The Temple: From Eden to Eternity with Dr. Randall Price

Creation Fellowship Introduction and Speaker Welcome

Okay, all right. I'm going to start over. I'm Terry Camerazelle here on behalf of Creation Fellowship Santee. We love to learn about our Creator God and believe that the Bible, when read properly, rules out the possibility of millions or especially billions of years.

We used to meet for 10 years at the Creation and Earth History Museum in Santee, California. Then, and online, our goal is to rally the remnants so we can defend our faith. You can see a list of our upcoming speakers by visiting tinyurl .com forward slash CF Santee.

That's C for Creation, F for Fellowship, and Santee is spelled S-A-N-T-E-E. Tonight, we are happy to have with us Dr. Randall Price, founder of the ministry Word of the Bible. Dr. Price is a biblical archaeologist, leading scholar on biblical prophecy, and global keynote speaker.

Our Creation followers might recognize him as one of the experts in the recent Ark in the Darkness movie, but Dr. Price is also a prolific author on the temple. That's just what we are excited to have him come speak to us about.

If you're watching on Facebook or if you're in the Zoom and you have questions during his presentation, please put them into the chat and comments so that we can ask during the live Q &A at the end. With that, I'm happy to turn it over to you, Dr. Price.

The Temple as Protology and Eschatology

Thank you, Terri. I'm glad to be with everyone this evening. I know this is a fellowship that focuses on creation, and I do speak on those topics as well, but when we talk about the subject of the temple, we're actually beginning with what we call protology, the first things, and tying that in with eschatology, the last things, because God had the original creation, but he also has a new creation, and the subject of the temple spans all of that and is very essential to all of that, because in God's plan and program, we'll find that the temple is kind of at the center of all that he is doing.

So, I'm going to switch to a PowerPoint and run through a little bit of everything related to the temple, kind of past, present, and future, and let me get this where we can all see it. All right, I hope that's full screen now, and is everything okay for y 'all?

Looks good, thank you. Okay, I have something on mine that says meeting is being recorded. Leave meeting. Okay, I'm just going to click that. Everything's good?

I do see your tempo from Eden to eternity. We're good to go. Okay, good. All right, so as I was.

Saying, when we talk about creation, starting at the very beginning, we're talking about the Garden of Eden, God putting man on earth, putting him in a particular situation, and we know God's presence was there, but sometimes we just bypass that and don't think deeply enough about what was going on.

And so, for us, this is going to relate to the temple's past purpose. Let me go back to that. So, what are we doing as we talk about the very beginning of things? As we look at the scriptures, we talk about a heavenly temple.

The heavenly temple, you'll see it as we come to the psalmist. He talks about the Lord in his holy temple. The Lord's throne is in heaven, and this was written by King David, but there wasn't a temple standing in the time of King David.

That only happened in the time of Solomon. Then we have passages from the book of Revelation that mention a loud voice coming from the temple from the throne, but obviously the setting of this is heaven.

As you can see this also in Revelation 11, 19, the temple of God which is in heaven was opened, and the Ark of his covenant appeared in his temple. Dr. Price, can I interrupt you for.

One minute? I think you have it on presenter view rather than slideshow, but do you prefer it like this? Can you see all of it? I can see the whole, just somebody in the comments mentioned that it's in presenter view.

I'm okay with it. I can certainly change that.

Let me escape this and go to... It would be slideshow. Yeah, from current slide. From current slide right there. There you go. Yeah, thank you very much. I'll put those texts back up. All we're simply saying here is that there was a temple in heaven from the very beginning.

This is God's throne. This is God's presence, and you'll notice it has features in it that are similar to features received later in earth on the earthly temple. When we get to that, we'll find out why, but as we go to the Garden of Eden, the layout, and this is the best an artist can do with what we have in the text, but it tells us God's presence was in the garden.

It talks about a tree of life and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. It talks about cherubim stationed at the east of Eden to prevent man from coming back into the garden once he was exiled from the garden after the fall.

So, these are just features that are there. There's an assumption that there was a mountain of the Lord, but at any rate, God's presence was in the western part of the garden because when they are thrown out of God's presence, they go east, and the return to God would be west, but they're not permitted to do that.

So, this is the kind of picture we see. You see in Genesis 3 -24, it says he drove the man out, and at the east of the Garden of Eden, he stationed cherubim with a flaming sword, which turned every which direction to guard the way of the tree of life, so that man in a fallen state could not return and regain immortality in the garden.

