Mount of Temptation
Mount of Temptation, in Palestinian Arabic , is a mountain over the city of Jericho in the West Bank, Palestine; ancient Christian tradition identifies it as the location of the temptation of Jesus described in the New Testament Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke, in which it is said that, from "a high place", the Devil offered Jesus rule over all the kingdoms of the world.
The city of Jericho lies at the feet east of Mount Quruntul, at below sea level, with the nearby Jordan River and the Dead Sea at even lower elevations, further to the east and southeast. The mount has around of prominence over Jericho, which translates to an elevation of above sea level, and offers a commanding view of its fabled surroundings to the east.
Quruntul has been the location of a Seleucid and Maccabean fortress known as Dok. It was the scene of the assassination of Simon Maccabeus and two of his sons in 134 BC. Held by the last Maccabean ruler, Antigonus, during his war with Herod, the latter later improved the fort's water system.
Since at least the 4th century, Christian tradition has specifically associated the forty days of Jesus's fasting that preceded his temptation with a cave on Jebel Quruntul. Eventually, it came to be associated with the high mountain in the Gospel's description of temptation. Centuries after the death of Jesus, the mount became the site of a lavra-type monastery, turned into a Catholic monastery during Crusader rule over the Holy Land, and then into an Orthodox monastery since the late Ottoman period. Since 1998, the monastery halfway up the mountain has been connected with the tell holding the remains of ancient Jericho via a cable car and a center of religious tourism. In 2014, the mountain and monastery were made part of the State of Palestine's "Jericho Oasis Archaeological Park". It has also been nominated to the Tentative List for World Heritage status as part of religious traditions of El-Bariyah, the Judaean Desert.
Names
Bible
The first time the place is mentioned is in the Bible. Ketef Jericho is part of Mount of Temptation and is known for its many caves. They are mentioned in the Book of Joshua, it is the location where Rahab sent the spies, while in the Book of Maccabees and "The Jewish War" it is noted as the refuge place to where Ptolemy son of Abubus fled after assassinating Simon son of Mattathias.Related to the Gospels
The standard Koine Greek texts of the New Testament state that, after his baptism in the Jordan River, Jesus went into a "solitary" or "desolate place". All three passages where this is mentioned are traditionally translated into English as "the wilderness", although the same term is variously rendered in other locations in the Bible as a "secluded place", a "solitary place", or "the desert". As the second temptation in Luke and the third in Matthew, from "a high mountain", the Devil offered Jesus "all the kingdoms of the world". On the Crusader-period Uppsala Map of Jerusalem, it appears as "mons excelsus", literally "high mountain" .When this passage was connected to a specific hill in late Antiquity, it was eventually given the name , after the 40-day period mentioned in the biblical accounts, quarranta being a Late Latin form of classical quadraginta.
This was preserved in Arabic as , also transliterated Jabal al-Qurunṭul, Jebel Kuruntul, Jebel Kŭrŭntŭl, Jabal al-Quruntul, and Jabal al Qarantal, and eventually properly translated as Jebel el-Arba'in.
The name, later Mount of Temptation, was first attested in English in 1654.
In modern times the name has been calqued into Arabic as , literally 'Mount of the Temptation'.
Related to the ancient fortress
The Hebrew name of the Maccabean fortress on this hill is not separately recorded but was transliterated into Greek as Dōk in 1 Maccabees and as Dagṑn in the works of Josephus. The same name was preserved as Douka as late as the early monasteries founded in the 4th century and two small settlements near the springs at the base of the mountain continue to bear the name Duyūk. In Modern Hebrew, it is called Qarantal, after the Arabic name.Christian traditions
In the Synoptic Gospels of the Christian Bible, after his baptism by John in the River Jordan, Jesus is said to have been driven by the Spirit into the "wilderness", where he fasted for 40 days and 40 nights before being tempted by the "devil" or "Satan". The account in Mark says as much in brief summary. The account in Matthew describes the devil tempting Jesus first with his ability to provide himself food to end his hunger, then traveling to the Temple in Jerusalem and tempting him with threatening suicide to prompt action from God's angels, and finally traveling to a high mountain and tempting him with dominion over all the kingdoms of the world with the attendant glory. On each occasion, Jesus refuses to misuse his power to sate human appetites, to misuse his position to test God's will, or to countenance worship of anyone other than God. The account in Luke is essentially the same, but the order of the last two temptations is reversed.A separate tradition recorded in John Phocas's Ecphrasis, a 12th-century pilgrimage report, was that one of the tells at the base of the mount once held a temple commemorating the location where Joshua supposedly saw the archangel Michael.
