Home›The Near East and Egypt›Sacred ToBrowse BySacred ToThis page groups sacred regions by the specific worship they were built to hold. Wikipedia notes that "the Temple in Jerusalem ... was the central place of worship for Israelites and Jews and serves as the namesake of the Temple Mount." Browsing by sacred-to lets a visitor find every region built to hold the same worship.FactsSacred ToSourcesComments (0)Reader Challenges (0)FactsDirectoryCategoryWell-attestedRegions 1Sacred ToFilter Results7 entriesAdherents TodayAllAn Israelite Samaritan population survey puts the community at approximately nine hundred people, divided chiefly between Kiryat Luza on Mount Gerizim and Holon near Tel Aviv, making Samaritanism among the smallest continuously practised religions in the world. (1)Pew Research Center's Religious Composition of the World, 2010-2020 report estimates the global Jewish population at about 14.8 million as of 2020, the smallest of the major world religions measured, concentrated primarily in Israel and the United States. (1)Pew Research Center's Religious Composition of the World, 2010-2020 report puts the global Christian population at 2.3 billion as of 2020, about 28.8 percent of the world's population, up 122 million from 2010 even as its share of world population fell. (1)Pew Research Center's Religious Composition of the World, 2010-2020 report puts the global Muslim population at 2.0 billion as of 2020, about 26 percent of the world's population, up from 1.7 billion in 2010 and growing about twice as fast as the world's population as a whole over that decade. (1)The Baha'i community's own worldwide estimate is approximately five million adherents, gathered across virtually every country and territory. As with most new religious movements, no independent national census breaks the figure down apart from the community's own reporting. (1)Adherents Today MaximumAll900 (1)5,000,000 (1)14,800,000 (1)2,000,000,000 (1)2,300,000,000 (1)Adherents Today MinimumAll900 (1)5,000,000 (1)14,800,000 (1)2,000,000,000 (1)2,300,000,000 (1)Ban or Official WatchlistAllIran's 1979 Constitution names in Article 13 only Zoroastrian, Jewish and Christian Iranians as the country's recognised religious minorities, free within the law to perform their own rites and follow their own canon in personal affairs; the Baha'i Faith, Iran's largest non-Muslim religious minority, is not among them and has no legal recognition or protected status under the Iranian constitution. (1)Basis of the Membership FigureAllChurch-Reported Rolls (2)Independent Survey (3)Scholarly or Demographic Estimate (4)Current StatusAllA small Samaritan community survives today, divided between Holon in Israel and Mount Gerizim near Nablus, and continues to observe Passover with an animal sacrifice on the mountain in a practice long since abandoned by other traditions. (1)Era of DeclineAllOrganised Canaanite religion faded from the historical record with the political and cultural upheavals of the Late Bronze Age collapse and the subsequent rise of Israelite and Phoenician successor cultures. (1)Public cult practice faded following the region's conquest by successive empires and the spread of Christianity and later Islam, with cuneiform religious writing itself dying out by the first centuries CE. (1)Era of Decline End YearAll600 BCE (1)100 (1)Era of Decline Start YearAll1200 BCE (1)100 BCE (1)Establishment StatusAllDeclared Not Established (1)No Establishment (1)Varies by Province (2)Form of the ConfessionAllThe Nicene Creed and the Apostles' Creed are the two most widely shared credal statements across the branches of Christianity. (1)The shahada, the declaration that there is no god but God and Muhammad is His messenger, is Islam's central creed and the first of the five pillars. (1)FounderAllBaha'u'llah (1817-1892), preceded by the Bab (1819-1850) (1)Jesus of Nazareth; the movement was organised by his followers after his death (1)Muslims hold Islam to be the restoration of the primordial religion rather than a new founding (1)None (1)None in the historical sense (1)The Prophet Muhammad (c. 570-632) (1)Tradition traces the covenant to Abraham and the Torah to Moses (1)How the Expectation Is EnforcedAllCodified Obligation With Consequences (2)Customary Norm (1)Legal StatusAllEgypt's national identity card system recognized only Islam, Christianity and Judaism in its religion field, leaving Bahais unable to obtain identity documents essential to daily civic life. Egypt's Supreme Administrative Court ruled on 16 March 2009 that a dash could be entered in the field instead, and the Interior Ministry implemented the ruling by decree the following month; the first identity cards issued to Bahais under the new policy were dated 8 August 2009. (1)Israel/Palestinian Authority: the Kiryat Luza community on Mount Gerizim