind of, you know, ruin? Well, he had it cleared. And on that cleaned ground, around 637, immediately after the conquest, he put up a simple modest prayer house. Nothing fancy, basically like a very plain wooden structure. And that humble little building is the seed that would eventually grow into this grand elaborate and beautiful mosque that we now know as Al-Aqsa. But that wouldn't happen for a really long time because, and this is pretty surprising, the order these structures get built in is backwards from what you would expect. So remember how I said there's like a mosque and a shrine? Well, the shrine came first, around 691 AD, about 50ish years after Umar put up that little prayer house and Umayyad Caliph named Ab Al Malik built dome of the rock. That is the octagonal shrine that we mentioned earlier with the golden dome and placed it directly on the center of the platform over a sacred rock. All the little fun fact, the famous golden dome wasn't always gold, the gold plating you see in every photo is actually added in the 20th century. And then between 7505 and 715 AD, that's when they built the mosque. It's Ab Al Malik's son, a Caliph named Al Walid who takes Umar's humble prayer house and then rebuilds it into something monumental. So let's just review the timeline in order because it gets a little bit confusing. 637 Umar clears the mount and builds a very simple little prayer house. 691, the dome of the rock, that is the shrine that goes up. 7505 to 715, the grand al-Aqsa mosque replaces that humble little prayer house. Roughly over 70 years and overseen by three Caliphs and the skyline of Jerusalem is completely changed. Now to be clear, these buildings didn't make this ground holy to Muslims. The sanctity came from their centrality to the night journey. And then the buildings were later an expression of it. And it's also worth noting that Muslims also share the same prophets as Judaism and Christianity. So the stories of Adam and Abraham and Noah are all very important and very central to the Muslim faith. So as a result, this ground is also important to them for that shared history. Now with that, the ground stands as the third holiest site in all of Islam, only after Mecca and Medina. And now finally, all three faiths have roots on this one sacred piece of land. All three layered into the same 37 acres. And for about four and a half centuries, it stayed under Islamic rule until an army marched out of Europe with a giant red cross on its banner. The year is 1099 and it is the year of the first crusade. And we actually have a couple episodes breaking down the crusades over on history camps. You can definitely check those out. And the stories are crazy and super in depth to try to put them in here. But we're just going to cover the main points that way, you understand how the crusades affect the temple mount. So the crusaders march from Europe into the east and after a brutal siege, they take Jerusalem. And with it, they take the temple mount. And immediately they claim and rename this Islamic building. So they stick a giant cross on top of the dome of the rock and they convert it into a Christian church. They call it the Templum Domini, the Temple of the Lord. And then they turn the Al-Aqsa mosque into a royal palace, handing part of it over to this brand new order of warrior monks. And this is maybe the most interesting part of the episode to me. Let's talk about these warrior monks. So the crusaders were convinced that the Al-Aqsa mosque was Solomon's Temple, or at least was built right on top of its ruins, which as we know it wasn't. Solomon's Temple had been basically destroyed for over 1,200 years by then. And Al-Aqsa was built completely fresh in the 700s. Plus, the mosque was at the southern edge of the platform. Well, it seems that the actual temples almost certainly stood dead center on top of the rock, which is directly under the dome. So they got the error wrong by more than a millennium and the location wrong by a couple hundred feet. But regardless, they believed it. They thought that it was Solomon's Temple. And so they called it the Temple of Solomon. And this new order of warrior monks, well, they were headquartered there. And they named themselves after it. They called themselves the Knights of the Temple, or better known as the Knights Templar. And that's it. That's where the name comes from. One of the most famous, most mythologized, most theorized, secret orders in all of human history, the Templars got their name because they were literally camped out on top of this platform, on Mount Moriah in a building that they thought were the remains of Solomon's Temple. Again, we've done deep dives on the Knights Templars and other episodes, so you should definitely check it out. It is a fascinating history. And I definitely recommend you jump over to History Camp and the main channel to check those out. But anyway, the crusaders hold in Jerusalem. It didn't last. In 1187, a Muslim leader rides in and they takes it all back. In his name, you probably heard it is saladin. And we've actually done a whole episode on him as well, if you want to know more about him. But in short, he recaps your Jerusalem, tears the cross off the dome, and restores the site as an Islamic sanctuary. And there it stays, in Muslim hands for centuries, which brings us up to the group whose history is all over what you see if you visit today. And almost really no one gives them credit for it. It's the Ottomans. For nearly 400 years, the Ottoman Empire ruled Jerusalem. And their most famous sultan, Suleiman, the magnificent rebuilt the Great Walls that still surround the old city today. So much of what you see in Jerusalem right now, if you go there or if you live there, those enormous walls and gates, that's actually Ottoman. And then the Ottoman Empire fell in the 20th century. And then World War I breaks it apart. And in December of 1917, British forces marched into Jerusalem, ending