Now, thinking about all that, and just to think about it in a real sense, how do we get back? How does man get back to God? How does he get to the plan that unfolds in Scripture? We come to Abraham, and it says the Lord appeared to him.

So, this was a manifestation to Abraham, just as had happened to Adam. Adam and his wife, later Chava, Eve, had God's presence. It tells us they walked in the garden in the cool of the day, and the presence of God was there, and they heard his footsteps, and he called for them.

So, this was what we call a theophany. If you understand, that's the second person of the trinity. It'll be a Christophany, but God came down with two angels. We know the story from Genesis 18, and the picture there goes on with Sodom and Gomorrah, but Abraham is left standing before the Lord.

So, we know that the Lord was there in the physical form. We see something similar when Abraham now is being told by God to offer his son Isaac on Mount Moriah. In Mount Moriah, the text goes on to talk about that they named that place Adonai Uriah, or the Lord's Seas, or as a kind of a play on words, it will be provided, because the same root for see and provide is there.

So, the picture is that where he was to offer Isaac, God substituted a ram, and so this is the first substitutionary atonement in the Bible. The ram takes the place of Isaac. It forecasts the work he's going to do on Mount Moriah, which is the place, of course, where the temple would stand, and also in the same vicinity where the crucifixion took place.

All of this is part of talking about future experiences. So, it's tying things together and moving things forward. All of this deals with a covenant. It's the covenant that helps us understand how God works throughout history.

He made a covenant with Abraham in Genesis 12, and that's repeated in 15 and 17 and 22, and on it goes with all of Abraham's descendants, so that when he chose him, he chose his descendants in him, and he said, in you, all the nations of the earth will be blessed.

So, the picture of what God was going to do through the Jewish people, through Israel as a nation, would be to bless all the other nations of the world, and out of this Abrahamic covenant, which involved a land and a seed and a blessing, came three other covenants, a land covenant, which kind of made it necessary that Israel have a land and be in that land in order for these promises to be fulfilled, and then a Davidic covenant, which was a covenant based on the seed promise, and that was the one that would indicate Messiah would come from a particular family, a lineage, and then finally there was a blessing, but this is the spiritual covenant called the new covenant, and that's the one that will be affected with national Israel in the future.

Those who believed in Jesus as their Messiah entered into that new covenant when that happened, whether the Jew or Gentile, so that's what we—the church is now under the new covenant. It participates in the new covenant, but remember, the new covenant, as part of this whole covenant system made with Israel, was designed to be ultimately fulfilled by them.

So, the temple is going to be a strategic part of this, both past, present, and future, and we'll see how this unfolds. When we're talking about restoring God's presence to this people and carrying that whole promise forward, we come to Mount Sinai.

In Mount Sinai, we heard this statement when Moses and the children of Israel camped at the foot of Mount Sinai. He said, let them make for me a sanctuary that I may dwell in their midst. And the word sanctuary, I'll show you here the Hebrew word, mishkan, it comes from the verb shekan, which means to dwell.

So, he literally says, make for me a dwelling place that I may dwell in your midst, because God's desire was to dwell with his people. He couldn't do it as a holy God and midst of unholy people, but with this structure that was a meeting place, he could bring his presence, in a sense, ritually shielded from man and his unholy contamination.

And through the ritual and through the various things that recognized sin and how to approach God in a proper way, that his presence would dwell with man. And that's what happened throughout the Old Testament period.

It's the same word is used in the New Testament. When we speak of John 1 .14, it says, the word became flesh and dwelt among us. And this is the word shkina in Hebrew or shekina or shekina, some people put it that way.

The Greek term, skinao or skene is simply a transliteration of that Hebrew word. So, when you see that, what is being said is that when the second person of the Godhead, who would be the Messiah, came to earth and took a human form, it was like God in his glory dwelling within the tabernacle.

It was a way he could meet with us. It actually tells us that this is God in the flesh. This is what we're talking about. So, you can see how all this ties in with temple terminology. So, when Moses is receiving commandments from God, the one he received was about building the tabernacle.

And God said, this is going to be according to the pattern which I showed you, both with the structure of the tabernacle and all the furniture that goes in it. You shall construct it according to what was shown you on the mountain.

The term pattern that's used there, some text will say pattern, some will say type, some will say example, some will say many things, or design, something like that. The word tavmit in Hebrew refers to something that could be a model or a blueprint.

Moses was actually shown the heavenly temple. He saw something in that vision. And God said, make a copy on earth, the things that are in heaven. Why is that? Because God was bringing his presence to earth, localizing it, and he simply reproduced a little bit of heaven on earth as the place of his throne.

