Page Content (OCR)
184 a place where you may dwell forever... Though the uttermost heavens cannot contain Thee, May you hear our supplications from Thine seat in heaven. “And Yahweh appeared to Solomon that night, and said to him: I have heard your prayer; I have chosen this site for my house of worship . . . From heaven I will hear the prayers of my people and forgive their transgressions . .. Now I have chosen and consecrated this House for my Shem to remain there forever” (IJ Chronicles, Chapters 6-7). The word Shem—here and earlier, as in the opening verses of chapter 6 of Genesis—is commonly translated “Name.” As far back as in my first book, The Twelfth Planet, | have sug- gested that the term originally and in the relevant context re- ferred to what the Egyptians called the “Celestial Boat” and the Sumerians called MU—‘*sky ship’”—of the gods. Accord- ingly, the Temple in Jerusalem, built atop the stone platform, with the Ark of the Covenant placed upon the sacred rock, was to serve as an earthly bond with the celestial deity—both for communicating and for the landing of his sky ship! Throughout the Temple there was no statue, no idol, no graven image. The only object within it was the hallowed Ark of the Covenant—and “there was nothing in the Ark except the two tablets that were given to Moses in Sinai.” Unlike the Mesopotamian ziggurat temples, from Enlil’s in Nippur to Marduk’s in Babylon, this one was not a place of residence for the deity, where the god lived, ate, slept, and bathed. It was a House of Worship, a place of divine con- tact; it was a temple for a Divine Presence by the Dweller in the Clouds. It is said that a picture is worth a thousand words; it is cer- tainly true where there are few pertinent words but many relevant pictures. It was about the time that the Jerusalem temple was com- pleted and consecrated to the Dweller in the Clouds that a noticeable change in the sacred glyptic—the depiction of the divine—took place where such depictions were common and THE END OF DAYS