Jerusalem: The Biography

Herod pulled down the existing Second Temple and built a wonder of the world in its place. The Jews were afraid he would destroy the old Temple and never finish the new one, so he called a city meeting to persuade them, preparing every detail. A thousand priests were trained as builders. Lebanese cedar forests were felled, the beams floated down the coast. At quarries around Jerusalem, the massive ashlar stones, gleaming yellow and almost white limestone, were marked and cut out. A thousand wagons were amassed, but the stones were gargantuan. In the tunnels alongside the Temple Mount, there is one stone, 44.6 feet long, 11 feet high, that weighs 600 tons.^* No din, no hammering had polluted the building of Solomon’s Temple, so Herod ensured that everything was readied offsite and silently slotted into place. The Holy of Holies was ready in two years, but the entire complex was not completed for eighty.

Herod dug down to the foundation rock and built from there, so he would have destroyed any remnants of Solomon’s and Zerubbabel’s Temples. Though limited to the east by the steepness of the Kidron Valley, he expanded the esplanade of the Temple Mount to the south, filling the space with a substructure held up by eighty-eight pillars and twelve vaulted arches, now called Solomon’s Stables, to create a 3-acre platform, twice as large as the Roman Forum. Today, it is easy to see the seam in the eastern wall, visible 105 feet from the south-western corner of the city, with Herodian ashlars to the left and smaller Maccabean stones to the right.

The courts of the Temple led in diminishing size to ever-increasing sanctity. Gentiles and Jews alike could enter the huge Court of Gentiles, but a wall encircled the Court of Women with this warning inscription:

FOREIGNER! DO NOT ENTER WITHIN THE GRILLE

AND PARTITION SURROUNDING THE TEMPLE

HE WHO IS CAUGHT

WILL HAVE ONLY HIMSELF TO BLAME

FOR HIS DEATH WHICH WILL FOLLOW

Fifty steps led up to a gate that opened into the Court of Israel, open to any male Jew, which led to the exclusive Court of Priests. Within that stood the Sanctuary, the Hekhal itself, containing the Holy of Holies. This rested upon the rock where Abraham was said to have almost sacrificed Isaac, and where David built his altar. Here the sacrifices were conducted on the Altar of Burnt Offering, which faced the Court of Women and the Mount of Olives.

Herod’s Antonia Fortress guarded the Temple Mount in the north. There, Herod constructed his own secret tunnel into the Temple. In the south the Temple was reached by monumental stairs passing through the Double and Triple Gates, to underground passages decorated with doves and flowers that led into the Temple. On the west, a monumental bridge, doubling as an aqueduct bringing water into huge hidden cisterns, stretched across the valley into the Temple. In its sheer eastern wall stood the Shushan Gate, used exclusively by the high priest to progress to the Mount of Olives to sanctify the full moon, or to sacrifice that rarest, holiest of victims, the unblemished red heifer.^*

There were pillared porticoes on all four sides but the greatest of these was the Royal Portico, a vast basilica which dominated the whole mountain. About 70,000 people lived in Herod’s city but during the festivals hundreds of thousands arrived on pilgrimage. Like any bustling shrine, even today, the Temple needed a gathering place for friends to meet and for rituals to be arranged. This was the Royal Portico. When visitors arrived, they could shop on the busy shopping street that ran beneath the monumental arches along the western walls. When it was time to visit the Temple, pilgrims took purifying baths in the many mikvahs – ritual pools – that have been found around the southern entrances. They would climb one of the monumental staircases that led into the Royal Portico where they saw all the sights of the city, before it was time to pray.

At the south-eastern corner, the towering walls and cliff of the Kidron Valley created a precipitous peak, the Pinnacle, where the Gospels say the Devil tempted Jesus. At the south-western corner, facing the wealthy Upper City, priests announced the start of festivals and Sabbaths on Friday nights with trumpet blasts that must have echoed across the desolate gorges. A stone, thrown down by Titus in AD 70, proclaims ‘The Trumpeting Place’.