holds dual Israeli and Palestinian Authority identification (1)Marriage Position DetailAllbahai.org states marriage is "a union between two consenting adults: a man and a woman," quoting Baha'u'llah: "God hath prescribed matrimony unto you... Enter into wedlock, O people, that ye may bring forth one who will make mention of Me amid My servants." On divorce it quotes Baha'u'llah's statement that "the Lord loveth union and harmony and abhorreth separation and divorce," counseling that "should resentment or antipathy arise between husband and wife, he is not to divorce her but to bide in patience throughout the course of one whole year, that perchance the fragrance of affection may be renewed between them." Divorce is permitted after that year of patience if reconciliation has not occurred. (1)Qur'an 4:3 states: "And if you fear that you shall not be able to deal justly with the orphan girls then marry (other) women of your choice, two or three, or four." Classical and contemporary Sunni and Shia jurisprudence alike reads this as permitting, not requiring, a man to be married to up to four wives at one time, on two conditions: material justice between the wives, in spending, clothing, and time, which Qur'an 4:129 immediately qualifies by noting that perfect justice in feeling, as opposed to material treatment, is not humanly possible and so is not what is required; and the financial capacity to support each wife. Monogamy remains the ordinary practice for most Muslims worldwide; the ruling recognizes polygynous marriage as licit rather than mandating it. (1)Membership Figure As OfAll1919-03-01 (1)1969-12-31 (1)2010-01-01 (3)2011-01-27 (1)2011-12-19 (1)2013-01-01 (2)2020-01-01 (3)2024-01-01 (1)2026-08-13 (1)Membership Over TimeAllA tertiary reference gives a more recent approximate total of about 900 as of 2024, continued growth beyond the community's own most recently published count, though without a named survey date of its own. (1)By 1 January 2013, the same survey recorded 756 individuals (357 in Kiryat Luza on Mount Gerizim, 399 in Holon near Tel Aviv), a real and dramatic recovery, more than a fivefold rise from 1919, tracked by the community itself since no outside census counts Samaritans as a distinct category. (1)By 2010, three independent outside demographic estimates converged in a narrow range: the World Religion Database gave 7.3 million, the Association of Religion Data Archives gave 7.6 million, and the CIA World Factbook gave 7.8 million (0.11 percent of world population). All three sit well above the Baha'i World Centre's own current figure recorded below, a divergence in the opposite direction from the Church of Scientology's case in this axis, where the tradition's own claim runs far ABOVE outside counts. (1)By 2020, the same Pew study found the global Christian population had risen by 122 million to 2.3 billion, even as its share of world population fell from 31 percent to 28.8 percent, as Sub-Saharan Africa overtook Europe as home to the largest share of the world's Christians. (1)By 2020, the same Pew study found the global Muslim population had grown 21 percent to 2.0 billion (26 percent of world population), growing twice as fast as the rest of the world's population over the decade, driven by Muslims having more children and a younger average age than members of any other major religion. (1)By Pew's 2020 "Jewish Americans in 2020" survey, that share had grown to 2.4 percent of US adults, an estimated 7.5 million people, a national self-identification measure rather than any single body's own membership rolls. (1)In its December 19, 2011 Global Christianity report, Pew Research Center estimated 2.18 billion Christians worldwide as of 2010, nearly a third of the estimated 6.9 billion global population, compiled from a country-by-country analysis of about 2,400 sources including censuses and nationally representative surveys. (1)In its January 27, 2011 report, Pew Research Center estimated about 1.6 billion Muslims worldwide as of 2010, 23.4 percent of the estimated 6.9 billion global population, compiled from roughly 1,500 sources across 232 countries and territories. (1)In Pew Research Center's 2013 "A Portrait of Jewish Americans" survey, 2.2 percent of US adults, an estimated 6.7 million people, identified as Jewish, according to Pew's 2020 follow-up report summarizing both waves. (1)Pew's June 2025 update to its global religion modeling revised its own 2010 Christian estimate down slightly to 2.1 billion (31 percent of world population), a mild revision of the 2011 report's 2.18 billion figure for the same year, both recorded here side by side rather than one replacing the other. (1)Pew's June 2025 update to its global religion modeling revised its own 2010 Muslim estimate upward to 1.7 billion (24 percent of world population), a modest revision of