The Jerusalem Parchment

by Tuvia Fogel

  They did and ended up inside the Golden Gate. Or would have, if workers, ladders, and materials hadn’t filled the space around the structure. Still, it was clear that had they taken the last twenty of the 395 steps, they would be standing under the gate’s disappearing arches. Yehezkel was euphoric.

  “Of course! I’m surprised Alain didn’t think of it! He knows the Gospels better than I do; he should have realized that a Christian Elisha would call the Gethsemane Sacrifice of the Heart!”

  They walked back to the Qubat Ru’aheen, Yehezkel debating with himself—but out loud, mindful of Galatea’s temper—the implications of what Elisha was suggesting. “If the Kodesh Kedoshim was under the little dome, it could mean that Omar, despite being advised by a Jew, wrongly identified the site of the Temples. Or it could mean that the converted Jew remained Jewish enough to mislead his caliph on this one, so that no abominations would be built on that spot. Then again, it could mean that Omar knew where the Temples stood but decided that Muhammad flew to Heaven from another spot, three hundred feet south. There’s no end to the possible explanations.”

  They stood once more under the little dome, gathering their thoughts. Galatea spoke first. “Surely, Yehezkel, if the Sancta Sanctorum was here—I’m thinking of my dream now—then the Gethsemane must also be where the Altar of the Red Heifer was.”

  “Of course!” said Yehezkel. “Or maybe somewhere just above the Gethsemane. And look at how Elisha relished the parallel between the ashes of the heifer overcoming the impurity of death and Jesus’s sacrifice absolving humanity of its sins—overcoming the impurity of man, as it were.”

  “And the place where they crucified and buried him he called Heart of the Messiah,” said Galatea, turning round again. Seeing the sepulchre, she added, “We counted 395 steps east, but we could never do the same walking west, Yehezkel. Within a hundred steps, we would be in the city’s alleys!”

  “True,” said Yehezkel. “But in any case, we only counted the steps to the oil, not to Sacrifice of the Heart, so we can’t yet be sure we’re right. By the way, here is a greater conundrum: the oil is the hiding place, so even if we are right, where exactly in the Golden Gate do you suppose the oil is hidden?”

  “Mmh . . . we need more confirmation before we tackle that one,” said Galatea. “First we must find a way to verify, without actually counting the steps, that the sepulchre is as far to the west of this dome as the Gethsemane is to the east . . .”

  “Yess! You’re priceless, Galatea, simply priceless! The Holy Spirit is never far from your lips!”

  She was about to ask what she’d just said that was so priceless, but Yehezkel grabbed her hand and sprinted south toward al-Aqsa. All she could do was run with him.

  Her words reminded him of his astrolabium, an object so precious it was in his pouch even on the Temple Mount. He had to find a place on a line perpendicular to the Gethsemane-sepulchre horizontal axis of the map they had just identified, the farther away and the higher off the ground the better, and then hold his instrument horizontally, instead of vertically as at sea.

  Using the astrolabium as a simple goniometer would allow him to measure the angles between dome and olive garden on one side and dome and sepulchre on the other. If the angles turned out the same, then so were the distances. And best of all, they would have confirmed it without having to count the steps, as his personal prophetess said!

  Twenty years earlier, the Ayubbids had built a women’s mosque west of al-Aqsa. Looking south from the Dome of the Spirits, Yehezkel’s eyes fell on its minaret. They ran the length of the plaza, stopping before they reached its southwestern corner to brush up and straighten each other’s clothes. He covered her hair, as he expected Waqf officials to object strenuously to the idea of two infidels climbing to the top of a minaret, even if it was just to “take a look.”

  He was right. The vizier had heard of the Jew with the sultan’s letter and knew he couldn’t win. He either disobeyed al-Kamil’s orders or provoked his ulema, who argued, not unreasonably, that “freedom to explore” didn’t mean “freedom to desecrate.” In the end, al-Hadhbânî ordered the Waqf to arrest the Jew, but only if he practiced a religious ritual, or even mumbled what looked like a prayer.

  Yehezkel found a compromise. The cleric at the foot of the minaret would climb to the muezzin’s platform with them, to ensure that what they did up there was really geography, as they claimed, and not some Jewish celebration—or worse, propitiation. As they climbed the spiral staircase inside the tower, Yehezkel thought, “Not only are they walling up the eastern gate, they fear anything Jews do on the Mount!” He smiled. “Mohammedans seem to believe in the coming of our Messiah more than we do!”

