Mount of Temptation

Mount with a Christian Monastery in Jericho, in the State of Palestine

Mount of Temptation, in Palestinian Arabic Jebel Quruntul (جبل لقرنطل), is a mountain over the city of Jericho in the West Bank, in the State of Palestine; ancient Christian tradition identifies it as the location of the temptation of Jesus described in the New Testament Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke, in which it is said that, from "a high place", the Devil offered Jesus rule over all the kingdoms of the world. Since at least the 4th century, Christian tradition has specifically associated the forty days of Jesus's fasting that preceded his temptation with a cave on Jebel Quruntul. Eventually, it came to be associated with the high mountain in the Gospel's description of temptation. The city of Jericho lies at the feet east of Mount Quruntul, at below sea level, with the nearby Jordan River and the Dead Sea at even lower elevations, further to the east and southeast. The Mount has around of prominence over Jericho, which translates to an elevation of above sea level, and offers a commanding view of its fabled surroundings to the east. Quruntul had previously been the location of a Seleucid and Maccabean fortress known as Dok (also Doq and Dagon), which was the site of the assassination of Simon Maccabeus and two of his sons in 134. Centuries after the death of Jesus, the Mount became the site of a lavra type monastery, turned into a Catholic monastery during the era of the Crusades, and then into an Orthodox monastery since the late Ottoman period. Since 1998, the monastery halfway up the mountain has been connected with the tell holding the remains of ancient Jericho via a cable car and a center of religious tourism. In 2014, the mountain and monastery were made part of the State of Palestine's "Jericho Oasis Archaeological Park". It has also been nominated to the Tentative List for World Heritage status as part of religious traditions of El Bariyah, the Judaean Desert.

The Hebrew name of the Maccabean fortress on this hill is not separately recorded but was transliterated into Greek as Dōk (; Docus; دوكا) in 1 Maccabees and as Dagṑn (Δαγὼν) in the works of Josephus. The same name was preserved as Douka (Δουκα) as late as the early monasteries founded in the 4th century and two small settlements near the springs at the base of the mountain continue to bear the name Duyūk (ديوك). In Modern Hebrew, it is called Qarantal (קרנטל), after the Arabic name.

In the Synoptic Gospels of the Christian Bible, after his baptism by John in the River Jordan, Jesus is said to have been driven by the Spirit into the "wilderness", where he fasted for 40 days and 40 nights before being tempted by the "devil" or "Satan". The account in Mark says as much in brief summary. and attacked. Encircled by the Judean army, Ptolemy threatened to throw John's mother, his own mother in law, from the fort and over the cliff. The woman supposedly pled for her son not to shirk his duty on her account, after which he continued the assault. She was first tortured and then, after John was forced to withdraw from the siege to honor the seventh year of rest then observed by the Jews, killed. Receiving insufficient reinforcements from Antiochus to hold his position, Ptolemy then fled to Zeno Cotylas, the tyrant of Philadelphia (now Amman, Jordan). Tradition ascribed its "rediscovery" to StHelena, the pious mother of Constantine the Great, during her tour of the Holy Land sometime after 326. In 340, Chariton the Confessor established a lavra type monastery on the mountain, then still using a form of its earlier Hebrew and Seleucid name. The lavra was not at the top of the mountain but beside the Grotto of the Temptation, the cave supposedly identified by Helen as the location of Jesus's 40 days of fasting. In all, 35 other cells were hollowed out on the east face of the mountain to house the monks. The wider area saw several other churches and monasteries erected over the next few centuries, most notably the monastery in Wadi Qelt, established by John of Thebes and made famous by George of Choziba. This initial period of Christian development came to an end with the 614 campaign of the ByzantineSasanian War, when the Persians were able to leverage a Jewish revolt to briefly conquer Jerusalem. The monasteries of Quruntul and Jericho were plundered and depopulated, recovery being prevented by the rapid Muslim conquest of Palestine in 635 and 636.

