Palestine Twilight: The Murder of Dr Glock and the Archaeology of the Holy Land

This corpus of legend was always changing and growing, surviving the Reformation and a powerful Protestant critique. The Crusader ‘way of the cross’ evolved, by the fourteenth century, into the tradition of the Via Dolorosa: the route through the streets of the Old City of Jerusalem that Christ took on his final procession to his public execution. The discovery of such sites as the spot where Jesus fell for the third time was ascribed to Empress Helena, although the configuration of the sites (conforming to the traditional narrative of the Stations of the Cross) changed over the centuries, and the locations the modern tourist sees were fixed only as recently as the nineteenth century.

Layer upon layer of popular myth, legend, tradition, pious fantasy and delusion and endlessly repeated second-hand scholarship have accumulated in the sacred geography of the Holy Land over the centuries, like artefacts in an archaeologist’s mound. The facts were lost in the obscurity. The biblical archaeology that began in the nineteenth century, of which Albert Glock was an inheritor, was a Protestant critique of the traditions and legends that had accreted in the course of centuries of pilgrimage by European Christians. The corpus of medieval tradition that began with Helena seemed primitive and pagan to the Protestant sensibility: nineteenth-century biblical archaeology was an attempt to impose the Reformation on how Christians saw the Holy Land. The first notable expedition in this reforming spirit was made by the American biblical scholar Edward Robinson and his colleague Dr Eli Smith, an Arabic-speaking missionary, in two journeys to Palestine, the first and most substantial in 1838, the second in 1852. Robinson is important because he introduced Protestant rationalism, and Protestant piety, into the Western encounter with Palestine. ‘We early adopted two general principles, by which to govern ourselves in our examination of the Holy Land,’ he wrote. ‘The first was, to avoid as far as possible all contact with the convents and the authority of the monks; to examine everywhere for ourselves with the Scriptures in our hands; and to apply for information solely to the native Arab population. The second was, to leave as much as possible the beaten track.’

Emphatic typography expresses the principle Robinson followed in his three-month journey through the biblical landscape: ‘all ecclesiastical tradition respecting the ancient places in and around Jerusalem and throughout Palestine, IS OF NO VALUE, except so far as it is supported by circumstances known to us from the Scriptures, or from other contemporary testimony’. This was a radically new approach. For the first time, a respected scholar was able to say and to demonstrate that a good many of these traditions didn’t make sense historically or rationally. Most conspicuously, the complex of shrines inside the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in the Old City of Jerusalem, which it was claimed, contains both the site of the Crucifixion and the tomb of Christ, not to mention the stone on which the body of Christ was anointed for burial and related sacred attractions, is manifestly unrealistic and convincing only when seen through the most powerfully filtered lenses of faith. ‘I am led irresistibly to the conclusion’, he wrote, ‘that the Golgotha and the tomb now shown in the church of the Holy Sepulchre, are not upon the real places of the crucifixion and resurrection of our Lord. The alleged discovery of them by the aged and credulous Helena, like her discovery of the cross, may not improbably have been the work of pious fraud.’

This conclusion was the most publicly sensational of Robinson’s observations, and it was hotly debated for decades afterwards, with the arguments for and against the historicity of the site falling along sectarian lines: the Catholics (who had maintained a stake in the Holy Sepulchre since the Crusades, and therefore had a vested interest) arguing for it, and the Protestants arguing against. (The best current archaeological thinking favours the traditional location of the Holy Sepulchre as the most probable place of the crucifixion.) The whole superstitious business of the Holy Sepulchre, epitomized by the annual spectacle of fairground spirituality in the ceremony of the Holy Fire at Easter, when crowds thronged the church to witness the miracle of a lamp over the tomb of Christ being lit by divine agency, ‘was to a Protestant painful and revolting’.

Robinson’s work was, strictly speaking, biblical geography, rather than biblical archaeology, since he only conducted a surface survey, and carried out no excavations. Less sensationally than his attack on the tradition of the Holy Sepulchre, his accomplishment lay in the meticulous record he made of his survey, linking biblical place names with their contemporary Arabic equivalents, without reference to legend. He favoured local Palestinian folklore, seeing in it a more reliable, continuous tradition, and by this method he correctly identified the site of Megiddo, for instance, an identification which formed the starting point for the later archaeological study of that site.