the 2011 report's 1.6 billion figure for the same year, both recorded here side by side rather than one replacing the other. (1)The Baha'i World Centre's own statistics page currently states, as an undated ongoing figure, that there are more than 5 million Baha'is worldwide, present in well over 100,000 localities, notably lower than the outside demographic estimates of 7.3 to 7.8 million recorded above for 2010; the page names no counting method behind the total, unlike the church-reported figures this axis records for PC(USA), the ELCA and the UCC. (1)The Encyclopedia of Religion (2nd edition, 2005) states that worldwide Baha'i numbers stood at a little more than one million at the end of the 1960s, rising to close to six million by the early 21st century, as compiled in a BahaiTeachings.org survey of population estimates. (1)The Samaritan community's own tracked population survey recorded 140 individuals on 1 March 1919, near the community's historic low point after centuries of decline from persecution, forced conversion and strict endogamy. (1)Observance NoteAllReading the sky was formal state theology, not private divination. The omen series Enuma Anu Enlil catalogued thousands of correlations between celestial events and royal fortune, and in the Neo-Assyrian period professional scholars wrote directly to the king reporting lunar eclipses, planetary positions and other sky readings as matters of state, their letters preserved in the royal archives at Nineveh. A king who ignored these reports was understood to be ignoring the gods' own communication. (1)Origin AccountAllCanaanite religion is known almost entirely through tablets recovered at Ugarit in modern Syria from the 1920s onward, supplemented by biblical polemic against Canaanite worship and by scattered inscriptions from the wider Levant. (1)Christianity traces its origin to the life, teaching, crucifixion and, in the faith of its adherents, resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth in Roman Judea in the first century. (1)Islam traces its origin to the revelations received by the prophet Muhammad in Mecca and Medina in the early seventh century, collected as the Quran. (1)Jewish tradition traces its origin to God's covenant with Abraham and, most definitively, to the covenant given to Moses and the people of Israel at Sinai after the exodus from Egypt. (1)Mesopotamian religion developed across Sumerian, Akkadian, Babylonian and Assyrian civilisations over some three thousand years, without a single founder, and is known through cuneiform temple archives and myth texts such as the Enuma Elish and the Epic of Gilgamesh. (1)Samaritans trace their religious identity to the northern Israelite tribes and regard Mount Gerizim, rather than Jerusalem, as the true site chosen by God for the Temple, a divergence that has separated Samaritan and Jewish tradition for over two thousand years. (1)The Baha'i Faith traces its origin to the teaching of Baha'u'llah in nineteenth century Persia, preceded by the Bab, a herald whose own movement, Babism, Baha'is regard as a distinct precursor faith. (1)Origin PeriodAllJudaism proper takes shape after the Babylonian exile (1)The Gerizim temple dates to the 5th century BCE (1)Origin Period End YearAll3000 BCE (1)1200 BCE (1)400 BCE (1)300 BCE (1)50 (1)632 (1)1863 (1)Origin Period Start YearAll3500 BCE (1)2000 BCE (1)586 BCE (1)450 BCE (1)30 (1)610 (1)1844 (1)Place of OriginAllMount Gerizim and Samaria, in the central Levantine highlands (1)Persia and Ottoman Iraq: Shiraz, Baghdad and Acre (1)Roman Judaea and Galilee, spreading through the eastern Mediterranean (1)Southern Mesopotamia (Sumer), and later Babylonia and Assyria (1)The Hijaz, in western Arabia: Mecca and Medina (1)The Levantine coast and its city-states, chiefly Ugarit (1)The southern Levant: the highlands of Israel and Judah (1)Position on MarriageAllMarriage is held to be monogamous, with remarriage after divorce sanctioned under specified conditions (1)Marriage may licitly be polygynous (1)Position on SexualityAllSame-sex orientation or practice is held to bar full membership or participation (1)Same-sex sexual relationships are held contrary to teaching; LGBT individuals are welcomed as members but not ordained, and same-sex unions are not blessed (1)The body holds no single settled position; the question is actively and openly contested within it (2)Position on UsuryAllInterest is permitted but bound by ethical constraints against exploiting the poor (1)Interest of any kind on a loan is forbidden (1)Practice StatusAllDiscontinued as a state religion (2)Living, and practised in varied local forms (2)Partly restricted: some elements are closed to outsiders (3)Sexuality Position DetailAllbahai.us states "sexual relations are only permissible between a couple who are married to each other," and marriage