The 70 long years of the Babylonian exile had ended. Darius, the benevolent Persian king, son of Queen Esther and King Achashverosh, granted his Jewish subjects permission to return to Zion and rebuild their Temple.1 The Mishnah tells us that the returning Jews made an engraving of Shushan,2 the capital of the Persian Empire, above […]
“Those who trust in the Lord shall be like Mount Zion, which cannot be moved but abides forever” (Psalms 125:1). Dr. Ari Zivotofsky’s well-presented article “What’s the Truth about … King David’s Tomb?” addresses the question of the true location of King David’s Tomb from a Biblical as well as an archaeological perspective. In the […]
Rabbi Leibel Reznick Asks: When Was the Second Temple Really Destroyed? PART I The year is 255 ce. The place is Dura-Europos, a Roman garrison town [in modern-day Syria] on the western bank of the Euphrates. The elderly Reb Shmuel HaKohen looks around his synagogue. The morning service is about to end. He knows that […]
Our story of the secret chambers of the Temple Mount begins in the early 1860s. At that time, more than half of Jerusalem’s Jewish and Christian populations were suffering from the ill effects of the city’s polluted water supply.