Letter from Hiram Abiff

 

Dear Editor

Devotion News

 

I keep my all seeing eye on you in your sub-luminary abode and beheld that you are about make some decisions on property and Temples.  You may have heard that I have had some experience in these matters. 

 

The best advice I can give on sites is our old one of position, position and position.  Have you heard of that?  It is no good building a Temple where the great unwashed live if you want Brethren to attend.  That’s why we, King Solomon and I, chose what we call The Temple Mount to construct his Temple. 

 

My people have always regarded this to be a Holy Site, the hill where Abraham nearly sacrificed his son Isaac at God’s behest.  The later Christians believe that too.  What better position could we have chosen? 

 

The Muslims consider it to be Holy too, the place from which Muhammad ascended to Heaven to get his riding instructions from God then returned to Earth.  The site is now covered with Islam’s Dome of the Rock and the al-Aqsa Mosque and they call it the Noble Sanctuary. 

 

You can read all this in the Testaments but in October 2007 artifacts from 8th – 6th BC were indecently un-interred from the Mount using bulldozers, dating and locating my Temple.  There were bone fragments and crockery bearing the designs of my time. 

 

You might ask what comes first, worshipers or a Temple (you know the chicken and egg stuff).  Well, take my advice that you will have worshipers first but if you want to keep them and have their numbers grow then you have to build Temples in convenient places for attendance and in missionary areas even if you have to pay a few more shekels for the position.  They do not have to be flash as you are told in the 1st Degree Tracing Board. 

 

We lost our sacred Temple Mount on which our brother Muslims have now built a Mosque, a property like it that we can never replace. 

 

And finally my Brethren let me exhort you to dedicate yourself to such pursuits that will enable you to keep for prosperity that property wherewith your forefathers have blessed you for once sold it is like a pearl thrown into the sea or corn cast among the swine. 

 

 

 

Yours fraternally

 

Hiram

 

 

Note:  The Temple Mount was later Jordanian territory until the 1967 war, when the new State of Israel conquered Jerusalem's Old City. Israel left internal administration of the compound to the Waqf, while Israeli police took responsibility for overall security.