The Eastern Gate

The Eastern Gate of the Old City is one of the most intriguing gates of the eight or nine (depending on how you count them … see my last blog).  It is the most intriguing because the gate sparks a fascinating dialogue about the coming of the Messiah.  The Eastern Gate is also commonly called the Golden Gate.  In Hebrew, it is called Sha’ar Harachamim, or the Gate of Mercy.  It is also called the Sushan Gate (named after Shushan the Persian capital – to signify appreciation to the Persian kingdom for allowing the re-building of the Temple in the days of Ezra and Nehemiah.) While most of the other gates of the Old City date to the Turkish Period, this gate predates this (although most believe that it was Suleiman the Great who blocked this already-existing gate in the 16th century). Most likely, the gate dates to the 7th century AD.  In fact, Hebrew writing on the internal walls of the gate’s chamber is believed to have been left by Jewish pilgrims at least 1,000 years ago.

As shared in an article a few years ago now about the gates of the Old City (Temple Mount.org), the dramatic story is told of Jim Flemming (someone I lived with in Jerusalem in June, 1982 for one month) who discovered an archway of a gate below the present-day Eastern Gate of the Old City.  Falling through the rain-soaked ground in 1969 while walking along the Eastern Gate, Dr. Flemming fell into a modern Arab tomb. He found himself in a pit of bones looking at the top of another gate eight feet beneath the surface. The story was re-told in the Jan/Feb 1982 BAR magazine (Biblical Archaeology Review), “He (Flemming) stumbled into the large tomb in front of the left portal of the Golden Gate. At the bottom of the tomb, on the face of the wall, he observed wedge-shaped stones, indicating the top of an arch. In the drawing above, the stones that he actually saw are drawn in solid lines inside the tomb. If the partial arch he saw is, in fact, complete, it forms an arched gateway exactly under the left portal of the Golden Gate. Presumably, a similar arched portal is under the right portal of the Golden Gate, thus forming a double-portaled Lower Gate.”  The question is simply this: What was this gate and what time period does it date to?

Diagram of Eastern Gate, Taken from TempleMount.com

Except for the stones in the left arch of the Lower Gate that were actually observed, the Lower Gate is drawn with dotted lines in the accompanying reconstructed drawing.  Some date this archway to Herod’s time (1st century AD).  Others date it back to Nehemiah’s time (5th century BC).  What is sure is that it predates the 7th century AD because it connects with a wall that consists of different masonry. Some theorize that this was a gate that led into the Temple precincts.

What makes this even more interesting is that in 1867 Charles Warren discovered another wall that actually extended eastward from the present Turkish wall.  The article describes the find this way, “41 feet below ground level and 46 feet in front of the eastern wall of the Old City is a wall discovered by Captain Charles Warren. Warren encountered the wall after he sank a shaft 143 feet east of the Golden Gate and then burrowed westward underground along bedrock toward the Temple Mount. This underground wall obstructed his progress, so he tried to chisel through it in order to reach the Old City wall. After penetrating 5.5 feet into the underground wall and failing to come out on the other side, he decided to tunnel south to try to get around the wall. After tunneling 14 feet south without coming to the end, Warren turned around and dug north for 55 feet until an earth-fall in the tunnel stopped him. Shortly before he was forced to stop tunneling, Warren observed that this underground wall obstructing his progress had started to curve west toward the Golden Gate and the Old City wall.”

Why is the Eastern Gate so interesting to people?  It is because of the prophetic words of Ezekiel.  He says,”Then the man brought me back to the outer gate of the sanctuary, the one facing east, and it was shut. The Lord said to me, “This gate is to remain shut. It must not be opened; no one may enter through it. It is to remain shut because the Lord, the God of Israel, has entered through it. The prince himself is the only one who may sit inside the gateway to eat in the presence of the Lord. He is to enter by way of the portico of the gateway and go out the same way (Ezekiel 44:1-3).”  The question is however – what gate will the Messiah come through when he returns?  Will it be the closed 7th century gate?  Will it be the gate Jim Flemming found underneath the present gate?  Or will it be another gate that does not exist yet?

The arch of a lower gate found “accidentally” by Jim Flemming in 1969.

According to the Mishnah (Middot 1.3), there was only one gate in the Eastern Wall of the Temple Mount: “the Eastern Gate on which was portrayed the Palace of Shushan”. Leen Ritmeyer writes, “The Eastern Gate is an important gate of the Temple Mount, as on Yom Kippur the scapegoat that was chosen by the High Priest in front of the Temple, would have been led through the Court of the Women, down a stairway to and through the Shushan Gate and into the Kidron Valley. From there it was led over the Mount of Olives into the Wilderness of Judea.” (“The Eastern Gate of the Temple in Jerusalem” May 13, 2013)  The Mishnah said that the “priest that was consecrated to burn the Red Heifer would leave the Temple Mount with the Heifer and go through the eastern gate to the Mount of Olives.”

According to Ritmeyer, the problem of the identification of the eastern gate lies in two passages, in Mishnah Parah 3.9 and 4.2.  “The first states that the priest that offered the Red Heifer on the Mount of Olives, sprinkled its blood seven times toward the Holy of Holies. According to the second passage, ‘if the blood was sprinkled not in the direction of the entrance [of the Holy of Holies] it is invalid.’ There must therefore have been a direct line of vision between the Mount of Olives and the entrance to the Temple. From the place of this activity, he could look straight through the Nicanor Gate and see the entrance to the Temple.”   What does all this mean concerning the location of the “Eastern Gate?”

Ritmeyer’s Temple and “Nicanor’s Gate”

The idea that the Shushan Gate had to be directly opposite the entrance to the Temple comes from a misunderstanding of the passage in Middot 2.4: “All the walls there were high, save only the eastern wall, because the [High] priest that burns the [Red] heifer and stands on top of the Mount of Olives should be able to look directly into the entrance of the Sanctuary when the blood is sprinkled.”  If this is true (as Ritmeyer suggests), then the “Eastern Gate” was none other than the interior gate on top of the 15 rounded steps on which the Levites sang the Psalms of Ascent (Psalm 120-134).  It was called the Nicanor Gate. It was the gate that stood right in front of the Holy Chamber of the Temple.

If this is the Eastern Gate” through which Christ will one day walk through (according to Ezekiel 44), then it is a gate that is not yet built!  Does this then presuppose the building of a Third temple?  This all makes for very interesting speculation, doesn’t it.

As for me, I am glad that God has all this figured out.  Whether the Eastern Gate is the present-day blocked gate, the gate underneath the present gate discovered by Flemming, or the gate not yet built, God knows.  And this is all fine with me.