The temple-hill was emphatically “the mount of the Lord.”  In Ezekiel (xliii. 15) the altar that stood upon it is called Har-el, “the mountain of God.”  The term reminds us of Babylonia, where the mercy-seat of the great temple of Bel-Merodach at Babylon was termed Du-azagga, “the holy hill.”  It was on this “seat of the oracles,” as it was termed, that the god enthroned himself at the beginning of each year, and announced his will to mankind.  But the mercy-seat was entitled “the holy hill” only because it was a miniature copy of “the holy hill” upon which the whole temple was erected.  So, too, at Jerusalem, the altar is called “the mount of God” by Ezekiel only because it represents that greater “mount of God” upon which it was built.  The temple-hill itself was the primitive Har-el.

The list of conquered localities in Palestine recorded by Thothmes III. at Karnak gives indirect testimony to the same fact.  The name of Rabbah of Judah is immediately preceded in it by that of Har-el, “the mount of God.”  The position of this Har-el leads us to the very mountain tract in the midst of which Jerusalem stood.  We now know that Jerusalem was already an important city in the age of the eighteenth Egyptian dynasty, and that it formed one of the Egyptian conquests; it would be strange therefore if no notice had been taken of it by the compiler of the list.  May we not see, then, in the Har-el of the Egyptian scribe the sacred mountain of Israelitish history?

There is a passage in one of the letters of Ebed-Tob which may throw further light on the history of the temple-hill.  Unfortunately one of the cuneiform characters in it is badly formed, so that its reading is not certain, and still more unfortunately this character is one of the most important in the whole paragraph.  If Dr. Winckler and myself are right in our copies, Ebed-Tob speaks of “the city of the mountain of Jerusalem, the city of the temple of the god Nin-ip, (whose) name (there) is Salim, the city of the king.”  What we read “Salim,” however, is read differently by Dr. Zimmern, so that according to his copy the passage must be translated:  “the city of the mountain of Jerusalem, the city of the temple of the god Nin-ip is its name, the city of the king.”  In the one case Ebed-Tob will state explicitly that the god of Jerusalem, whom he identifies with the Babylonian Nin-ip, is Salim or Sulman, the god of peace, and that his temple stood on “the mountain of Jerusalem”; in the other case there will be no mention of Salim, and it will be left doubtful whether or not the city of Beth-Nin-ip was included within the walls of the capital.  It would seem rather that it was separate from Jerusalem, though standing on the same “mountain” as the great fortress.  If so, we might identify Jerusalem with the city on Mount Zion, the Jebusite stronghold of a later date, while “the city of Beth-Nin-ip” would be that which centred round the temple on Moriah.