United States or French Southern Territories ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
The word uru, "city," became yeru or yiru in Hebrew pronunciation, and between this and yireh the difference is not great. Yahveh-yireh, "the Lord sees," might also be interpreted "the Lord of Yeru." The temple-hill was emphatically "the mount of the Lord." The term reminds us of Babylonia, where the mercy-seat of the great temple of Bel-Merodach at Babylon was termed Du-azagga, "the holy hill."
However this may be, the fortress and the temple-hill were distinct from one another in the days of the Jebusites, and we may therefore assume that they were also distinct in the age of Abraham. This might explain why it was that the mountain of Moriah on the summit of which the patriarch offered his sacrifice was not enclosed within the walls of Jerusalem, and was not covered with buildings.
The mountains of the south present no striking peak or headland like Hermon and Carmel. Even Tabor belongs to the north. Ebal and Gerizim alone, above Shechem, stand out among their fellows, and were venerated as the abodes of deity from the earliest times. The temple-hill at Jerusalem owed its sanctity rather to the city within the boundaries of which it stood than to its own character.
It would seem, indeed, as though it had been the architect's intention to gradually wean the pilgrims from the physical to the spiritual, for as they began to ascend from stage to stage of the temple-hill they were insensibly drawn from material, every-day things to the realities of religion, so that by the time the dagoba at the top was reached they had passed through a course of religious instruction, as it were, and were ready, with enlightened eyes, to enter and behold the image of Buddha, symbolically left imperfect, as beyond the power of human art to realize or portray.
So, too, at Jerusalem, the altar is called "the mount of God" by Ezekiel only because it represents that greater "mount of God" upon which it was built. The temple-hill itself was the primitive Har-el. The list of conquered localities in Palestine recorded by Thothmes III. at Karnak gives indirect testimony to the same fact.
There is a passage in one of the letters of Ebed-Tob which may throw further light on the history of the temple-hill. Unfortunately one of the cuneiform characters in it is badly formed, so that its reading is not certain, and still more unfortunately this character is one of the most important in the whole paragraph. If Dr. What we read "Salim," however, is read differently by Dr.
Word Of The Day