Who Blocked the Golden Gate?

The story that the Old City’s eastern gate was blocked to prevent the messiah's arrival is finally debunked

“A tour guide shouldn’t let the facts get in the way of a good story” is an oft-heard mantra but I’m not sure that it’s true. Sometimes, the facts offer an even better story, or at least a more important one. That’s certainly the case with Jerusalem’s Gate of Mercy (Sha’ar Ha-Rahamim in Hebrew and Bab al-Rahma in Arabic), also known as the Golden Gate. Located on the eastern side of the Temple Mount/Haram al-Sharif, and best observed from the Mount of Olives, it’s been sealed since the medieval era, with many guides today claiming this was done by Muslim rulers to prevent the messiah’s entry. This, in turn, reflects the story of Jesus’s Triumphal Entry into Jerusalem, which many (inaccurately) claim was via the Golden Gate, and Jewish traditions, drawing on Ezekiel, that the Messiah will enter Jerusalem from the east.

The story never made much sense to me. Even though the Messiah isn’t a superhero, I always found the idea that a single blocked gate would stop him rather unconvincing. Now, in a recent article in the Journal of Islamic Studies, ‘The Gate of Mercy as a Contested Monument: Jerusalem’s Sealed Gate as a Muslim Site of Memory,’ Dr. Christiane-Marie Abu Sarah has convincingly debunked the myth.

While Josephus noted the presence of an “eastern gate” in the first century, the current gate is thought to have been built during the Umayyad period (the original “eastern gate,” possibly known as the Shushan Gate, that Jesus would have used is believed to have been further south). A double gate with two bays opening into an interior vestibule, with a pair of small domes lining the ceiling of the inner walls (you can see images of the gate’s interior here), Abu Sarah notes that the dimensions are homologous to the Dome of the Rock, with Syro-Palestinian style rosette-adorned friezes that correspond to its marble friezes.

On the other side of the gate is an Islamic cemetery that also dates to the Umayyad era, when the Dome of the Rock was built. It houses the tombs of Ubadah ibn al-Samit and Shaddad ibn Aws, who were companions of Muhammad. The gate seems to have been built as way to access the cemetery from the Haram al-Sharif. Referring to the nearby Dome of the Chain, and earlier Jewish traditions, early Muslim chroniclers described the gate as a place of penitence in preparation for judgement.

By the 10^th century, amidst an increase in apocalyptic traditions, local Muslims began connecting the gate to a verse in the Quran (57:13): “a wall will be put between them, with a gate therein. Inside it will be mercy (al-rahma) and outside it will be torment (al-adhab).” Abu Sarah quotes David Cook, who writes in Studies in Muslim Apocalyptic: “Without a doubt, to attach a tradition to a Quranic verse (or vice versa) was the ultimate way to ensure that a tradition was accepted.”

The next shift came in the Mamluk era, when the scholar Ibn Kathir, who was conspicuously hostile towards Judaism, argued that the link between the Quran and the Gate of Mercy was false and the result of local residents using “Jewish traditions and fabrications” (he specifically mentions Ka’b al-Ahbar, a famous seventh-century Jewish convert to Islam). Responding to Ibn Kathir, Abu Sarah writes:

Notable here is that Ibn Kathir is concerned with the purity of tradition – but scholars have shown that hybridity was in fact intrinsic to Islam and Christianity: supersessionist memory programmes by nature involved building on prior traditions, and shared Muslim/Jewish/Christian sites, saints, rituals, and prayers were common in the late antique and medieval Mediterranean.

I would put this less diplomatically: Islam, like Christianity before it, believed it had replaced Judaism (and Christianity), but never threw off what Harold Bloom (in a very different context) called “the anxiety of influence.” This is why the Dome of the Rock and Al-Aqsa were viewed by many Muslims as the Third Temple, and why medieval traditions about the Gate of Mercy drew on the Midrash when they described Solomon harvesting precious metals from trees of gold and silver. Today a common word for this kind of practice is appropriation; while this is an anachronistic way of describing medieval syncretism, it’s important to acknowledge the genealogy of this hybridity, which isn’t simply the result of some kind of benevolent neutrality.

Why, then, was the gate closed? One theory, mostly rejected, is that it happened after the 747 earthquake that damaged the southern Umayyad palace; however, the first Muslim source confirming its closure was in 1165-6. It’s more likely (though we’ll probably never know for certain) that it was closed (along with other gates and domes) during the Fatimid period to make room for a zawiya (a residence for Muslim scholars and ascetics).

By the Crusader period, following the earlier apocalyptic associations, a tradition emerged that the gate would be shut until the Final Judgement. Nobody, though, claimed that this was part of a plot to prevent the Messiah’s entry. Christians only began offering this explanation in the 1800s, citing Ezekiel 44:1-3:

Then he brought me back to the outer gate of the sanctuary, which faces east; and it was shut. The LORD said to me: This gate shall remain shut; it shall not be opened, and no one shall enter by it; for the LORD, the God of Israel, has entered by it; therefore it shall remain shut. Only the prince, because he is a prince, may sit in it to eat food before the Lord; he shall enter by way of the vestibule of the gate, and shall go out by the same way.

A PEF lecture series spread this message, while key figures like Thomas Cook and Laurence Oliphant also amplified it. Ironically, Jerusalem Palestinians shared the belief that Jesus would return and save the world, drawing on the Dome of the Rock inscriptions which, while rejecting his divinity, bless Jesus and anticipate his return. As Abu Sarah writes:

The rumours should also be understood as part of a long tradition of Christian imperial apocalypticism, now revamped as a new imperial myth-in the-making about the inevitability of a European takeover of the Holy Land in the face of Ottoman weakness. As one British writer stated, ‘The Arabs walled up this gate because of a prophecy that when the Christians take the city they will enter through that gate. I think they are foolish to suppose a few stones will defeat the prophecy – as if the Christian nations could not enter the city whenever and wherever they choose!

The notion that the gate was blocked to prevent the messiah’s return remains a popular myth to this day. As Abu Sarah notes, it has also been dragged into the maelstrom of the wider conflict over the Temple Mount/Haram al-Sharif (which includes the increasingly prevalent Muslim denial of the Jewish Temple’s existence) and has even been published in several reputable guidebooks. This should always be resisted. The pursuit of truth should power our understanding of the land’s history, irrespective of the wider political implications, even at the expense of a good story.