THE CAPTURE OF JERUSALEM

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JERUSALEM DAY
(Continued)

THE CAPTURE OF JERUSALEM
King David captured Jerusalem using only his standing forces. That is, he did not call up his reserves from the 12 Israelite tribes and he did not use a general levy or conscription of the Israelites. In this way, no one could dispute the royal possession of the conquered city and no one tribe could lay claim to the city.

The manner in which King David captured Jerusalem is something that we would expect to see in a modern-day "action" movie. Fortress Jerusalem had an underground water tunnel cut through the rock that let to the springs outside the city. The commander of King David's forces was a man by the name of Yoav. Yoav led his forces up the water tunnel in almost total darkness in full battle gear. They had to scale a sheer rock wall many meters high. In this way, they came out from under the city wall and took the entire city by surprise.

Do any of you remember the movie, the Guns of Navarone with Gregory Peck? Do you remember Gregory Peck and his men scaling the cliff of this island fortress? Then just imagine that the way in which King David captured Jerusalem was many times more difficult.

JERUSALEM DURING THE MACCABEAN WARS
It is perhaps a curious coincidence that during the Maccabean wars, Jewish forces completed their liberation of all of Jerusalem from the Greeks on the 23rd of Iyar 141 BCE. This is only 5 days before the date upon which Jerusalem Day is celebrated today. The resulting Jewish Hasmonean Kingdom included what is now the West Bank and Jordan.

The Roman Historian Philo described Jerusalem as being the administrative center of Judea and the capital of the Jewish nation. Pliny the Elder wrote that Jewish Jerusalem was the most famous of the great cities of the East. Nowhere does Pliny the Elder mention anything about Palestinian Arabs. The Palestinians did not exist at this time in history. (Sorry, we certainly do not mean to offend anybody. This is simply a historical fact).

THE THIRD TEMPLE
In the western world, everyone has heard of the Roman emperor Constantine who converted to Christianity and made Christianity the official religion of the Roman Empire, especially at the council of Nicaea. Few people are aware that Christianity suffered a serious setback when the emperor Julian reverted to the ancient Greek religion and then suddenly started to favor Judaism. In the year 363 he ordered the reconstruction of the Jewish Temple in Jerusalem. In other words, this was to be the Third Temple.

There were unconfirmed rumors that the Emperor Julian was seriously considering converting to Judaism. If he had, history as we know it, would have taken a radically different turn. Judaism might possibly have replaced Christianity as the official religion of the Roman Empire. As things turned out, there was a huge fire in the building storehouses at the Temple reconstruction site in Jerusalem. The project was temporarily suspended. The Emperer Julian left to fight in the Persian Campaign, and it was in Persia that Julian was killed. The next Roman emperor, Jovian, put an end to the Temple project.

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