four centuries of Ottoman rule over the city. A few years later, in the early 1920s, that wartime occupation actually got formalized. And the League of Nations handed Britain official control of the area. And they basically called it the British mandate. Now to be clear, I'm skipping over a lot here. The mandate years definitely deserve their own episode. And we'll probably do that. But here's what you need to know for this story. The British created a problem for themselves. They've made promises to both sides, support for a Jewish homeland, and then separately commitments to the era population that was living there. And those two promises can't both be kept. So for about 25 years, Britain tried to govern the territory where two peoples had each been told essentially that the land would eventually be theirs. And as you can imagine, this went extremely badly. Classic British colonialism. They're like, we got two different ethnic groups in here that believe two different things and don't really like each other. We'll keep them fighting and then we'll retain control, right? So as a result, violence from both communities escalated through the 1930s and 40s. And by the end of World War II, Britain was broke and exhausted from trying to keep hold of their entire empire and just kind of out of ideas. So in 1947, they dumped the entire problem on the newly created United Nations who proposed splitting the land into two states, one Jewish and one Arab. And Britain didn't stick around to enforce anything. In May of 1948, they dipped out handing over an unresolved problem about who this land actually belonged to. And the moment that they were gone on May 14, 1948, Israel declared itself as an independent state and war broke out immediately. Israel on one side and a coalition of neighboring Arab states on the other. Jerusalem unsurprisingly became one of the most brutal fronts of that entire war. So when the fighting actually stopped in 1949, the city was cut in half. Israel held the newer western part of Jerusalem, and Jordan's army, the Arab Legion, controlled the eastern part, which included the old city, the ancient walls, and of course the western wall. And as it pertains to this episode, the temple mount. So the holiest site and all of Judaism ended up on the Jordanian side of the line. And for the next 19 years, under Jordanian control, Jews were banned from the old city. Like completely no access to the temple mount, no access to the western wall. Now there were agreements that were supposed to give access, but they weren't really honored. So an entire generation grew up with the holiest place in their religion, sitting just a few hundred yards away, yet completely out of reach. And then that all changed in June 1967. Because over the course of just one week, everything flipped the other direction. And dropped us right into basically the world that we're living in now. June 5th through June 10th, 1967 is what they call the Six Day War. And in just six days, Israel started fought indecisively one war against several neighboring Arab states, recapturing the old city of Jerusalem in the meantime. So for the first time in nearly two thousand years, the temple mount was now under Jewish control yet again. And here's where you would expect the story to end, right? Israel controls it now. Israel's defense minister Moisha Dayan made a decision that's done the world, a decision that still shapes how the place operates to this day. He handed day-to-day control of the temple back to the Muslims. This was the deal. Israel would keep overall security, controlling the entrances, but the actual religious administration of the site, like who praised there, how it's run, that stayed with the Islamic religious trust called the Wachv, then it's basically overseen by Jordan. Muslims are allowed to pray up on the mount. And non-Muslims that include Christian and Jews, they're allowed to visit during limited hours, but under the traditional arrangement, they are technically not allowed to pray up there. A Jew who actually wanted to pray would go down to the western wall below instead. Now why would Israel agree to that? Well, partially to keep the peace, but also because of something else, something kind of surprising. A huge number of Orthodox rabbis actually agree that Jews shouldn't go up there. And not only that, they don't want another Jewish temple built on that mount. That's actually a huge internal debate that almost no one really outside of Judaism really knows about, but why? Why shouldn't they go up there and why don't they want another temple on the whole is site in all Jewish history where their other temples were? Well, I'll tell you. And the answer really splits the Jewish world in half. The truth is, for many Orthodox Jews, the problem is ritual purity. So to even set foot on the most sacred zones of the temple, tradition requires a state of purification that they believe isn't fully possible today. And on top of that, nobody today knows the exact location of the ancient holy of Holies, that most sacred inner chamber, and accidentally walking across that spot in an impure state would be an extremely grave sin. So the safest option, according to many rabbinic authorities, is, "Hey, don't go up there at all," which is exactly why for a long time mainstream Orthodox Judaism actually discouraged Jews from ascending the mount, not because they doubted that it was holy, but because they believed it was too holy to risk going up there in a ritually impure state. And here's a shift, that consensus has been cracking. A growing minority of rabbis now argue that the boundaries can be worked out, that Jews can safely enter certain outer areas after proper preparation. And outside of them, there's a passionate activist movement, sometimes called the temple mount movement of religious Jews who don't just want to visit in prey, they want to fully see the temple rebuilt, an actual third temple on the actual