  The position was perfect, but measuring an angle precisely while holding an astrolabium horizontally is tricky, so he took two bits of wood he’d picked up in the plaza and arranged them on the platform’s low parapet so they would hold up his instrument as he kneeled behind it and sighted the map’s landmarks without needing to touch it. Galatea and the cleric watched him, intrigued, as he set up his makeshift goniometer and measured the two angles.

  After the second measurement, Galatea saw his face light up. Elisha’s map was deciphered!

  Back down on the esplanade they were overtaken by sheer, unhinged joy. They unabashedly took a few Provençal dance steps, holding hands high in the air and spinning round each other, as the cleric from the Waqf looked on in silent outrage. Then, feeling like kids playing the most exciting of games, they sat under a big cypress and planned their next move.

  Galatea said, “You know, I can see the map now. Where we are sitting must be roughly where Elisha placed the Judge of the Sons of Darkness, whatever that meant to him.”

  “But it’s the oil we’re after, Galatea,” said Yehezkel. “If my astrolabium worked from here, I think we should look for somewhere in the southeastern corner where we can use it again, to check if the Golden Gate is really halfway between the Dome of the Spirits and the Gethsemane.”

  “Sounds logical to me. Let’s go, then!” cried Galatea, grabbing his hand and dragging him off. They ran eastward across the plaza with childish enthusiasm, looking for all the world like a pair of young lovers indecorously chasing each other in a holy place.

  “Apart from the issue of respect,” thought the Waqf official watching them as they passed before al-Aqsa, “they should know they no longer have the age for this sort of thing.”

  Soon they were standing on the ramparts in the extreme southeastern corner of the esplanade, a spot from which—Yehezkel told her—more than one priest or heretic had been thrown to his death. Leaning out, she looked at the desert descending to the Dead Sea in the distance and murmured, “The shrubs look like stubble; that’s what does it. It may be holy, but the Judean desert looks like an old man’s unshaven cheeks.”

  Yehezkel walked about a hundred feet north along the top of the eastern wall before the Dome of the Spirits reappeared from behind the Dome of the Rock, which had been hiding it. He would have liked to be higher up but set up his instrument and found the angle between the little dome on the left and the Golden Gate in front of him to be exactly equal to the angle between the gate and the olive garden on his right, at the foot of the Mount of Olives. There could no longer be any doubt: the equidistances were those Elisha had drawn on the Parchment of Circles!

  They rested awhile, breaths short and heads spinning, already wondering where in the Golden Gate to look for the oil. The gate was a large structure, with walkways and chambers beside the two arches. The idea of brandishing the sultan’s letter and starting to dig in the middle of a gate the authorities were busy closing seemed too much even to them.

  “In my dream, the Levites began to sing as the high priest bearing the ashes crossed the threshold of the gate. It was where the viaduct from the altar ended.”

  “I’m on a different line of reasoning,” said he. “First, we know that the rabbis who wrote the letter in the geniza found what Hanina hid. S
econd, when Elisha drew the map, the Romans had destroyed everything: there was no more Temple, no more viaduct, no more Altar of the Red Heifer—but above all, there was no more Gate of Mercy! How could Elisha be sure that with the map what Hanina had hidden could still be found?”

  “Because it was underground!” she cried. “Yehezkel, you’re the best! I have yet to see you let down your teacher!” Without warning, she took his face in her hands, smacked a loud kiss on his forehead like a mother with her child, and ran off toward al-Aqsa.

  Yehezkel stood there, unable to breathe.

  The idea of a hiding place below the gate suggested to them the possibility of a gallery beneath the path the high priest followed, both when entering the Temple with the ashes of the red heifer and when exiting it with the scapegoat to be sent into the desert on Yom Kippur.

  “King Solomon dug chambers and hiding places deep inside the Mount, so a tunnel could exist from the time of the first Temple,” he said. “In any case, none of the tunnels the Templars dug—according to Alain’s map—is even close to the Golden Gate. Besides, if a tunnel exists that passes below the floor of the Valley of Jehosaphat, it must be so deep that its entrance would have to be at the bottom of a well!”