Robinson was motivated by a strong Protestant attachment to the text of the Bible, which he took as literally true. In this he was violating an elementary principle of geography, of course, articulated in antiquity by the second-century geographer and astronomer Ptolemy: that the landscape is more important than the map. Instead, he saw the map (the Bible) as more important than the landscape. But the degree of Robinson’s intellectual rigour is impressive, for his time, and there is no obvious instance in the three volumes of his principal work that suggests he distorted anything he saw to meet what he expected, out of reverence for the Bible. The only distortion was that he wasn’t interested in anything in the land and history of Palestine that wasn’t to do with the Bible.

Robinson explains that his journey to the Holy Land was the fulfilment of a lifelong ambition, one that had emerged from his experience of growing up in New England. For the child growing up in the Puritan culture of New England in the early nineteenth century, ‘the names of Sinai, Jerusalem, Bethlehem, the Promised Land, became associated with his earliest recollections and holiest feelings’, he wrote. For Americans from a variety of backgrounds – for Edward Robinson, for Albert Glock and for millions of others – the sacred geography of the Holy Land (itself abstracted from the geography of Palestine) was superimposed on the geography of North America. The notion of America as the new Israel, a God-fearing, perfect society set apart from the rest of mankind, ‘a city on a hill’, was imported with the first English settlers in the seventeenth century, and remains an essential part of America’s idea of itself.

This sentiment gave rise in Edward Robinson to a ‘scientific’ curiosity, to explore the country whose place names were already so familiar to him. In exploring Palestine he was, in a sense, exploring New England: he was fathoming his own experience, his own identity. ‘In no country of the world, perhaps, is such a feeling more widely diffused than in New England.’

But this feeling was widely diffused in a number of places besides New England. Turn, for example, to the earliest report of the Palestine Exploration Fund. This was established in London in 1865 with a purpose similar to Robinson’s: to study, according to its original prospectus, the ‘archaeology, manners and customs, topography, geology, natural sciences (botany, zoology, meteorology)’ of the Holy Land, on the grounds that ‘No country should be of so much interest to us as that in which the documents of our Faith were written, and the momentous events they describe enacted.’ Founded by the great and the good of Victorian Britain, with Her Majesty the Queen herself as its patron, the PEF was launched amidst great popular enthusiasm, combining the adventure of discovery with the high goals of scholarship, Christian piety, and the emotional appeal of national purpose and pride. Its aim was to send expeditions to Palestine that would be funded by public contributions. In its first general meeting, the Archbishop of York, who chaired the gathering, expressed the project’s fundamental motivation.

This country of Palestine belongs to you and to me, it is essentially ours. It was given to the Father of Israel in the words: ‘Walk through the land in the length of it, and in the breadth of it, for I will give it unto thee.’ We mean to walk through Palestine in the length and in the breadth of it, because that land has been given unto us … It is the land to which we may look with as true a patriotism as we do this dear old England, which we love so much. (Cheers.)

So Palestine belongs to the Englishman, as well as to the American. It also belongs, one discovers, to the French, the Russians, the Germans, the Armenians, the Ethiopians, the Jews and the Muslims, and a few other groups as well. Each of these nations has a claim to the Holy Land that is exclusive and incommensurate with the others, because it is based on either a claim to territory or property that overlaps someone else’s, or on an idea, which can’t be argued about because it is entirely subjective and non-rational and cultural. Since the beginning of the Christian era, Palestine has been the focus of this multitude of claims to produce an effect of what one might call negative cosmopolitanism. The usual sense of cosmopolitanism denotes an outlook in which a person from one location identifies with a wide variety of places. Negative cosmopolitanism means the opposite: the identification of people from a wide variety of locations with one place.