mountain. Now, you don't have to be some type of political scientist to see the problem here, right? Because there's no empty lot up there waiting for a third temple. There is the dome of the rock, a very important Muslim shrine, and the al-Aqsa mosque, the third holiest site in Islam, is sitting exactly where the most fervent activists want to build. And now, of course, the problem gets bigger, because we're not just dealing with a contested site anymore, we're dealing with activists who fight to take it. Now, I could spend way too much time on the violence that has erupted around the temple mount in the last 50 years or so, but I'm not going to, because that's not really the point of the episode. Maybe a different time will do a whole deep dive on all these moments, but it is a lot and people have written entire books on just individual weeks. But at the end of the day, every one of them is a different person, a different grievance, a different decade, and a different chaos that erupts, and the mountain is what stayed. So instead of covering incidents right now, I want to just draw your attention to the pattern underneath all these incidents. Every so often, the calendars of all three religions collide. So you have the most holy month of Islam, known as Ramadan, the Jewish festival of Passover, perhaps one of the most important days for Jews, and the Christian season of Easter. And sometimes they all sync up at once. And suddenly, this tiny old city is flooded with devout worshipers from three different faiths all converging on the same sacred spot. So where does all of the stand right now in 2026? The honest answer is the status quo is cracking in real time. Like right now, there's no total consensus from anyone. For decades, the ironclad rule was, hey, Jews don't drown the Mount, but over the last few years, that's been changing. Reporting through 2025 into 2026 describes Jewish visitors openly praying on the Mount, then organized prayer groups gathering during certain hours in specific areas, which is something that didn't really happen a few decades ago. By some counts, tens of thousands of Jews are now ascending the Mount each year, a number that's been climbing sharply. Now Israeli officials have publicly insisted the status quo was not changed, but critics and plenty of observers on the ground argue that in practice, it already has. That's the old rule being eroded, slowly, you know, one prayer at a time. So we can reframe the stakes together because the lazy version of the story is like, you know, two sides who can't agree on who owns a rock, like people will sometimes describe it as like, you know, religious people being dumb. I don't think that cuts it because it's that each community's claim is grounded in something real to them. A different sacred tradition, a different lived history, I mean, a different set of laws and like, you know, personal losses to the land. So when a devout Jew stands at that wall, they're standing at the last remnant of the center of the world, literally where God created Adam, when a Muslim prays at Al-Aqsa, they are praying at the place where their prophet ascended to heaven, literally the place where all Muslims would pray before they turned their attention to Mecca. When a Christian stands in those courts, they're walking where God himself became man and purified the house of his father and kicked out the den of thieves. And each one of these groups has historically occupied this space for different periods of time. So, yeah, there are multiple layers that make this site, this crazy mountain rock turned platform, this temple mount, and it's just insanely complicated. So let's go back to the first question that I asked, the one from like the very beginning, the one that I was telling you to kind of hold on to, not like who owns a temple mount, but why? Generation after generation, empire to empire to do, human beings keep looking at this one hill and feel absolutely certain and has to be theirs. Well, remember, none of these were just meaningless land grabs. Those were people who genuinely believed heaven touched down right there and they basically spent everything they had to show honor to it and to try to make themselves worthy of it. Now let's review sort of the roll call, like who had this land at one period of time and what did they do? Right? Let's just kind of go through the whole thing. So from what we know, the Egyptians were there and then the Jews were there, the Babylonians then burned the first temple, then the Persians let the exiles rebuild it, then the Greeks came and then the Romans burned the second temple and then the Romans and Herod expanded the second temple and then the Byzantines made a Christian and then the Umayids raised the golden dome and then the crusaders planted their cross and then saladine tore it down and then the Ottomans ruled it for four centuries and then the British mandate came and then the Jordanians inherited it and now it's the Israelis. Every one of them, every single one believes that they were the final chapter that the question of who controls this holy place was closed and that the mountain was theirs and every one of them in time they watched it slip through their fingers and pass it on to someone else. The stones hold up a Jewish wall, an Islamic shrine and mosque and the memory of Christ's body, the new temple, all at once. And maybe that's the thing to take away from this 3,000 year long story that the deepest human hunger isn't just to believe in something sacred, it is too belonged to something bigger than yourself. It's to be a part of your people to fight for your ancestors and to be connected to your history. And the temple mount, well, it's a part of all of those stories outlasting everyone who ever tried to claim it once and for all and very possibly will outlast us too. And that ladies and gentlemen is a very brief history of the temple mount and why it is so important to all the Abrahamic