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Judaism, Christianity, And Islam

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The location where one encounters the divine demarcates itself from the rest of the world and becomes a sacred place. The “sacred” connotes reverence and respect as illustrated in Exodus 3:5, where the Lord told Moses: "Do not come closer. Remove your sandals from your feet, for the place on which you stand is holy ground.” Whereas Jerusalem is just a common city in an ordinary man 's eyes, this viewpoint changes dramatically when it comes to a religious man. For the three monotheistic religions of the West- Judaism, Christianity and Islam, Jerusalem is considered one of the most important and sacred places in the world. The land acquired its sanctity through numerous manifestations of the divine in biblical times. Even though Jerusalem does not have extraordinary physical features of a city in antiquity, it became widely renowned as a holy city. Romanian writer, religion historian Mircea Eliade argues that "space is not homogeneous" (Eliade 1957:20) by proposing the term hierophany to designate the act of manifestation of the sacred, and how it contributes to differentiating the sacred from the profane. The book then describes an axis mundi, where the site of hierophany occurred, is established to connect and communicate the heaven, the earth and the underworld through the center. Further construction at axis mundi is typically done to consecrate the place. The building built is referred to as an imago mundi, a representation of a miniature cosmos in the

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