The Protestant attachment to the Holy Land was separate from the tradition of Helena but it too was subject to imaginative conceptions of the holiness of the Holy Land, and nowhere more than in Victorian England at the time of the founding of the Palestine Exploration Fund. In its first years, the subject that dominated the pages of the Palestine Exploration Fund Quarterly Statement was the location of the sites of the crucifixion and the tomb of Christ, which the earlier Catholic tradition established inside the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. Reason required the rejection of the Holy Sepulchre as the historical location of these sites, but faith required an alternative, and one was soon found. The modern tourist can now visit a walled garden outside the old city, near the Palestinian bus station and the Damascus Gate, known as the Garden Tomb. It contains a pair of stone grottoes that probably were used as tombs at some point in history, but Protestant tradition has settled on one of the grottoes as the likely tomb of Christ, and it has come to be invested with holiness. Its tranquil setting and physical simplicity compared to the hectic Holy Sepulchre reflects the more individualistic and unadorned character of Protestant spirituality. The site had other advantages for nineteenth-century Protestant sensibility as the true site for the tomb of Christ. The rocky mound out of which the tomb was cut bore a physical resemblance to the dome of a human skull, which conforms to the meaning of the biblical word ‘golgotha’ used to describe the place of the entombment: the place of the skull. Like Helena, the Victorian Protestants were seeing what they wanted to see, finding what they wanted to find.

The Orthodox tradition saw no need to identify the ‘true’ sites of the events of the life of Christ. To Russian Orthodox pilgrims, whose liturgy retained the mysticism of an older form of Christianity, the Holy Sepulchre complex was not supposed to be historically realistic. This was a place where the cosmic realm penetrated into the earthly realm. Normal physical reality was pushed aside here by metaphysical reality, and time was replaced by the eternal. The tomb of Christ was a three-dimensional icon, a miraculous object possessing real supernatural power, not just representing it. If it looked like a normal tomb, or was held to be one, it could not be the tomb of the son of God and it would not put the beholder in touch with the divine. In entering the Church of the Holy Sepulchre the pilgrim was entering a zone of divine reality, not a real place but something higher. Like the earliest Catholic pilgrims, he sought to be amazed, not reassured.

The Protestant Golgotha inspired the visionary imagination of one especially eminent Victorian: the British military hero General Charles Gordon, the martyr of Khartoum. Before he embarked on his doomed expedition to confront the rebel forces of the Mahdi in the Sudan, and after his victorious campaign crushing the Taiping rebellion in China in 1864, Gordon spent a year in Jerusalem as a solitary mystic, studying the Bible and the topography of Jerusalem. His research led him to the conclusion that the sacred sites were set out on the landscape of Jerusalem in the form of a vast human skeleton. The skull-shaped hill, with two caves resembling eye-sockets, was its skull, Solomon’s Quarries were its chest, the lower back lay on the Temple Mount, with the Dome of the Rock at its pelvis, the knees at the Dung Gate and the feet some distance outside the Old City. Gordon propounded this theory in the Palestine Exploration Fund Quarterly Statement in 1885. Why a skeleton? Because it would represent sculpturally an enormous human sacrifice on the Temple Mount.

Gordon’s idea is of interest mainly for its eccentricity, but it is a good example of the tendency towards biblical mysticism that thrived among members of the ruling class of Victorian England, and motivated the work of the Palestine Exploration Fund, despite the ‘scientific’ nature of its expeditions. A more widespread notion, similar to one held by contemporary American fundamentalist Christians, was the desirability – as the fulfilment of biblical prophecy – of the ‘restoration’ of the Jews to Palestine from their world-wide diaspora, a development which would be followed by their conversion to the true (Anglican) Christian faith and the return of the Messiah as the leader of a thousand-year era on earth of peace and justice, before the end of the world. This belief (called chiliasm) led to the establishment of missionary societies dedicated to the conversion of Jews in England and even in Palestine itself. Although the success rate of organizations like the London Society for Promoting Christianity among the Jews (established 1808) was dismal, making only about six or seven converts a year even after thirty years, its members remained optimistically active throughout the nineteenth century.

