Replies

“Gibbon says that the menorah is at the bottom of the Mediterranean. Israel should go get it.”

1. I can’t see the Romans just tossing something away that contains so much gold. They would have taken it and either melted it down, or kept it as a bargaining chip for some future Jewish state. BTW, even a modern re-creation of the Menorah that is plated 1mm thick (i.e. not solid gold) has 43kg. of gold, worth something like $2.7 million in today’s dollars. https://templeinstitute.org/history-holy-temple-menorah/ No, they didn’t just toss it into the sea - and, besides which, what’s on the Arch of Titus - among other things, Jews being paraded down the street in Rome, carrying a (the?) Menorah. THAT’S where it was taken.

2. The “bottom of the Mediterranean” is a VERY large place. Even if you can somehow specify a box that’s 5 miles x 5 miles (and I doubt that), there have been over 1,950 years of silt being built up over it, so just going to find it will be a nearly impossible task. If it was so easy, it would already have been done.

Carried off by the Vandals during the Sack of Rome in 455 CE, the Menorah and other assorted treasures of the Temple in Jerusalem were taken to Carthage, the capital of the Vandal Kingdom. They were still there when a Byzantine army under General Belisarius captured the city and defeated the Vandals in 533. Belisarius removed the Menorah and the other treasures and brought them to Constantinople as trophies of war. According to Procopius, the Menorah was carried through the streets of Constantinople during Belisarius' triumphal procession

Procopius' works on Project Gutenberg

Procopius adds that Justinian, prompted by superstitious fear that the treasures had been unlucky for Rome and Carthage, sent them back to Jerusalem and the "sanctuaries of the Christians" there. No record however exists of their arrival there, and there are no indications of pilgrimages to a shrine for the Menorah there. If the Menorah arrived in Jerusalem, it may have been destroyed when Jerusalem was pillaged by the Persians in 614, though legend suggests that it was secreted away by holy men, much as tradition purports the original Menorah was hidden before Nebuchadnezzar's invasion

NOTE -- the Persians had Jewish allies (as the Jews were pretty happy to rise up against the Romans in 614 AD and later also helped the Arabs conquer Jerusalem in the same century) - so I doubt that it was destroyed then

More likely, imho, it was melted down and the gold made into other objects