Why does the Middle East so often dominate our headlines? One obvious answer is oil, the lifeblood of modern economies. Without oil to run factories, heat homes, fuel transportation and provide energy and raw materials for thousands of uses, the economies of many nations would grind to a halt. The crucial importance of oil alone ensures that the Middle East will remain in the headlines for years.

But there's more that keeps the Middle East in the news. It is the birthplace of the world's three great monotheistic religions--Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Too often it has not been just their birthplace, but their battlefield as their adherents warred against each other for control territory they considered holy.

Flash point in history

Nowhere are these conflicts more obvious than in Israel, and specifically in Jerusalem. It's hard to imagine how so much history, religion and culture can collide and literally stand in heaps. Nowhere is this more evident than at the Temple Mount, flash point for many a conflict over the years.

The site first came to the attention of Israel's King David, who bought a threshing floor and built an altar there, intending it to be the site of the future temple (1 Chronicles 21-22).

The Temple Mount is called such because it is the location of the temples built by David's son Solomon (destroyed by the Babylonians ca. 587 B.C.) and the temple built by Ezra and enlarged by Herod the Great (and ultimately razed by the Roman emperor Titus in A.D. 70).

Here Jesus of Nazareth worshiped, taught and confronted the moneychangers, scribes, Pharisees and religious authorities. After His death, Christianity was born in its shadow. His followers continued to worship and teach there for another several decades until Rome crushed a Jewish rebellion in A.D. 70 and removed most of the Jewish population they hadn't killed. A later Jewish rebellion in 132-135 led to a Roman decree that no Jew was to set foot in Jerusalem on pain of death.

Temple Mount Centuries later, in 638, Muslim Arabs took the city. In 691 Muslims built the Dome of the Rock on the Temple Mount, enclosing the spot Muslims believe Muhammad ascended to heaven. Today Muslims consider it the third holiest site in Islam, after Mecca where Muhammad was born and Medina where he found refuge and died.

Several centuries later the Crusaders captured Jerusalem, slaughtering Muslim and Jew alike. It was at this time the Dome of the Rock was converted into a church. Jerusalem would change hands between these warring factions three more times before Muslims finally took control of Jerusalem from 1244 to 1917. They would maintain control of the city until the Ottoman Empire fell at the end of World War I. From the end of World War I until 1948 the city was under British administration.

In 1948 the modern state of Israel was born, and in the 1967 war the Israelis captured all of Jerusalem, though leaving the Temple Mount under Islamic authority. Today one can see Muslims praying at the Dome of the Rock atop the Temple Mount, Jews praying at the Western Wall barely a stone's throw away and Christians praying along the Via Dolorosa and at the Church of the Holy Sepulcher a few hundred yards to the north and west. And all around one sees the rubble of the centuries of conflagration and conflict over this holy place.

Future of Jerusalem

Who will write the next chapter in the history of this troubled city? Will it be the last? Believe it or not, the final chapters are already written--prophesied centuries ago in the pages of the Bible. And ominously, they mesh remarkably well with today's headlines.