He had a heavenly throne, in a sense, he had an earthly throne. When you come to the Ark of the Covenant, this structure, you'll see how this fits together. So, when we look at this, going back to our picture of the Garden of Eden, you had these essential elements.

And when we come to the tabernacle and its layout, you'll see those same elements reproduced. So, you have the presence of God in the west, you have preventing people from entering into that presence, or the cherubim.

They're on the outer curtains on the eastern side, on the inner curtain separating the holy place from the holy of holies, and they're on the Ark of the Covenant itself. And then you have the lampstand, which is like a stylized tree of life, and the table of showbread, which is like, shall we say, in this case, the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.

These are things that represent the original creation, but now have been restored in a ritual way, so that as people enter God's presence, they enter according to this prescription. So, in a sense, what we're saying is, God created a place where he can dwell with us in our fallen state.

And so, the way away from God is to the east, the entrance to God is to the west, just as it was in the Garden of Eden. We come to the Ark of the Covenant, this is where God's glory came and dwelt. That's what he said, I will meet with you there.

And so, from the time of the original tabernacle, the glory of God appeared as a pillar of fire at night or a cloud by day, stayed with Israel, and when we come to the first temple, it entered into that structure and could be seen with Israel all through that period of the united monarchy, and then later what we call the divided monarchy, those periods.

So, this was the kind of idea, I will speak to you from the mercy seat, the Kippurit, that's the term for it. So, our term, Yom Kippur, when the high priests would go in once a year for a few minutes into the holy of holies, carrying the blood on Yom Kippur, the day of atonement, that's when this kind of thing happened, when Israel as a nation had their sins passed over one more year.

Solomon's Temple, the First Temple, and Archaeological Evidence

Now, if we look at the temple through time, going back, we have the construction of a first temple, and I'll go ahead and circle this because this is where we're headed right now, construction of a first temple under Solomon, and then we had the construction after a 70-year period of exile of a second temple.

So, let's look at some of that. That's very important. It says, God chose Zion, this is Jerusalem. He said, he's desired it for his habitation. This is my resting place forever. Here I will dwell for I have desired it.

So, God, just as he had a chosen people, he also had a chosen place. That's the land of Israel, but within that chosen place, he had a central sanctuary, a place where his presence would dwell, where all the tribes of were to come and representative appear before him.

And when he created the first temple, he's going to say, wherever you are on the face of the earth, you turn toward this place and pray, I will hear from heaven because God's presence was there. Edwin Smith wrote an older book.

He said, unlike other cities, a lot of my screen is obscured by things that I can't seem to make go away too well. I've got all our pictures on the side here. I'm not sure how to make those.

Would you like help just reading the start of that?

Well, I just moved it out of the way. So, I moved it down to the bottom. So, it says, like other cities of antiquity, which have been the admiration of the world on account of their greatness, splendor, or wisdom, Jerusalem has ever been identified as that particular place in the whole world, which may be said to have formed the connecting isthmus betwixt this sin-polluted earth and the throne of the eternal majesty on high.

In other words, it was considered a meeting place. It was a place where God was going to bring his presence. But now moving, putting that there, I can't get to my corner. Let's see. Well, let's work in that way.

All right. So, here is something of what the first temple may have looked like. As you can see from the text in 1 Kings 8, it says, if you pray toward this place, because you're praying to God and God has localized his presence, not his entire presence, obviously, because when Solomon prayed, he said, heaven and highest heaven cannot continue, much less this temple, which I built.

But nevertheless, his presence was with his people. So, that temple, archaeologically, we have evidences of what this temple would have looked like in nearby places. Remember, it was King Hiram of Tyre, Lebanon, up in that area, that came and helped build the temple.

If you go to that area today, this is in Syria. We have the Ein Dara temple, and you see cherubim at the entrance to the temple. We have models of temples that were found at a place called Kirbat Keyefa, just near the Valley of Elah, from the time of Saul, King David period.

We have walls now discovered in Jerusalem from the time of King Solomon. And here is a reservoir from the first temple period, you know, used by pilgrims coming to the temple. And I show you some of this because all of this stuff is at the present-day Temple Mount.

There are people who, and I've done a whole presentation on this, you can find at my website. But where was the temple located? It was located exactly where we know it has always been. That's the testimony of history and archaeology.

There are some disparate voices today trying to say that the temple was somewhere else, another part of the city. Simply not correct. So, that's why I'm showing you a little of this evidence. Because of Israel's sin, basically following other gods alongside or in place of the God of Israel, God said, I made a covenant with you.

