‘2023 World Conference of Regular Masonic Grand Lodges’

    

The details are still to come, but mark your calendars for the 18th World Conference of Regular Masonic Grand Lodges next year in Jerusalem.

(I think what happened was it had been scheduled for Nazareth in 2020, but the Chinese Virus kiboshed that. The 17th went ahead in Berlin last November, and now they’re planning again for Israel next May.)

     

‘Familiar looking coin found in Jerusalem’

    

Eliyahu Yanai/City of David

There is something going on lately with amateur archeologists unearthing ancient coins. It seems hardly a month passes without some guy with a metal detector finding a cache of Roman or Saxon or some other gold and silver in Britain. A few weeks ago, a child volunteering at a dig in Jerusalem brought to light a 2000-year-old shekel that should look familiar to Mark Master Masons.

Liel Krutokop, age 11, plunged her fingers into her very first bucket when a round object made itself conspicuous amid the dirt taken from the City of David area. It turned out to be a shekel of pure silver dating to 67 or 68 C.E.—The Great Revolt—when Judea was in rebellion against the Roman Empire.

Coil’s Masonic Encyclopedia 

In Freemasonry, tokens closely resembling such ancient coins have a symbolic value in Mark Masonry. In the United States, they typically are called Chapter Pennies on account of their use in the Mark Master Mason Degree, which is conferred in Royal Arch chapters.

I’m assuming whoever lost this coin two millennia ago had some explaining to do when he got home.

Congratulations Miss Krutokop!

     

‘Tisha B’av 5774’

     
“For the Lord your God is a merciful God; He will not let you loose or destroy you; neither will He forget the covenant of your fathers, which He swore to them.”

Lamentations 4:31

Courtesy Aish

It must be daylight still somewhere, so we are in the final hours of Tisha B’av of 5774, the Jewish commemoration of the destruction of the First and Second Temples in Jerusalem; the former—King Solomon’s Temple—was sacked by the Babylonians in 586 BCE, and the latter destroyed by the Romans in 70 CE. It is a sad day of fasting and observance among Jews for obvious reasons.

Within fifteen years of the Romans’ destruction of Jerusalem, the Arch of Titus, located near the Forum, was unveiled to the Roman citizens. One of its decorative marble relief panels depicts victorious Romans carrying plunder from the Temple, including its menorah, and possibly the Ark itself. Whether this art is journalistic accuracy or grandiose sycophancy or a little of both remains unknown.