Historic Find from First Temple Period!

Ancient Telegram from the past -- "Hi! We're here waving at you - its us!"

As the Palestinian Authority and Waqf do everything in their power to destroy any trace of Jewish History on the the Temple Mount -- an amazing historic relic has been found.

Going back a few years, under the Ehud Barak government, the Palestinians were in the middle of building one of the world's largest mosques -- underground, on the Temple Mount. Not wanting to upset the Palestinians during his attempts to come to a "peace agreement" with Arafat, Barak ignored the massive excavation of the Temple Mount. This archeological "crime of the century" was largely ignored by the Israeli government, despite the warnings from Israeli chief of antiquities authority, Amir Drori. The Palestinians destroyed whatever archeological evidence they could find that proved the Jewish Temples once existed. Arafat often told Bill Clinton that there never existed a Jewish Temple at that location. (see Ross interview; Dennis Ross, Yasir Arafat, Foreign Policy, (July/August 2002).

The Palestinians dumped hundreds of trucks worth of "landfill" from the Temple Mount at the base of "Ir David", the city of David, just south outside the walls of the old city of Jerusalem (known as Silwan in Arabic).

Never before was any archeological work done on the Temple Mount, and for the first time, real earth from the Temple Mount was now "outside" the walls of the Temple Mount compound. However, adding insult to injury, as Jewish archaeologists ran to the site to see if they could recover any artifacts, they were promptly arrested by the Israeli Police. Their crime was "illegal archaeological work." Never mind that the police ignored the illegal excavations on the Temple Mount by the Arabs, never mind that the earth was "pre-searched" and everything the Arabs could find, destroyed, but the trucks were dumping the landfill in a garbage dump.

Eventually, the Police gave up arresting people for sifting through the dirt and went on to much other more important tasks.

Bar Ilan University's Dr. Gabi Barkai and a team of archaeologiststs and students have been painstakingly sifting through the landfill, and recently made a remarkable find. They found a "bulla" (stamping tool) with Hebrew writing on it, which dates back to the First Temple period. More exciting is that it contains the name of "Yehochal ben Shlomiyahu ben Shvi" (יהוכל בן שלמיהו בן שבי) on it. Yehochal was a minister in King Tzidkiyahu's court, and is mentioned in the Tanach, Sefer Yirmiyahu, chapter 37, pasuk 3:

ירמיה לז 3: וישלח המלך צדקיהו את יהוכל בן שלמיה ואת צפניהו בן מעשיה הכהן

אל ירמיהו הנביא לאמר התפלל נא בעדנו אל ה' א-להינו

Here are more pictures of remnants of the Jewish Temples that were dug up (some were destroyed) by Palestinians.

See more at the site: http://www.israel-wat.com and parts of this story came from here: http://rotter.net/forum/scoops1/6495.shtml