This was the Mosaic covenant. And it had terms, it had conditions. And because of that, when Israel did not obey, God had told them what he would do in a progressive way. He would bring ultimately, finally, some destruction.

And he did that at the place that represented his fellowship or presence with his people. So, the first temple was destroyed. And then we have an interim time when the Jews returned from exile after 70 years and came to Judah.

Daniel will be talking about a sanctuary that will be built. This is during the period we call the Maccabean period. Just before that, it's actually in the Syrian Greek period. A man named Antiochus IV of Epiphanes, when the temple was built by the exiles who returned to Judah, he came in because Israel was never again independent as it had been before.

It was under now Greek rule. And he had a priest offer pigs, which are unclean animals, on the altar. He put a huge statue of Zeus Olympius, the Greek god, outside the temple. This was what Daniel referred to at that time as abomination that makes desolate.

When this was, there was a revolt that happened, temple was cleansed again. The term for rededicating the temple is Hanukkah. So, this is the whole story behind Hanukkah, which is not necessarily in our Bibles.

It's in between the Testaments, but Jesus and John 10 celebrate the feast of dedication, it says. And that's the same term as Hanukkah, the same time of year. Herod the Great, Roman, following the Greek rule came Roman rule.

Herod the Great wanted to placate the Jews and press the Romans. He built the temple twice the size that it was before, built a very expansive courtyard around it. You can see from this picture that the temple is there kind of to the left-hand side of your screen.

But as you look, you see this large esplanade, you see all these walls and columns. This is all part of the Roman world, what they were used to, these type of stoas. And so, all this was part of that work.

If you look at the front of the screen, you see some stairs coming down. All that area has been excavated by Israel, and also to the right of the screen as well. They can't excavate on the Temple Mount, but they can excavate at the foot of the Temple Mount, only since 1967.

That's been ongoing. So, if we look right beneath this staircase, there's an arch called Robinson's Arch. You can see at this point, the top of that corner, see the corner up there, just above that arch.

So, Josephus, a first-century historian who wrote about these things, talks about the priest standing here at this corner, blowing a trumpet to sound the beginning of the Shabbat, that is the Sabbath day.

And then, when it ended, the same thing. It was the way that people knew to stop work and go home. The stone that was up there was pushed down, and right at the foot of that, archaeologists found it. Now, I'm pointing here to it, but there's a piece missing.

The piece that's missing is this piece that was cut out and taken to the museum. It has on it the words, to the place of trumpeting. So, we know it was put there to tell the priest, particularly the priest in training, where to stand and where to blow those trumpets.

When we look at this staircase, it's just around the corner. This is all of Israel entered through this. When we talk about Jesus entering the temple, this is the place he would have entered through these double gates.

He was not a priest. He's not from the tribe of Levi, so he couldn't enter through the other gates, which are only given to the priest or a part of the royal family, which that Robertson's arch was part of.

So, this is the public interest. When we talk about the beautiful gate and the healing of a man in the book of Acts, Acts chapter one, when Peter and John go to pray, they're going through this gate, and the man is sitting right at that gate.

Inside those gates, very beautiful construction. That's why it's called the beautiful gate. In fact, if you look the staircase just to the right of it, you see sort of a building. The staircase continues on the other side of that building, but that is the mikveh.

This is the place of ritual immersion. We would call it baptism. They had to immerse themselves to be ritually pure to go into the temple. When the day of Pentecost happened, all the baptisms that took place, 3 ,000, 5 ,000, adding to the church, they went into that building there for that ritual cleansing.

So, here's what that looks like today. It's excavated. The staircase is here, and there's the remains of the building with a lot of those mikveh or these ritual immersion pools in between. So, again, we have evidence of where these things are mentioned in scripture.

When Jesus was on earth and overlooked this at one point, he says in the gospel of Matthew, Behold, your house is being left to you desolate. I say to you from now on, you shall not see me until you say, Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord.

The idea here is that, again, because of the national rejection of Jesus as Messiah, they then came under the terms of the covenant and rejected God. As a result, they were going to find their house desolate or be destroyed.

This is also mentioned in Luke when it says, These days are going to come upon you, and they will love you to the ground and your children within you, and not leave one stone upon another, because you did not recognize the time of your visitation.

I didn't point this out, but when the first temple was destroyed, it was on the ninth of the Hebrew month of Av, which is our August-September. When the second temple was destroyed, it was exactly on the same day.