The best-known proponent of this movement was the seventh Earl of Shaftesbury, Anthony Ashley Cooper, better known now for his campaigns for benevolent social legislation, such as the Ten Hours Bill, limiting the working hours of factory workers. The same evangelical Christianity that inspired his social campaigning at home led him to work equally hard for the conversion of the Jews, and he became president of the ‘Jews’ Society’ in 1848. Although he saw little evidence that mass conversion had begun, as he hoped, Shaftesbury had considerable success in influencing British foreign policy in line with his ideas. He persuaded the Foreign Secretary, Lord Palmerston, to establish a British consulate in Jerusalem in 1838, charged with the protection of local Jewish interests, and granting Palestinian Jews British citizenship. A few years later, his lobbying bore fruit in the creation of an Anglican bishopric in Jerusalem, with a converted Jew as its first incumbent.

Eventually, in 1875, Shaftesbury became President of the Palestine Exploration Fund. In his first address to the PEF as its President he called with undiminished enthusiasm for ‘the return [to Palestine] of its ancient possessors’. His mystical belief in Britain’s instrumental role in returning the Jews to Palestine – for the sake of Christianity, rather than Judaism – was the ideological force behind Britain’s increasing political involvement in Palestine throughout the nineteenth century, an involvement which could be seen later in British support for Zionism, as expressed in the Balfour Declaration of 1917, and in Britain itself assuming the government of Palestine in 1921, and holding it for nearly thirty years in the form of the British Mandate. To understand politics it is sometimes necessary to understand the power of irrational ideas.

In its first years, the pages of the Palestine Exploration Fund Quarterly Statement were dominated by reports from the field despatched by the leaders of the expeditions sponsored by the Fund. These were eventually published as books which have become the classics of early biblical archaeology. Notable among these is the expedition of Charles Warren, a captain in the Royal Engineers, who used military mining techniques to excavate the tunnels and subterranean chambers under and around the Temple Mount in 1867. His account was published in 1876 as Underground Jerusalem. This was one of the first expeditions sponsored by the PEF, and it nearly bankrupted the Fund, obliging the tireless Warren to postpone excavation work for weeks at a time due to lack of money to pay labourers.

The object of Warren’s exploration was the Temple of Solomon, and in his search for it he exemplifies the mystical tendency of Victorian Englishmen towards anything to do with the Holy Land. His search for the original Temple of the biblical Israelites set in motion a popular obsession which persists to this day. Warren was motivated in his curiosity by his experience as a Freemason, a membership which was common among English military officers. Freemasons consider themselves members of an unbroken tradition of occult knowledge that begins with the builders of the first Temple and its founder, Solomon, whom biblical legend has given the character of an archetypal complete being, supreme in both power and wisdom. The rituals of Freemasonry, in which the individual ascends a hierarchy of esoteric lore through progressive initiation, are based on metaphors of the construction and architecture of the Temple. To Freemasons, Solomon’s Temple is a radiantly meaningful symbol, rich with associations of power and practical knowledge, deepened to a condition of mystical enlightenment, held in the collective hands of a closed fraternal institution. Adding to the sum of knowledge of the Temple would have been of enormous importance to Freemasonry, and Masonic lodges donated regularly and generously to the Palestine Exploration Fund in the years when Warren’s reports were being published.

Warren therefore had a definite object in mind when he began his work. The image of the Temple in his mind formed the template into which all of his discoveries fitted, and almost immediately his expectations were rewarded with results that confirmed them. He dug shafts along an exposed side of the Temple Mount, and then tunnelled under it. Illuminating his way with strips of burning magnesium, he discovered pottery fragments inscribed with the word ‘the king’ and markings in Phoenician characters on stones near the base of the structure, which he took to have been made by the Temple’s original builders. He pronounced the area he was exploring to be the corner of the palace Solomon built for himself adjoining the Temple, in fact a highly dubious attribution. If a Temple built by Solomon ever existed, no trace of it has been found.

In the course of his exploration of the hidden part of the western wall of the Temple Mount, he found a long vault to which he gave the name ‘the Secret Passage’, believing it to be part of a secret tunnel used by King David (Solomon’s father, according to the Bible) to walk from his palace to his place of prayer on the Temple Mount, an idea originating in a fifteenth-century description of Jerusalem that Warren had read: this is an attribution based entirely on pious folklore. No such tunnel could have existed. ‘This passage would have been revealed whenever anyone living on the street above installed a cistern beneath his house,’ the Israeli archaeologist Dan Bahat wrote in 1991.