is "between a man and a woman," so "it is not possible to recognize same-sex marriage within the Baha'i community." A person with same-sex attraction "should be treated like any other people seeking admittance to the Baha'i Faith, and be accepted on the same basis," with membership carrying the same expectation of aligning conduct to Baha'i teaching as any other member's. Quoting the Universal House of Justice's letter of 11 September 1995, the page states "to regard those with a homosexual orientation with prejudice or disdain would be entirely against the spirit of the Baha'i Faith." (1)Christianity is governed by no single worldwide teaching authority, and its major bodies read at every point on this question today. The Roman Catholic Church's Catechism of the Catholic Church holds that homosexual acts are contrary to natural law while insisting that persons with homosexual tendencies must be accepted with respect, compassion and sensitivity, and reserves marriage to a man and a woman. The Russian Orthodox Church's Basis of the Social Concept, adopted at its Jubilee Bishops Council in August 2000, names homosexuality a sinful distortion of human nature and bars anyone who promotes it as a norm from work with children or youth or from military or reformatory positions, reaching beyond ordination. The United Methodist Church, one of the tradition's largest global bodies, ended its forty-year ban on LGBTQ clergy and same-sex marriage at its 2024 General Conference. The Anglican Communion, in its own 2022 Lambeth Conference Call on Human Dignity, states that its forty-two member provinces hold differing convictions and pastoral practices on this question, some blessing same-sex unions and others continuing to hold that marriage is exclusively the lifelong union of a man and a woman. No statement speaks for Christianity as a whole. (1)Classical Islamic jurisprudence treats homosexual acts, generally termed liwat in the legal literature, as unlawful across all four Sunni schools, though the schools differ on the exact legal category and punishment. The Shafi'i, Hanbali and main Maliki position hold the punishment mirrors that for zina under the hadd category, a fixed penalty applied only under strict evidentiary conditions such as four eyewitnesses or a clear confession; the Maliki school's own harshest reading holds both parties subject to execution regardless of marital status; the Hanafi school instead leans toward a discretionary punishment, ta'zir, set by a judge rather than a fixed hadd penalty, on the reasoning that the specific evidentiary threshold hadd requires was not met by the available textual evidence. Across all four schools, the same-sex attraction itself is treated as distinct from the act and is not, on its own, held to be sinful; the legal rulings address conduct. (1)Judaism is governed by no single worldwide teaching authority, and its recognized movements read at every point on this question today. The Reform movement's Central Conference of American Rabbis authorized rabbis to officiate at same-sex ceremonies in 2000 and, in a 2014 responsum, held that a same-sex union may constitute Jewish marriage, kiddushin, in the full sense. The Reconstructionist and Humanistic movements likewise affirm same-sex marriage and ordain LGBTQ clergy. The Conservative movement's Committee on Jewish Law and Standards issued a combined responsum in 2006 that itself left the question unsettled, approving some liberalizing opinions on ordination and commitment ceremonies alongside others that retained the traditional prohibition, so both readings stand as valid within the movement. Orthodox Judaism, including its Modern Orthodox and Haredi streams, holds that the Torah forbids homosexual acts and sanctions only the marriage of a man and a woman, generally without denying a gay Jew ordinary synagogue membership. No statement speaks for Judaism as a whole. (1)Standard Rate ExpectedAllNineteen percent. (1)Ten percent. (1)Two and a half percent. (1)Standing Giving ExpectationAllHuququ'llah (the Right of God), established by Baha'u'llah in the Kitab-i-Aqdas, obliges a Baha'i whose possessions reach a set threshold (nineteen mithqals of gold) to pay nineteen percent of that value once, and again on each further increase of the same size. Unlike this arm's other codified obligations, payment is explicitly left to individual conscience: the law itself states that no believer is to be approached individually to pay it, so there is no administrative consequence, such as a membership or participation gate, for not paying. (1)Ma'aser kesafim, giving one tenth of income to charitable causes (tzedakah), is a widely practiced Jewish norm modeled on the Torah's agricultural tithes. Most halachic authorities today hold that it is not itself a biblical or rabbinic commandment but a minhag, a