It was an indication to the nation of Israel that this was a divine discipline. God was doing it exactly at the same time. Of course, they record their recognition of that. We look today at some of the evidence of that.

These stones were pushed down from above. The wall nearly to the right of your screen is the Western Wall or the Kotel or what we call the Wailing Wall. There are shops on the left-hand side, but you can see when the stones were pushed down, it buckled the street.

This is the main street that Jesus, the disciples, and others would have walked upon. The excavator of this was a man named Ronnie Reich. He only finished it around 1998 for the 3000th anniversary of the city of Jerusalem.

They left these stones right where they were rather than trying to reconstruct something because they wanted to give testimony to the fact this destruction happened just as history said. It also indicated the fulfillment of Jesus' prophecy because he said it would happen and it did happen.

The Present Temple Mount and the Conflict Over Jerusalem

Now we go to the temple through time and we're moving from the past to the present day. There is no longer a temple on the Temple Mount. There is a spiritual temple and those who belong to the body of Christ are part of that spiritual temple because the presence of God is with them.

Individually, our bodies are called the Temple of God because the Holy Spirit dwells in us. This same language is used, but the temple, in a sense, was taken away or it no longer exists in that sense.

Instead, we have since 691 AD a Muslim structure known as the Dome of the Rock and we'll talk a bit about that. So, let's look at some of this present situation and it's a very problematic one. That's why we have the issues we face today.

Before 1967, as Islam took over, they built a part of their city and things wrought almost against this wall. It was only a narrow corridor where Jews could come and wail, as they would call it, at this wall.

In 1967, on June 7th, all that changed with the Six-Day War as Israel was attacked simultaneously by eight different nations. It responded and it from Jordan, who in 1948 had occupied all of what we call today the West Bank.

That's all Judea and Samaria, including half of Jerusalem. Just as Egypt had occupied the area we today call Gaza and Syria had occupied the Golan Heights. All of these were occupied by other nations.

It's always strange. We never hear anybody else called occupiers. They just call the Israelis occupiers, but they were simply re-occupiers because it was their land in the first place, going back to antiquity.

In 1967, that changed. They regained this territory. The Jordanian authorities surrendered. The chief of the Israel Defense Forces, Shlomo Goran, sounded the shofar. In 19 years, they were separated from this part of the Temple Mount and the Western Wall and all of this.

The soldiers that were serving at this time, when they were born, there was no access to this. For the first time in their young lives, they were able to come and actually come to this place where Jews prayed from a distance now, since the very beginning.

So, Shlomo Goran sounded the shofar. He said, we're announcing the beginning of the Messianic Age, because he felt if Israel has returned, and for the first time in history, in the last 2000 years, regained this territory, that something monumental must be happening.

I met with him, actually shortly before his death, and went through some of these things with him. He explained how they came to the Temple Mount, they had Army Corps of Engineers measuring things, they were going to do many things.

He even wanted to remove the Dome of the Rock. Politically, it was not possible. There was great protest. He couldn't get his way. He did some other interesting things before his death, but this was the intention of Israeli authorities, at least of religious authorities, but the world was not ready.

So, the Temple Mount, from that point, became the most volatile 36 acres on earth, and we have seen now a contest of holy sites. What was where the place of the Temple was, now there's a Muslim Dome of the Rock.

Even though the wailing wall, or western wall, of the Temple Mount was called Al-Buraq wall, because the Muslims claimed that Muhammad had rode his celestial steed Al-Buraq, and tethered into this wall in his night journey to this place, which all, of course, is a reinterpretation, because he died five years before any Muslims came to Jerusalem.

In his night vision, he went to the far mosque, which in that day was in a place called Medina. He was in Mecca, but it's been reinterpreted, of course, for political reasons to be Jerusalem. So, they built a mosque later in the year 711, called the Al-Aqsa mosque.

The whole place is called Al-Aqsa, meaning the far mosque, and so this is where we are in terms of interpretation of history. If you look at this aerial view, you can see because of this, even though this came under the sovereignty of the state of Israel, Jews relegated themselves to the western wall below, and the Muslims continued to worship up on the top, where the original Jewish temple was.

There are other reasons for all of this, but basically this is the status quo for today. But if you notice, when the Muslims come up here for prayer, which is only once a year in Ramadan, they pray toward Mecca, which is the opposite direction.

The Dome of the Rock is, of course, in the west. They pray toward the east, which is toward Mecca, and turn their backsides to what is considered the holiest place in Judaism, and maybe the third holiest place in Islam, but they don't give it the same reverence at all.