Further on, Warren found a large hall which was built at the time of the second Temple, commissioned by Herod nearly a thousand years after Solomon is thought to have lived. Warren named it ‘the Masons’ Hall’, and the site, still referred to by the same name, can be visited today as part of the controversial Western Wall complex. Its connection with the masons of Solomon’s Temple lay entirely in Warren’s imagination, but within a few months of its discovery it had been adopted by Freemasons as their own, and a group of American Masons held an initiation ceremony in it.

Freemasonry came to identify even more closely with a cave that can be seen today near the Damascus Gate, which has come to be known as Solomon’s Quarries. Masonic initiation ceremonies are now carried out inside it annually, and during the British Mandate stones were quarried from the rock inside and used as the cornerstones of Masonic lodges around the world. According to Masonic legend, the ritual implements used by the priests of the Temple were hidden in it at the time of the Roman siege of the city.

Later on, Warren uncovered stones in which a long, straight groove had been cut. He took this to be a drain along which blood flowed from the sacrifices in the Temple. His source for this was again a colourful legend that he found in his reading: in this case taken from the traditional Jewish text the Mishnah.

The mythic power of Warren’s work, and the lively prose in which he described it, attracted enthusiastic public interest. Soon after the excavation began, The Times expressed its fascination with Warren’s project of ‘the discovery of the true foundations of the Temple of the Holy City, of the ancient aqueducts, subterranean passages, and grandiose engineering projects of the Scriptural Monarchs’. Warren’s exploration of the irregular system of spaces, passages, water courses and cisterns under the Temple Mount – in the course of which, at one stage, he floated through a channel of sewage on an improvised raft made of wooden doors – contributed to the popular folklore of the Temple Mount as a maze of occult secrets, where a source of supernatural power lay hidden in inaccessible tunnels. The idea, of course, originates in Jewish tradition: the Temple was the earthly seat of God. Jerusalem was the centre of the world; at the centre of Jerusalem was the Temple; at the centre of the Temple was the Ark of the Covenant; at the centre of the Ark of the Covenant, seated invisibly on a throne within it, was God. Warren’s syntax falters with excitement when he contemplates the possibility of penetrating another circle of this great mystery when his exploration took him, as he thought, close to the divine point at the centre of these concentric circles of power, the Ark:

As we pursued our course along the wall to the north, and were opposite the end of the Birket Israil, we came upon a slit about eighteen inches wide and four inches high, formed by cutting away the upper and lower portions of two courses. Here was an exciting discovery: what might not be in this chamber in the wall? the ark and utensils secreted at the destruction of the Temple might here be hidden away.

The Pyramids of Egypt hold a similar place in the popular imagination, with their systems of tunnels and supernatural secrets, but the Temple is in our own religious tradition; the Pyramids are merely pagan.

Although Warren was certainly advancing the archaeological knowledge of the structure of the Temple Mount, he was also adding to the corpus of folklore surrounding it, particularly the fascination with secret tunnels. The narrative of his book, Underground Jerusalem, as its title hints, is driven by the mythic power of his search for the secrets of the Temple Mount through tunnels. His exploration of underground Jerusalem is a search for esoteric knowledge, a gnostic adventure, and one that fully assorts with Masonic tradition.

Among one’s own people, a tunnel is a marvel. Held by an enemy, a tunnel inspires fear and suspicion: it is a sinister thing, and evidence of a conspiracy. In September 1996, about seventy Palestinians were killed by Israeli soldiers in a riot that broke out in the Old City of Jerusalem after the Israeli authorities opened an exit to a connected series of chambers and passages of various ages that followed the length of the Western Wall. (It was the same area explored by Charles Warren.) The exit, cut out of a wall, opened out onto the street beside the Temple Mount. It enables tourists to walk the length of the passage without having to double back to the entrance in the Western Wall plaza. The Palestinians of the Old City and throughout the Occupied Territories, and the Muslim clerics of the mosque complex atop the Temple Mount, were outraged because they believed the Israelis were ‘digging a tunnel’ under the Temple Mount and the shrine of the Dome of the Rock which surmounts it.