custom, though a small number of authorities have argued it carries binding force; the debate itself is long standing and unsettled rather than resolved in either direction. (1)Zakat, one of the five pillars of Islam, obliges a Muslim whose accumulated wealth exceeds a minimum threshold (nisab) to give 2.5 percent of that qualifying wealth annually. The Quran (9:60) names eight categories of recipients. In several Muslim-majority countries zakat is collected by the state itself rather than left to the individual, giving the obligation a legal as well as a religious force there; elsewhere it is a personal duty of conscience understood to be as central to Islamic practice as prayer and fasting. (1)Status TodayAllHistorical; not practised continuously (2)Living tradition, practised today (5)Supreme BeingAllA single, unknowable God, held to have revealed himself progressively through a succession of messengers or manifestations including Abraham, Krishna, Moses, Buddha, Jesus, Muhammad, the Bab and Baha'u'llah. (1)Allah, God, held to be one and without partner or equal. (1)Canaanite religion, known chiefly from the texts recovered at Ugarit, centred on the high god El and the storm god Baal, with the goddesses Asherah and Anat also holding major roles. (1)The God of Israel, understood as one, without partner or physical form, referred to in the Hebrew Bible by the name written as the tetragrammaton. (1)The triune God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, one being in three persons. (1)TheologyAllMonotheistic: one God (5)Polytheistic: many gods (2)Transgression CategoryAllAkl mal al-yatim: consuming the wealth of an orphan. (1)Al-tawalli yawm al-zahf: fleeing from the battlefield. (1)Avon: iniquity, a sin arising from desire or moral failure, held more culpable than chet. (1)Chet: an unintentional sin, literally a missing of the mark, wrongdoing through error rather than intent. (1)Pesha: transgression, a willful rebellion against God, the most severe of the three, an intentional defiance rather than a lapse. (1)Qadhf: slandering chaste, believing women with unchastity. (1)Qatl al-nafs: killing a soul that Allah has forbidden, except by right. (1)Riba: consuming usury or interest. (1)Shirk: associating partners with Allah, the first and gravest of the Seven Destructive Sins (as-sab al-mubiqat). (1)Sihr: magic or sorcery. (1)Sin, understood as thought, word, deed or omission contrary to the will of God, ranging in Catholic moral theology from venial to mortal sin. (1)Usury Position DetailAllThe heter iska, literally a permit for a joint venture, restructures what would otherwise be an interest bearing loan between Jews into a shared business investment: the party supplying the capital and the party using it become partners sharing profit and loss rather than creditor and debtor, so any return the capital earns is a business profit, not loan interest, and the Torah's prohibition on taking interest from a fellow Jew (Exodus 22:24, Leviticus 25:36-37, Deuteronomy 23:19) is honestly not triggered rather than evaded on paper. The mechanism's formalization is credited to named medieval authorities, Rabbi Baruch ben Isaac's Sefer Ha-Terumah and Rabbi Yisrael Isserlin's Terumat Ha-Deshen among them, developed across the medieval period rather than at a single settled date. It remains in common use today, including for interest bearing accounts at banks under rabbinical supervision. (1)The Quran's treatment of riba came in stages rather than all at once. An early Meccan verse, Surah Al-Rum 30:39, contrasted interest unfavorably with charity as moral guidance, without yet imposing a legal ban. After the migration to Medina the tone sharpened: Surah Al-Nisa 4:161 rebukes an earlier community for taking interest despite being forbidden it, and Surah Al-Imran 3:130, revealed after the Battle of Uhud, specifically condemns compounding interest. The final and complete prohibition, covering interest of any kind, came in Surah Al-Baqarah 2:275-281, revealed near the end of the Prophet's life and describing persistence in the practice as tantamount to war against God and His messenger. This is why contemporary Islamic finance avoids interest bearing loans altogether, structuring transactions instead as profit and loss sharing partnerships or cost-plus sales. (1)BrowseCompareBahá’í FaithSacred To1 entryCanaanite ReligionSacred To1 entryChristianitySacred To3 entriesIslamSacred To2 entriesJudaismSacred To4 entriesMesopotamian ReligionSacred To3 entriesSamaritanismSacred To1 entrySources1. Divinity Atlas Directory Taxonomy, First Edition Category TreeComments (0)No comments yet. Be the first to share a thought.Sign in to join the discussion.Reader Challenges (0)No disputes yet. Spotted an error or a better source? Open the first one.Sign in to dispute this or suggest a correction.