Deus Artefacta: Revisionist Temple Mount Illustration

I recently did two watercolor illustrations of the revisionist location of the Temple on the Temple Mount. I do not share the view presented in the illustrations but created/painted them for the following article to illustrate the revisionist ideas. They have been published in Stripling, D. Scott, and Craig A. Evans. ‘Literary and Archaeological Evidence for the Location of Jerusalem’s Jewish Temple(s)’. Near East Archaeological Society Bulletin 66, no. 1 (1 January 2021): 37–59. Illustrated on page 51 Fig. 5.

Preamble to the article: Recently, it has become popular in certain circles to assert that the Jewish Temple(s) did not originally stand atop the historical Temple Mount, known today as Haram esh Sharif, but rather stood on the lower ground to the south in the City of David, covering the Gihon Spring and extending west between the Stepped Stone Structure and the Ophel (Proposal 1 – Martin’s hypothesis) or north of the Stepped Stone Structure and south of the Ophel (Proposal 2 – Cornuke’s hypothesis).

Proponents for Proposal 2 insist that the Temple precincts housed a spring, but their schematics show a smaller Temple to the west of the Gihon spring. Advocates for this revisionist view appeal to literature from the Late Classical period, archaeological remains, and biblical passages to support their case. In the discussion that follows we review all the pertinent evidence. This includes (1) Late Classical literature, (2) historical and archaeological evidence, and (3) biblical data.

The Stripling, Evans article debunks these two illustrations and I would agree with their scholarly article. The illustrations were provided to illustrate the revisionist view and not as support of their views. The article is supported by our colleague Dr. Leen Ritmeyer who has spent a lifetime researching the archaeological architecture of the temple mount area and had the privileged of working with at Tall el-Hammam, Jordan and Shiloh, Israel.

The article is available at Academia.edu.

Other illustrations for archaeological works include Douglas Petrovich, Origins of the Hebrews: New Evidence of Israelites in Egypt from Joseph to the Exodus, Nashville, TN: New Creation, 2021. I provided many of the charts and drawings for the book. See my post.

I also published an article on the newly discovered Pontius Pilate ring and included my illustration of the ring.

My water colour illustration of Pilate's ring and photograph of the site was featured on the front cover of the Near East Archaeological Society Bulletin. Graves, David E. ‘Pilate’s Ring and Roman Religion’. Near East Archaeological Society Bulletin 69, no. 1 (2019): 1–20.

For more on the name of Pontius Pilate see this article.

I have added a bit more detail to the drawing of the Pilate ring that was published on the cover of the NEASB issue.