Place of the Skull

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billcu1

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Now I have always heard in Christian Tradition that the “Place of the Skull” was where Adam’s died and his skull was buried. My mother tries to tell me that it was Goliath’s skull. suspect there’s no tradition to this but as Protestantism goes David burying Goliath’s skull is mentioned in the Bible so that somehow means Golgotha. Does Church Tradition teach Adam’s skull was there. I guess too skulls could be seen scattered about since the Romans executed people there.
 
billcu1 said:
Now I have always heard in Christian Tradition that the “Place of the Skull” was where Adam’s died and his skull was buried. My mother tries to tell me that it was Goliath’s skull. suspect there’s no tradition to this but as Protestantism goes David burying Goliath’s skull is mentioned in the Bible so that somehow means Golgotha. Does Church Tradition teach Adam’s skull was there. I guess too skulls could be seen scattered about since the Romans executed people there.
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It was an ancient belief among Christians. Origen seemed to claim that it was a Jewish tradition, but there’s actually no such belief among the Jews - instead Adam is thought to be buried in Hebron along with the other OT patriarchs. (St. Jerome eventually rejected this tradition for precisely this reason.)

Historically speaking, the traditional site (the Church of the Holy Sepulchre) was a limestone quarry in the OT period. Originally, it was quite far away from the city, but over the centuries Jerusalem grew, so that by the time of Jesus, it was just by the city walls. During the final centuries before Jesus, good quality rock ran out and so the quarry was abandoned. People then reused the site as an agricultural place (orchards and gardens were grown there) and carved tombs on the rock face.

If you ask me, I think it’s unlikely that Golgotha was named such either because of Adam or Goliath.

Re. skulls: it’s very unlikely that skulls would have been littered in Golgotha. The Jews were very big on giving people - even executed criminals - a proper burial, because failure to do so would defile the land God had given them. That’s why among the Jews, it was not unusual for crucifixion victims to be buried, which is an exception to standard Roman procedure of just leaving the bodies to rot on crosses.
 
Although there is a sub-chapel in the Basilica of the Holy Selpulchre that is said to occupy the site of Adam’s tomb, there is no history to back up such a claim.

I had not heard the one about Goliath until just now.

To the best of my knowledge, Golgotha (Calvary in Latin) was so named either (a) because it was a place of execution and unclaimed bodies, therefore skulls, or (b) because it was then a rock formation vaguely resembling a human skull.

There is no way to tell now, because the original rock was chiseled away centuries ago in the construction of the BHS. Any headlike rock formation is long gone.

ICXC NIKA.
 
Golgotha is identified with Mount Moriah, too, and Abraham’s sacrifice of the ram instead of Isaac.

The fight with Goliath took place far from Jerusalem (which wasn’t owned by Israel yet -the Jebusites had it), in the Valley of Elah near Bethshemesh. So yeah, David wasn’t going into a different enemy’s territory to bury his Philistine enemy.
 
Now it does say in 1 Samuel 17:54 that David took Goliath’s head and “brought it to Jerusalem,” but it doesn’t say he did it at that time. He probably had it as a trophy, like Goliath’s sword that he apparently gave to the priests as a votary gift to God, since they had it when he needed a sword when he was on the run from Saul.

It was pretty normal in Bronze Age times to preserve and display a prominent enemy’s head, or even to keep them for generations as heirlooms.

But of course there may be many Biblical interpretive traditions I don’t know.
 
Mintaka said:
Golgotha is identified with Mount Moriah, too, and Abraham’s sacrifice of the ram instead of Isaac.
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Glad you brought this up, because this ties in with the Adam tradition in a way.

As you know, in 2 Chronicles Temple Mount is identified as Mount Moriah. But curiously, a Christian tradition claims that it was actually Golgotha instead.

Now while the common Jewish tradition is that Adam was buried in the Cave of the Patriarchs in Hebron, there was a minority belief that claims he was buried beneath the Foundation Stone (Eben ha-Shetiyah) in the Holy of Holies in the Temple Mount. (Another legend also claimed that God took the earth from which Adam was made in the same spot. In fact, the Foundation Stone according to Jewish legend was supposedly the very first part of the Earth to come into existence. It is literally the center of the world, the axis mundi.)

What seems to have happened was that Christians consciously adopted Jewish traditions about the Temple Mount and reapplied them to their own sacred places, such as Golgotha. So for the Jews, the Temple Mount is Mount Moriah, the center of the world; for Christians, it became Calvary.
Mintaka said:
Now it does say in 1 Samuel 17:54 that David took Goliath’s head and “brought it to Jerusalem,” but it doesn’t say he did it at that time. He probably had it as a trophy, like Goliath’s sword that he apparently gave to the priests as a votary gift to God, since they had it when he needed a sword when he was on the run from Saul.