  His astrolabium didn’t indicate any idea of where, on the Mount of Olives, the Altar of the Red Heifer had been, for without a landmark to sight, like the domes, “so many degrees east of the Golden Gate” meant a vague patch of ground around the dozen olives next to the ruins of the Church of Gethsemane, another Latin chapel the Ayubbids tore down.

  “If a tunnel that deep has its access near the grove,” he went on, “we’ll have to look for caves, cracks in the limestone, anything that leads down . . . a long way down.”

  He peered at the Gethsemane from atop the eastern wall. “Galatea, what’s that other church I can see pilgrims going in and out of, just across from the Gethsemane on the path that climbs the Mount?”

  “I prayed there last week,” said Galatea. “It is Saint Mary of Jehosaphat, but people call it the Tomb of Mary.” On pronouncing the word tomb, she remembered the catacombs Marie had told her about. “But of course . . .Yehezkel, we just found the way to the tunnel!”

  They were too exhausted that day to descend into the Valley of Jehosaphat, and in any case Yehezkel wanted to speak with Rav Shimshon before they did, so they went back to their rooms, quietly elated in the knowledge that, just like the rabbis four hundred years earlier, they had just solved Elisha’s riddle.

  Rav Shimshon was excited to hear of the equidistances on the Mount, but the idea that the Temple had not been where the Dome of the Rock was sat uncomfortably with him.

  “What you’re saying is not without its logic, Yehezkel,” he opined, “but I still believe Ha-Shamayim in the map is the Rock under the dome.”

  “It is your right, Rav Shimshon,” said Yehezkel. “But tell me, in the days of the Temple the eastern gate was called Gate of Mercy, but do you know if the Talmud says anything else about it?”

  “Well, now you mention it,” said Rav Shimshon almost reluctantly, “it’s not in the Talmud, but a bizarre, six-hundred-year-old tradition exists on the eastern gate.” The old rabbi seemed to struggle with an unwelcome, obstinate fact that could no longer be denied. “In the year Christians call 614, the Persians took Jerusalem from the Greeks and carried off their holiest relic, the True Cross. Fifteen years later, Emperor Heraclius led a holy war against King Khosrow and almost took his capital. Not surprisingly, the resulting treaty stipulated the return of the True Cross. Knowing he’d bring it back to Jerusalem, Heraclius arranged extravagant celebrations for the spring of 629. He would personally carry the Cross onto the esplanade through a new double gate in the eastern wall, whose construction he ordered before leaving to sign the peace.”

  Galatea and Yehezkel sensed that Rav Shimshon wasn’t happy to be divulging this story. Yehezkel was listening intently, his smile implying that he knew what was coming.

  “Ehm . . . the tradition claims that the workers who dug the Golden Gate’s foundations,” concluded Rav Shimshon, “found remnants of a previous gate in the very spot Heraclius picked for the new one—the remnants, it was said at the time, of Solomon’s Shushan Gate.”

  “I knew it!” cried Yehezkel. “Don’t you see how it all fits, Rav Shimshon? Elisha’s map, the Shushan Gate, the sick workers. . . . Come on, Rabbi, you know it wasn’t ‘spirits’ that made those workers sick last summer, it was digging on the site of the Kodesh Kedoshim! The Dome of the Spirits, not the Dome of the Rock, is where the Temple was!” Then, with a grin, “And I bet they’re walling up the Golden Gate because they know it, because it’s right in front of that little dome.”

  “It’s true,” smiled Rav Shimshon, “that they began to bury their dead outside that gate when they heard that Jewish priests may not walk through a cemetery. Evidently they didn’t know that the Messiah cannot be a cohen, since he must be from the tribe of Judah.”

  Yehezkel mused aloud, “The original Gate of Mercy was destroyed by the Romans along with the Temple. Isn’t it strange that the gate Emperor Heraclius built five hundred and fifty years later was exactly on top of it? I wonder if he knew what he was doing.”

  JERUSALEM, FRIDAY, 27TH MARCH 1220

  It was a week before Passover, and thousands of Jews in Jerusalem were caught in a habitual spring-cleaning frenzy. The very next day they went for an underground inspection.

