Garo Nalbandian

ON THE COVER: Glazed blue tile and golden dome gleaming in bright sunlight, the Dome of the Rock on Jerusalem’s Temple Mount has welcomed pilgrims and tourists for nearly 1,300 years. Within the mosque looms a huge mass of bedrock that tradition sanctifies as the site where Abraham prepared to sacrifice Isaac, where the Holy of Holies in Solomon’s Temple rested and where Mohammed ascended to heaven. In “Was the Site of the Jerusalem Temple Originally a Cemetery?” Rivka Gonen proposes that the Dome of the Rock shields a still older site—a cemetery from the Middle Bronze Age I, 2200 to 2000 B.C.