ABSTRACT
With the final devastating destruction of Jerusalem, its Temple and Jewish hegemony in Judaea, a new era began not only for the Land and the people who resided there, but for many Jews for whom Jerusalem and its Temple were significant, if only symbolically. Despite the ruined nature of the site, with the settlement of a Roman legion in the western part of Jerusalem, other people began to resettle within and around the devastated city. Jerusalem, the Temple, and the Temple Mount loom large in rabbinic imagination, wherever they gathered to discuss Torah-texts. By the end of the seventh century a distinctly Islamic structure arose over a rock on the Temple Mount commemorating its supposed connection to Paradise through its role in Creation, suggesting that a bit of Paradise remained attached to the rock, and was recreated within the building.
