Herod's Temple

By 18 BC, much of the known world was under the toe of the seemingly invincible Rome. Years earlier, Judea, home of the Jews, had succumbed to the steadily-advancing legions of Rome. Across the Mediterranean, Rome sent or commissioned rulers to keep their provinces and client kingdoms in line.

One such "client king" was King Herod the Great. Originally an Idumaean (from south of Judea), he had established himself at an early age, and now ruled a kingdom dominating Judea, as well as Samaria, and Galilee (two regions to the north of Judea). In history, he is perhaps best remembered for his cruelty and excesses. Before his accession of the throne, he had one wife (Doris), whom he replaced with Mariamme I after he rose to the rank of royalty. In a fit of rage, Herod had Mariamme executed, and later his two sons by her, Alexander and Aristobulus. These first two wives he succeeded with eight more, not in series but in parallel. Four days before he died, he similarly murdered his son by Doris, Antipater. He died in 4 BC.

Herod the Great is known to Christians for murdering the infant population of Bethlehem in fear of a usurper. (Matthew 2:16). A different Herod appears later in the Gospels: Herod Antipater executed John the Baptist (Mark 6:14-29) and tried Jesus before his crucifixion (Luke 23). He was one of the Great's heirs from a later marriage.

Even with his cruel reign on record, Herod is remembered as something else than a tyrant: a master builder. Throughout Judea he built gymnasiams, temples, and palaces. Abroad, even, in Antioch, he paved the central street with marble and flanked it with a colonnades. In Jerusalem, he hardened the defenses of the city, building towers of immense height and naming them after his wives and friends. He also attempted (unsuccessfuly) to inject Greek culture into Jewish Judea, by building theaters and a hippodrome. But by far his greatest work was his golden Temple, the Temple of Herod.

Dimensions of the Temple

The best extant description of Herod's Temple is found in Josephus' epic history of Judea under Roman rule, The Jewish War. It is quite a lengthy work; the translation I read, from 1959, is over 400 pages long, not counting the endnotes and appendices. (Here I quote an older public domain translation.)

Josephus spends a fair amount of time discussing the Temple. As can be expected, his description leaves plenty of room for interpretation. To begin, Josephus states that "in front its height and its breadth were equal, and each 100 cubits." The front of the building formed a square. This detail will be important later.

Similar to Solomon's Temple, the vestibule was followed by a Santuary, and then the Holy of Holies. Josephus gives the dimensions of the Sanctuary as "in height 90 cubits, and its length the same; whereas its breadth was but 20 cubits." This dimension in itself seems simple enough. But, he states earlier that, "As the entire house was divided into two parts within, it was only the first part of it that was open to our view. Its height extended all along to 90 cubits in height, and its length was 50 cubits, and its breadth 20." What could this mean? What is this "first" chamber? Its dimensions do not match the vestibule (of which we know the height and width) or the Sanctuary (of which we know all three dimensions). However, in his description of the Sanctuary, Josephus, mentions that the length was "again divided" 40 cubits inside. When one takes the measurements for this mysterious "first" chamber, we find that its width corresponds to the Sanctuary. Then, it is reasonable to assume that the "first" chamber is the Vestibule combined with the first part of the Sanctuary. After these first 40 cubits, the ceiling drops 30 cubits, to give us the stated height of 60 cubits.

After the Sanctuary was the "innermost chamber." It was a perfect cube, measuring 20 cubits in three directions. Josephus states: "In this there was nothing at all. It was inaccessible and inviolable, and not to be seen by any; and was called the Holy of Holies."

A few more bits of information are given for the full dimensions of the Temple. Along the sides were "intercommunicating chambers on three floors." They rose 60 cubits along the wall, with the rest of the building extending 40 cubits higher. The width of them can be found by subtracting the dimensions of the Sanctuary (20 cubits), and a 40 cubit setback mentioned by Josephus, and dividing by two to obtain cubits. A good portion of this was necessary taken up by the walls themselves which, being built of bearing masonry, were quite thick.

The final thing to establish, then, is the shape of the roof. The main chambers of the sanctuary were probably all on the same level, since no references are made to stairs leading up to the next. The roof of the Vestibule was clearly a full 100 cubits high, but what about the rest of the building? Did it drop far down and conform to the height of the rooms below? Or, did it soar up above the rooms? The answer is given in a sort of ancient footnote, in which Josephus remarks, "But then this house, as it was divided into two parts, the inner part was lower than the appearance of the outer..."

I take this to mean that rooms stood above the lower chambers, although they were not specifically mentioned, much less their uses given. They may have been used for storage, or they may have been sealed off, being regarded as holy and untrespassable. I suspect they provided access to the roof for maintenance. The ceiling of these upper rooms was probably vaulted to support the weight of the roof above.

When the final dimensions come in, we find something curious. The width and length of the Vestibule, as we already know, were 100 cubits. With a 10-cubit Vestibule, a 60-cubit Sanctuary, a 20-cubit Holy of Holies, and a 10-cubit outer chamber, we see that the length of the building is similarly 100. Thus, the maximum length, width, and breadth of the Temple described a perfect cube, echoing the Holy of Holies found within.

	Top plan view.
	Front elevation.
	Side elevation.
	A virtual model constructed in SolidWorks.

