Modern “Cave of Robbers”

IN Natural History magazine, anthropology professor Colin Turnbull related his experiences as a tourist in Jerusalem. He said that the “Christmas spirit” he had begun to develop “was quickly dampened” when he observed the city’s shops “full of junk being sold at ludicrous prices to Christmas shoppers (tourists) who seemed consumed by a compulsion to buy.”

Turnbull said of his “Christmas spirit”: “[It was] further dispelled in the one place I thought might possibly revive [it]​—the tomb of the Holy Sepulcher.” (Interior view seen above.) There, the behavior of fellow tourists “who seemed to manifest a blatant lack of respect for the sacred” discouraged him as they “pushed and shoved in a very un-Christian way, using shoulders and elbows to force a way through the narrow entrance to the sepulcher itself. Occasionally a minor fight broke out, accompanied by swearing and gestures that were anything but sacred.”

Rather than “restoring an air of sanctity,” Turnbull said, the clergy in charge “dispelled any illusion of holiness by themselves setting the pattern for aggressive behavior.” He told of “one brown-robed, heavily cowled, Rasputinlike figure” who “imperiously swept the common tourists back from the sepulcher entrance each time a group of higher paying, candle-bearing tourists (called pilgrims) came into view, led by yet another Rasputin.” The result, said the educator, was “hostility between non-candle-bearers and candle-bearers, as well as between the various clerics, as there seemed to be an endless succession of rival sects competing for time and space.”

Professor Turnbull’s companion was “a few yards away at the rear of the shrine, down on his hands and knees, half hidden inside a hole in the wall.” Turnbull related: “As I watched, his right hand came out and groped blindly for some money in his pocket, but his other arm remained inside, stretched as if held. Once he had transferred the money back inside the hole, however, his left arm was released and my friend stood up . . . In his left hand he held a microscopic wooden cross, wet where it had been sprinkled with allegedly holy water by the monk who had that concession and crouched concealed inside the little cavern, waiting for his prey.”

Jesus Christ observed similar conduct by influential people at the temple, and he told them that they were turning it into “a cave of robbers.” (Luke 19:45, 46) Of course, in our day such ‘caves of robbers’ are by no means limited to Jerusalem.

[Picture Credit Line on page 25]

Pictorial Archive (Near Eastern History) Est.