History
Bronze Age to Hellenistic period
Jebel Quruntul is a limestone peak controlling the main paths from Jerusalem and Ramallah to Jericho and the River Jordan since antiquity, possibly the same as the "desert road" mentioned in Joshua 8:15 & 20:31 and Judges 20:42. Nomads have frequented the oasis at Jericho, watered by the Ein es-Sultan spring, also known as Spring of Elisha, for at least 12,000 years. There was small settlement on the slopes of Quruntul around 3200 during the early Bronze Age. The area was conquered by the Israelites around 1200, but there are no records of important battles in the area during the subsequent conquest by the Assyrians, Babylonians, Persians, Macedonians, or the Diadochi.Maccabean Revolt
By the time of the Maccabean Revolt, the Seleucid general Bacchides had fortified the summit of Quruntul. This garrison fell to the Jewish revolt in 167, but was retaken and remanned by Bacchides following his victory at Elasa in 160. The emperor Antiochus VII Sidetes appointed a certain Ptolemy as commander of this garrison and the lands around Jericho. Using the fort as his main stronghold, he held a banquet there where he slew the Jewish high priest Simon Thassi, his father-in-law, along with two of his brothers-in-law in 134. Simon's third son John Hyrcanus then succeeded his father and attacked. Encircled by the Judean army, Ptolemy threatened to throw John's mother, his own mother-in-law, from the fort and over the cliff. The woman supposedly pled for her son not to shirk his duty on her account, after which he continued the assault. She was first tortured and then, after John was forced to withdraw from the siege to honor the seventh year of rest then observed by the Jews, killed. Receiving insufficient reinforcements from Antiochus to hold his position, Ptolemy then fled to Zeno Cotylas, the tyrant of Philadelphia.In the first century BC, during Herod's conflict with Antigonus for the throne of Judaea, Dok was seized by Antigonus. Herod subsequently made improvements to the water system at the site.
Late Roman and Byzantine periods
At some point in late Antiquity, Jebel Quruntul became associated with the entire 40 days of fasting which preceded the temptation of Jesus and then with the temptation itself, which occurred on the "high mountain" from which he saw "all the kingdoms of the world and the glory of them". Tradition ascribed its "rediscovery" to StHelena, the pious mother of Constantine the Great, during her tour of the Holy Land sometime after 326. In 340, Chariton the Confessor established a lavra-type monastery on the mountain, then still using a form of its earlier Hebrew and Seleucid name. The lavra was not at the top of the mountain but beside the Grotto of the Temptation, the cave supposedly identified by Helen as the location of Jesus's 40 days of fasting. In all, 35 other cells were hollowed out on the east face of the mountain to house the monks. The wider area saw several other churches and monasteries erected over the next few centuries, most notably the monastery in Wadi Qelt, established by John of Thebes and made famous by George of Choziba. This initial period of Christian development came to an end with the 614 campaign of the ByzantineSasanian War, when the Persians were able to leverage a Jewish revolt to briefly conquer Jerusalem. The monasteries of Quruntul and Jericho were plundered and depopulated, recovery being prevented by the rapid Muslim conquest of Palestine in 635 and 636.Early Muslim and Crusader periods
Relatively peaceful coexistence of Christians, Jews, and Muslims in the area ended in the 11th century with al-Hakim's persecutions, the invasions of the Seljuks, and the onset of the First Crusade. The Byzantine emperor ManuelI rebuilt the area's Orthodox monasteries. The two sites supposedly identified by StHelena centuries earlier, however, saw new Catholic chapels raised, and monks of the Holy Sepulchre used the site of Chariton's lavra beside the Grotto for a priory dedicated to John the Baptist, erected in 1133 or 1134. The relative importance of the Grotto and the priory led to the mountain itself becoming known to the numerous pilgrims of the era as "Mount Quarantine". The priory was granted the tithes of Jericho two years later. In 1143, this income was valued equivalent to 5,000 aurei per year and was transferred from the monks to the Sisters of Bethany by Queen Melisende of Jerusalem.Around the same time, the Knights Templar constructed a small but formidable fortification on the mountaintop, storing water in Hellenistic cisterns and caches of weapons and supplies in the mountain's caves. It appears likely that the Templar stronghold made use of parts of the Hasmonean and Herodian walls, as well as a Byzantine chapel that had been erected within them. The still-extant base of its walls form a rough rectangle about. The order's Hierarchical Statutes from the 1170s or early 1180s charged the Commander at Jerusalem to always have ten knights available to reinforce the route past Jebel Quruntul and to protect and supply any noblemen who might travel it. Around the same time, Theodoric's Little Book reported that at least a few Templars or Hospitallers accompanied any group of pilgrims along the route against any local bandits or Bedouin raids. Burchard describes visiting Jebel Quruntul in his Description, but places the actual site of the Temptation at another location closer to Bethel. Wilbrand's Itinerary considered it genuine.
The area was lost to the Christians shortly after their 1187 defeat at Hattin to the Ayyubid sultan Saladin and largely depopulated.