Are the Ruins of the Lost Temple of Israel Really Hidden in the South Pacific? – Tablet Magazine
One afternoon, a little over a year ago, I received a more or less random-seeming email from a colleague that had no particular connection to either of our busy professional lives. The main purpose of such emails, containing links to the weirder corners of the Internet, is to waste time, and having some time on my hands that day, I followed the two links inside. The first was to a Facebook post, on which I viewed a lo-res video of Papua New Guinea s Gogodala people in grass skirts, their bodies decorated with palm leaves, body paint, feathers, shells, and other accessories, and with one man wearing barnacle goggles singing the Shema, the holiest of Hebrew prayers. When I followed the second link in the email, I came across the text of a 2006 book titled Bine Mene: Connecting the Hebrews, by geoscientist Samuel Were, which made a linguistics-based case for a tribe of ancient Israelites who journeyed down to Lake Tanganyika and in an unexplained way ended up in Fiji. Elsewhere that day, as the result of my research (or Google searches), I found this: Growing numbers of evangelical Christians in North Malaita believe that the Lost Temple of Israel lies hidden at a shrine & in the mountainous interior of their island.
It was one of those frigid city days that make it easy to want to go anywhere. I clicked over to Google Maps, punched in Malaita Province, then zoomed out and sat back and considered what now appeared to be the makings of a truly great story the kind I could tell in hotel bars for the rest of my life. A story about how the Internet said Solomon s Temple was on Malaita in the Solomon Islands, an archipelago whose half a million people inhabit nearly 1,000 atolls, islets, reefs, cays, and islands including Guadalcanal, the site of the famous World War II battles and about how I actually went there to see myself, which is something that very few of us do anymore, which is a shame, because the mysteries of the world are only revealed in person. How did the destinies of Israelites and the inhabitants of the most remote member of the British Commonwealth become intertwined? What did this Solomon s Temple in the Pacific islands look like? I then bought a ticket online which was surprisingly cheap, considering that I would be traveling 8,505 miles, or one-third of the way around the circumference of the globe.