It was pretty normal in Bronze Age times to preserve and display a prominent enemy’s head, or even to keep them for generations as heirlooms.

But of course there may be many Biblical interpretive traditions I don’t know.
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The whole thing about Golgotha being connected with Goliath’s head is due to a rather quirky (okay, I’ll just use the term scholars use for this thing: fanciful) attempt to link the term “Golgotha” with “Goliath of Gath,” which supposedly became corrupted to “Goliath-Gath” and eventually, “Golgotha.”

Now I don’t know much Hebrew or Aramaic, but even I can tell that whoever cooked up this explanation probably doesn’t know Hebrew or Aramaic either. 🤷
 
GEddie said:
To the best of my knowledge, Golgotha (Calvary in Latin) was so named either (a) because it was a place of execution and unclaimed bodies, therefore skulls, or (b) because it was then a rock formation vaguely resembling a human skull.

There is no way to tell now, because the original rock was chiseled away centuries ago in the construction of the BHS. Any headlike rock formation is long gone.

ICXC NIKA.
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BTW I pointed this out in another thread, but it seems that our definition of ‘Golgotha’ is more narrower than the original definition of it.

Nowadays, what we consider “Golgotha” to be is the so-called Rock of Calvary, this approximately 5 meter (16 feet)-high column or pillar of rock. This rock is where we get the idea of ‘Mount Calvary’ from.

However, from the gospels it seems that ‘Golgotha’ is not the name of a specific spot or landmark, but that of a whole area or region. In fact, if you read John’s gospel, you get the impression that the term “Skull-Place” was the name of the general area where both the spot where Jesus was crucified and the garden where Joseph of Arimathea’s tomb is is. In other words, it refers to a general vicinity (BTW, there is actually no indication in the gospels - or in early Christian literature from before the 5th/6th century onwards - whatsoever that Golgotha was a hill).



The thing about the Rock of Calvary is that in its present form, it’s too steep to climb into and too narrow for three crosses to be erected on top of it (the top surface is only just about 3.5 x 1.7 meters). So with that in mind, some archaeologists think: if this rock was already in this shape in the 1st century, maybe Jesus was not actually crucified on top of it. Maybe the exact spot where Jesus’ cross stood was in reality located somewhere else within the vicinity.

http://members.bib-arch.org/bswb_graphics/BSBA/26/06/BSBA260602410.jpg

We know that when Constantine built his basilica on Golgotha, he left this rocky protuberance exposed (it was in a corner of the colonnaded open-air courtyard or atrium located in between the basilica proper and the rotunda where what is believed to be the tomb of Jesus was enshrined) and placed a cross on top of the rock. So maybe Constantine’s cross was the source of the confusion: later pilgrims might have thought that the cross denoted the spot where Jesus was crucified, and so they began to come up with the idea of ‘Mount Calvary’ and started restricting the name to the rock.

One archaeologist, Shimon Gibson, suggested that the actual place of Jesus’ crucifixion might have been somewhere in the sanctuary-apse area of Constantine’s basilica (kind of fitting). When the Rock of Calvary began to be identified as the site of the crucifixion, the original spot was forgotten. (Another archaeologist, Joan Taylor, thinks that Jesus was crucified in a place farther south, nearer to where the city gate would have been in the 1st century and well outside the boundaries of the CoHS. She bases this on Melito of Sardis’ assertion in the 2nd century that Jesus was crucified “in the middle of the main street, even in the center of the city.”)
 
patrick457 said:
It was an ancient belief among Christians. Origen seemed to claim that it was a Jewish tradition, but there’s actually no such belief among the Jews - instead Adam is thought to be buried in Hebron along with the other OT patriarchs. (St. Jerome eventually rejected this tradition for precisely this reason.)
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I find it rather disingenuous in the least to simply say. They were Jews so they not only didn’t know their own tradition they just “don’t know what they’re talking about so ignore them.”
 
billcu1 said:
I find it rather disingenuous in the least to simply say. They were Jews so they not only didn’t know their own tradition they just “don’t know what they’re talking about so ignore them.”
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The divide between Christianity and Judaism from a very early point, with a substantial amount of rancor on both sides, is an established part of our history.

ICXC NIKA
 
GEddie said:
The divide between Christianity and Judaism from a very early point, with a substantial amount of rancor on both sides, is an established part of our history.

ICXC NIKA
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Competition can sometimes hinder truth. Unless God steps in and reveals it to one.
 
Well, the burial place of Adam is hardly a matter of eternal truth. I doubt very much that he was moved to either Jerusalem or Hebron.

ICXC NIKA
 
GEddie said:
Well, the burial place of Adam is hardly a matter of eternal truth. I doubt very much that he was moved to either Jerusalem or Hebron.

ICXC NIKA
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Well yeah. It’s not a salvation issue.
🙂
 
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