  As they crossed the rocky, windswept Valley of Jehosaphat, Galatea said jauntily, “So this time you’re going to enter a church, eh? When the three of us went to the sepulchre, you invented a meeting with important rabbis so you wouldn’t have to come with us.”

  “But . . . but I really did see some famous rabbis that day.”

  “Oh come, Yehezkel! Everyone in Jerusalem knows Jews don’t set foot in churches. Did you really think I wouldn’t hear of it? Yehezkel, you still don’t treat this nun as your equal!”

  Yehezkel’s pride almost moved his lips, but the whole previous year crushed it underfoot, and he was silent as they approached the portal of the church.

  The crypt that harbored Mary’s tomb, cut out of an existing cave, was entered by descending a wide, gently sloping stairway. Sunlight and the outside world receded with every step down, as a powerful smell of incense and melted wax drifted up the vaulted, candlelit slope. The chapels on both sides of the stairway were crowded with lamps and candles as only Greek chapels can be. Galatea dragged him to the chapel of Saint Joseph, Mary’s husband, on one side, and then to that of Joachim and Anne, Mary’s parents, on the other, which also hosted the sixty-year-old tomb of Queen Melisende of Jerusalem.

  Voices singing a psalm in Greek wafted up from the crypt. By the time they reached it, it was as if the Valley of Jehosaphat—indeed, all Jerusalem—had ceased to exist. They turned the corner and saw Mary’s casket. Hundreds of candles and countless lamps hung from chains in a cluttered, glittering sanctuary, as if the holy objects of an entire cathedral were squeezed into the tiny cave. Altars covered in gold and silver were everywhere: Greek, Latin, Armenian, Coptic, even a niche pointing to Mecca. Galatea felt like she was inside a reliquary.

  Only a handful of pilgrims and the young, bearded Greek pope were there. Despite the cool March day, the deacon kept wiping sweat from his neck and forehead. As Yehezkel spoke with him, Galatea wandered around, staring at paraments that made her abbey in the lagoon look like a hermit’s hut. The humidity and smell felt as stifling as in a crowd. Then Yehezkel came back, dragged her to the Armenian altar in the eastern corner and whispered, “He confirmed that when Saint Helena declared this to be the Tomb of the Virgin, it was known to have been a family tomb in Herod’s time. I said we want to see the deepest part of the cave, but he waved me away. Come with me, and I’ll show him the sultan’s letter.”

  The pope was as outraged as his Saracen counterpart that a Jew should be in possession of such a document, and the two black-bearded men glared at each other for almost a f
ull minute. Then the Greek looked at Galatea’s eyes and relented. He took a key in his minuscule sacristy, in effect a niche in the rock behind a hanging curtain, and with it, he opened a low door in the northern wall they hadn’t even noticed and stood next to it, waving them in.

  The next thing Yehezkel heard, as he bowed to enter the chamber, was the loud slap on the pope’s face. He turned round and saw her shout at the deacon, a hand still on her buttock, “You’re a perfect example of the reason Jerusalem has been lost to the heathens!”

  The Greek cleric, who understood her Latin perfectly, retreated to the main crypt, a plump hand over his swelling cheek.

  Inside the catacomb, Yehezkel examined the floor by the torchlight, looking for ways further down. Finding none, he started removing earth with a brush from each square foot, searching for a crack. His patience was rewarded, and soon they were lifting a stone trap door. Before them was what they’d hoped to find: a spiral stone staircase, probably from the time of King Solomon, going straight down into darkness.

  The excitement made them forget deacon and pilgrims. They started gingerly descending the ancient steps, Yehezkel leading the way and Galatea holding the torch, trying to shine it ahead. They knew the tunnel had to pass beneath the valley, but they were both surprised, and not a little anxious, to be going down for so long. After what seemed like ten minutes, they finally emerged in a round hall, some fifteen feet across, where men a foot shorter would have stood comfortably.

  When they’d caught their breath and smiled at each other to raise their spirits, Yehezkel said, “There must be air ducts somewhere, or this torch couldn’t burn down here, and we couldn’t breathe. This is sophisticated work; it wouldn’t surprise me if it really was King Solomon who had it dug.” He looked around the chamber. “The tunnel must be behind one of these walls, the one facing west, but even if I had known where west was at the start of that stairwell, it’s a mystery now.”