faiths. I mean, it is a fascinating place. I would love to go there truly like I would love to stand there and to see like what the energy is like and from every different perspective I can understand like I know it's You know, maybe it's controversial to say. they like, you know, I get it. But I get why the Jews are so connected to it. They're like, yeah, this was ours. We had our temple here. I can get why the Muslims are so connected to it. They're like, hey, we have our mosque here. It's like the third holiest place. And, you know, we're operating the day-to-day function. And for Christians, it is less important because Christ, as I said, embodies that new temple. But still, it is important to all of us. And I think that all these religious groups should have some type of ability to engage with this place. And, I mean, yeah, I can understand why there's so much violence. It's a shame, and I wish that there wasn't. But, you know, I get it. And I try to do this episode and represent every faith with, you know, trying to show their perspective as well as possible so that maybe if you're from a different perspective, or maybe you're completely outside of all of this, maybe you're Hindu, and you're like, what are they doing over there? What is all this hoopla that they're doing? Well, maybe you can understand why every different group feels so connected. Maybe one day we'll find peace in our days. I am unsure of it, but it is my hope for humanity. Creasers, anything you learned? Don't you wish the Greek Orthodox set up a little tent over there? Sure, they were there at some point, but fair. But don't you wish they had like a little, don't you wish you walked in and you're like, that's my icon, you know? Honestly, I don't think I wanted any part of what's going on over there. Yeah, it is a lot. I see it. You guys are just kind of waiting in the corner. You're kind of posted up. You're gonna let everyone else do you get out and then the Greeks are gonna come in the last minute and be like, we can settle this. I don't appreciate that, but I will say it's awesome that not awesome, but interesting that all three of the holidays of the three different religious groups sometimes overlap on the same period of time. Oh, yeah, I think Don passed over in Easter. I think last year they did in April. I'm almost positive, like they all, they all synced up. And you know what? It was fun. I mean, it was fun over here in New York. Sure. And Brooklyn, I didn't really, I didn't really notice. It seemed like everyone was having a great time. Yeah, you know? But maybe over there I got a little tense. But can we all just like be like, hey, you, I mean, we're doing it. Yeah, you pray to, you pray to Allah, you pray to Hashem, I'll pray to Jesus and we're good. Now, hear me out. Let's just draw a line to three parts. Oh, however many it is now. Y'all stay over there, we'll stay over here. Well, you got this part. Hot take, give it to the Mormons. They do a pretty good job of like diplomatic work. Or maybe the hindus. The hind, no, because the hindus and the Muslims, we gotta find maybe the Buddhists. The last thing you want is more people. No, the Buddhists. I think the Buddhists can figure this out. Give it to the Buddhists. Let the Buddhists run it. And then the Buddhists will be like, hey guys, this is all an illusion, we're all one. And then that'll kind of help temper the vibes. And then you'll hear a new story about slain Buddhist monks. Buddhist extremism? Is that what you're talking about? I don't even know if there's such a thing as Buddhist extremism. No, the people they're trying to tell what to do. Are you gonna get them? No, you get the Buddhists suited up. You give them some. They're able to use mind trickery and like telepathy and stuff, I think. Let's try, I'll send the letter. Yeah, right to the Dalai Lama. And let them know, I'll be like, hey, the whole, the temple mount is yours. Where he's a little busy looking things. But, but think about it, the Dalai Lama is an exile. So he needs a home. And we can't decide amongst ourselves, like who's able to control the temple mount. So I'm like, yeah, let the Buddhists. You think the temple mount is the right place for the Dalai Lama? I see no better place. Yep, sounds great. Obviously I'm being facetious here. But, you know, it's such a topic of, you know, such elevated controversy. You gotta have some jest. Now guys, great news. If you like historical content, kind of like what we were talking about a little bit today with Saladin, the Crusades, well, history camp is a place for you. We go through all those stories in explicit detail. No stone is left unturned. And then if you like crazy mysteries and deep dives and conspiracy stuff, well, great news. You can check out the main channel camp, Kenya. I've spoken with different people about the Crusades and different experts and all those interviews are there at that channel. So make sure you check it out. And also I want to invite you to our secret society, our own little Knights Templar. It's where you're gonna get every episode of this show completely ad-free. You're gonna get monthly zooms. You're gonna get, you know, merch discounts and secret access to, you know, episodes that never even go out to the public. And all of that is yours for $5 a month. Now, if you just like to rock with the religious viable, great news, we do these episodes every single Sunday. So thank you so much for tuning in. I appreciate you guys being a part of this. I'm grateful for your time. And I'll see you in the future. God bless, have a beautiful Sunday. Peace be with you. Hey guys, if you love conspiracies and hypothetical history, well, I wanna invite you to check out Signal 33. This is a companion pod to our podcast here at camp. It's made and edited by the same team that runs all of our shows. And I choose the topics every single week. So check it out, subscribe and start the dialogue in the comments section.