Architecture and Furnishings

A few details are given by Josephus on the style and look of the Temple. First of all, Josephus states that "On its top it had spikes with sharp points, to prevent any pollution of it by birds sitting upon it." Later, Josephus mentions that these spikes had lead bases. He does not reveal whether the gold was solid or a plating on something else.

Further details are provided in the same paragraph:

"Now the outward face of the temple in its front wanted nothing that was likely to surprise either men's minds or their eyes; for it was covered all over with plates of gold of great weight, and, at the first rising of the sun, reflected back a very fiery splendor, and made those who forced themselves to look upon it to turn their eyes away, just as they would have done at the sun's own rays. But this temple appeared to strangers, when they were coming to it at a distance, like a mountain covered with snow; for as to those parts of it that were not gilt, they were exceeding white."

Josephus tells us that the outer room of the Sanctuary contained "Three things that were very wonderful and famous among all mankind, the candlestick, the table of shewbread, and the altar of incense." The lampstand had seven prongs, supposedly representing the seven "planets" (the sun, the moon, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn), although they might also stand for the seven days of creation. The table held twelve loaves of bread, which Josephus reports indicates the twelve signs of the Zodiac, but the more common interpretation is that they represent the twelve tribes of Israel. The altar for incense burned thirteen different spices.

Archaeology has uncovered a few visual references of the Temple sanctuary, including coins struck for the Bar Kochba revolt, in the 2nd century, AD. The coin shows that the inner door (which was covered by a curtain portraying the stars), was arched. Four massive columns run up the façade. These would have provided structural relief.

The Temple Mount

The Temple Sanctuary stood atop the Temple Mount, which Herod also remodeled. He expanded the Mount with fill, vaults, and massive retaining walls. Parts of these walls have survived into the present day; the western wall is known as the Wailing Wall, where modern Jews lament the destruction of the Temple.

All along the periphery of the Mount Herod built colonnades, with columns 25 cubits high. "These pillars," Josephus writes, "were of one entire stone each of them, and that stone was white marble; and the roofs were adorned with cedar." They were not "On the outside adorned with any work of the painter or engraver." I imagine this looked something like Bernini's colonnade around the Ellipse at St. Peter's Basilica in Rome.

Along the Southern edge of the Temple Mount (which was roughly, but not precisely, rectangular), ran a colonnade of exceptional width and grandeur, known as the Royal Stoa. Here merchants could set up shop to sell odds and ends, usually things to be sacrificed at the Temple. This is probably where Jesus crashed through the market, overturning the tables of the moneychangers, declaring that the place had been turned into a "den of thieves" (Matthew 21:12, 13).

On the northwest corner of the Temple Mount stood the Tower of Antonia, the site of the Roman garrison for the city. The tower was built on a rock 50 cubits in height. From each of the four corners rose another tower each: three were 50 cubits high; the tower in the south-east corner, nearest the Temple, stood 70 cubits.

The Temple itself stood at about the center of the Mount, although its exact location is unknown. It was surrounded by several walls indicating the barriers through which certain people could not pass. Successive courts banned Gentiles, women, ceremonially unclean men, and lastly all but priests. In this innermost courtyard was a massive altar, 15 cubits in height and 50 cubits in length and width. Horns protruded from the four corners. A long ramp on the south side gave priests access for sacrifices.

	Overall view of a 3D model of the Temple Mount, constructed in Google SketchUp and placed in Google Earth. (A .kmz file of this model is available for download here.)
	Detail of the Sanctuary and the assorted enclosures surrounding it.
	Detail of the Tower of Antonia.

The Reconstruction Model

It took me nearly four years to construct my 1/250 scale model of Herod's Temple, from August 2003 to June 2007. I built the model's walls and roof from styrene plastic, on a wooden base. Frustrated at the amount of work involved, I quit working on the model for three years. At random, I began working on it again in June 2007, and I finished it several weeks later. The columns were built up from balsa wood and covered in plaster and spackling paste. Sanding the columns to their proper contour took countless hours. Another tedious task was the installation of 330 toothpick tips to suggest the gold spikes covering the roof. While the sanctuary itself is hollow, the altar is entirely filled with plaster and "rubble" (junk plastic from earlier models). I carved the altar's horns from single pieces of balsa.

	Overall view. (This vantage point, suspended hundreds of feet in the air above the Temple Mount, was inaccessible to 1st-century Jews and Romans.)
	Aerial view from the west.
	Top view. This is the most gold paint I have ever used on a single model. (It took me six hours to apply, by hand.)
	The altar. I think this reconstruction looks more like an expressionist film set than ancient architecture.
	Detail of the entryway.
	Detail of a column's capital.

Conclusion

Herod's Temple, like Solomon's Temple, fell to a foreign army. In this case, it was the foreign army that had funded the Temple: Rome, conquerors of the Mediterranean world. After a bloody war of four years, in which hundreds of thousands of Jews were slaughtered, both by the Romans and internal dissension, Jerusalem was finally conquered in the late summer of AD 70 by the general Titus. After taking the innermost wall of the city, he destroyed Antonia and took the Temple. In the midst of desperate battle, the sanctuary went up in flames.

Resources

Meir Ben-Dov, In the Shadow of the Temple Mount: The Discovery of Ancient Jerusalem, 1985.
Flavius Josephus, The Jewish War, translated by William Whiston, accessed on Wikisource.