Because of political situations, and because the Muslims had control of this area called Al-Aqsa, or the Temple Mount, they decided to change the status quo by building a new mosque on the site. This was something that was not supposed to be allowed.

You can see them moving all these archaeological layers without any inspection, and they threw the debris out. We estimate about 20 ,000 tons of archaeological rich debris was just moved out, so they could build this within what was called Solomon's Stables, a new mosque called the Almawadi Mosque, and that's what exists today.

The pushback in all this started as early as 1987 with groups who wanted to see the temple rebuilt. We have Temple Mount Faithful who marched to the site wearing sackcloth like they were mourning over the temple, carrying a model of the temple.

They built cornerstones for the new temple. The sign behind me says, Mikdash Hashlishi. It's the third temple, stones of the ebony for the third temple, the Beit Mikdash Hashlishi, the third temple. There was another organization called the Temple Institute.

If you've gone to Israel, you may have visited this. They've been working since 1987 to build all of the type of implements and utensils required by Jewish law to have a functioning temple, and to also begin training a priesthood to do the work when that day arrives.

Sanhedrin was reconvened in October of 2004. This was the body, of course, that existed in the time of Jesus just because they were priests related to the temple, and the temple was destroyed. Their job ended, but now it's been reconvened in view of future rebuilding.

So, their goals are to locate at the original temple and find a descendant of King David, which by the way is very interesting because on a genetic basis, we know people who were related to the house of Hillel, related to the house of David.

Those descendants were known even though temple records were left. There's a whole huge database of the descendants of King David, and they actually meet on a regular basis once a year for a kind of a conference.

Then, of course, to ultimately erect a temple, an altar on the Temple Mount to renew sacrificial system. You can see headlines like this, the temple vessels are ready for the rebuilding of Jerusalem's third temple.

These are the kind of images you often see conceptualizing what that day would be like, but of course, we're talking about a World War III happening, at least over this kind of thing. In July of 2022, right at the end of COVID, Jews did something they hadn't done.

Just as the Muslims changed the status quo, Israel decided it was changed. We've not been able to go up on the Temple Mount and pray. It's our capital city. This is our holiest place. It's under Israeli sovereignty, but we have not gone there.

They decided to do that, and so that has been renewed. As that's been done, it has caused, of course, conflict with the Palestinians who now usurped charge of this place after the Jordanians lost it. When we come to something like October 7th, and the massacre that happened there, and the war that's going on right now, the day after that, you heard Ismail Hanea, who's the head of Gaza, say, we have achieved a victory in the battle for Jerusalem, the defense of Jerusalem.

Jerusalem's the axis of the conflict, and he went on elsewhere to say, because of Jewish prayer here, because of Jews' desire to rebuild the temple, this is why the war is taking place. It's a religious war.

If you look at the Palestinians, this is Hamas, one of the organizations among the Palestinians, but the one who's in charge of their government, they have right at the center of their logo, the Dome of the Rock, and then cross swords indicating that symbol of Jihad, the way this will be the battle for this.

Another thing they mentioned, and this headline, it says, Hamas reveals the hidden reason for the October 7th attacks on Israel. It's the red heifer. The red heifer is something that has to be raised and then burned, and it's ashes used for the purification of those who will rebuild the temple and officiate within it.

So, they got these red heifers from Texas. They have five of them right now sitting in Shiloh or Shiloh, and the hope is to have this red heifer ceremony on the Mount of Olives, and then from that, have the means to begin the process of rebuilding the temple.

That, of course, is frightening to the Palestinians because they feel they would lose control, and that's part of the things behind this conflict. Monadis, one of the codifiers of the Mishnah, which is kind of put together, the oral law, it's supposedly behind the written law, which is in the Bible.

He said, nine red heifers were prepared from the time that this command was given up until the destruction of the second temple. Verses prepared by Moses, the second by Ezra, and seven more prepared from Ezra until the destruction of the temple, and the tenth, the king Messiah will prepare, may he be speedily revealed.

So, in other words, there haven't, there's been nine. The one now that they want to see done, they believe will enter us into the Messianic era. So, this combines present politics with prophecy. Just this week, and before this as well, I think back in May, Ben-Gavir, who is the minister, national security minister, has been going to the Temple Mount, praying for the hostages, things like this.

It's the first time an official of Israel has actually gone to the Temple Mount for prayer, and it moves things into a different realm. He says, and he said this Al-Aqsa belongs only to Israel. You can see Muslims saying Al-Aqsa is only for them.