Relatively peaceful coexistence of Christians, Jews, and Muslims in the area ended in the 11th century with al Hakim's persecutions, the invasions of the Seljuks, and the onset of the First Crusade. The Byzantine emperor ManuelI (r. 1143–1180) rebuilt the area's Orthodox monasteries. The two sites supposedly identified by StHelena centuries earlier, however, saw new Catholic chapels raised, and monks of the Holy Sepulchre used the site of Chariton's lavra beside the Grotto for a priory dedicated to John the Baptist, erected in 1133 or 1134. The relative importance of the Grotto and the priory led to the mountain itself becoming known to the numerous pilgrims of the era as "Mount Quarantine". The priory was granted the tithes of Jericho two years later. In 1143, this income was valued equivalent to 5,000 aurei ( of gold) per year and was transferred from the monks to the Sisters of Bethany by Queen Melisende of Jerusalem. Around the same time, the Knights Templar constructed a small but formidable fortification on the mountaintop, storing water in Hellenistic cisterns and caches of weapons and supplies in the mountain's caves. It appears likely that the Templar stronghold made use of parts of the Hasmonean and Herodian walls, as well as a Byzantine chapel that had been erected within them. The still extant base of its walls form a rough rectangle about The order's Hierarchical Statutes from the 1170s or early 1180s charged the Commander at Jerusalem to always have ten knights available to reinforce the route past Jebel Quruntul and to protect and supply any noblemen who might travel it. Around the same time, Theodoric's Little Book reported that at least a few Templars or Hospitallers accompanied any group of pilgrims along the route against any local bandits or Bedouin raids. Burchard describes visiting Jebel Quruntul in his Description, but places the actual site of the Temptation at another location closer to Bethel. Wilbrand's Itinerary considered it genuine. The area was lost to the Christians shortly after their 1187 defeat at Hattin to the Ayyubid sultan Saladin and largely depopulated.

Exposed to continual Bedouin raiding, the area continued to languish under Ottoman rule. Writing in the early 18th century, the Dutch diplomat J. A. van Egmond reported that the local Arabs used the mountain's caves for protection and concealment. They had long forbidden Europeans to come near, but some of the Christian bishops in Palestine finally worked out an arrangement to pay them 10 silver kuruşlar a year for safe passage, after which pilgrims were again permitted to climb to the grotto and the top of the mountain with a local guide. Isolated travelers were sometimes robbed along the route but, in the case of a servant of a French ambassador to the area, the mutasarrif of Jerusalem personally intervened to force the area's village leaders to restore everything that had been stolen. Van Egmond noted the Fathers of the Holy Sepulchre he traveled with continued to believe the ruined chapel at the Grotto of the Temptation had been personally established by StHelena but its construction did not seem nearly so ancient to his eyes.

Amid the weakening of the Ottoman Empire and the increasing assertiveness of European empires, Christian pilgrimage to the Holy Land began to rise in the late 19th century, alongside teams of archaeologists and missionaries. The monastery, now dedicated to St John the Baptist, was rebuilt from 1874 to 1904, its care being given to Greek Orthodox monks in 1905. Following World WarI, Britain's League of Nations mandate over Palestine saw modern irrigation systems introduced to the area around Jericho, which prospered as a center of fruit harvesting. The chaos around the creation of Israel, the Palestinian exodus, and subsequent wars and conflict limited access, tourism, and economic development in the area although Jordan's King Hussein welcomed archaeological work, in part to undermine Israeli claims that the area had been primarily Jewish for most of its history. A 2002 excavation in the caves of Jebel Quruntul found that one had been used for burials from the Chalcolithic to the Islamic Age. In 1998, during the period of relative peace following the Oslo Accords, Palestinian businessman Marwan Sinokrot constructed a 12 cabin cable car from the ruins of ancient Jericho to the Greek monastery, capable of carrying up to 625 people an hour in preparation for an expected influx of tourists during the millennium celebrations of the year 2000. Religious tourism makes up over 60% of Jericho's total visitors (estimated at 300,000 people per year in 2015), and the aerial lift cut the time to reach the monastery from as long as 90 minutes to as little as 5. The company secured recognition from the Guinness Book of World Records as "the longest cable car aerial tramway below sea level" but the Second Intifada began shortly thereafter, again limiting tourism in the area. The project also ran into difficulty with the mountain's monks, who had not been consulted about the project and sometimes shut the monastery doors to groups of tourists, but continues to operate. Jebel Quruntul, its fortress, and its monastery form part of the El Bariyah "Wilderness" area proposed for World Heritage status in 2012 and were included in the Jericho Oasis Archaeological Park established with Italian help in 2014.

An account of Christ's Temptation under the name "Mount Quarantania" forms part of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's poem Christus: A Mystery.

The "high mountain" of the biblical narrative has sometimes been identified with other locations in Roman Palestine. A local Arab tradition placed it as late as the 19th century at the lower peak of 'Ushsh el Ghurab at the northern end of the Jericho Plain, separated from the Mount of Temptation by the valley known as Wadi ed Duyuk. Another tradition recorded in Ernoul's 13th century chronicle placed the Devil's offer of dominion over the kingdoms of the world at Mount Precipice just south of Nazareth, where Jesus was separately said to have disappeared from a crowd during one of his rejections by the Jewish community of his time.