Herod Rebuilds the Temple

In the eighteenth year of his reign Herod the Great announced that he would rebuild the temple in Jerusalem. Josephus gives him a speech: the temple built by the exiles who returned from Babylon was lower than Solomon’s, because the Persian kings had fixed its measurements, and now that he had peace, wealth and the friendship of Rome he would make good the lack (Josephus, Antiquities 15.380–387). The people feared that he would pull the old building down and never finish the new. He promised to demolish nothing until everything was ready. He assembled a thousand wagons and ten thousand workmen, and he had priests trained as masons and carpenters (Josephus, Antiquities 15.388–390), since only priests could enter the inner courts. Herod himself, Josephus notes, never went into them, “because he was not a priest” (Josephus, Antiquities 15.417–420).

The new sanctuary stood on new foundations and was built of white stone, with a golden vine spreading above its doors (Josephus, Antiquities 15.391–395). Its front was plated with gold that flashed in the rising sun, and from a distance the building looked “like a mountain covered with snow” (Josephus, Jewish War 5.222–223). The innermost room, the Holy of Holies, was empty (Josephus, Jewish War 5.219). Around the sanctuary Herod enclosed an area twice the size of the old one and edged it with colonnades (Josephus, Jewish War 1.401). The royal portico along the south side had 162 columns in four rows (Josephus, Antiquities 15.411–416). Foreigners could go no further than the outer court. A low stone barrier marked the limit, with notices in Greek and Latin forbidding any foreigner to pass it on pain of death (Josephus, Antiquities 15.417–420) (Josephus, Jewish War 5.193–194).

The priests finished the sanctuary itself in a year and six months, and the colonnades and outer courts took eight years (Josephus, Antiquities 15.420–423). The work as a whole went on far longer. In John’s Gospel people say, “It took forty-six years to build this temple!” (John 2:20). Josephus reports that it was finished only at the end of the governorship of Albinus, in the early 60s AD, when more than eighteen thousand workmen were left without employment (Josephus, Antiquities 20.215–219). A few years later the Romans burned it; see the Jewish Revolt and the Destruction of the Temple.

This is the temple in which the Gospels and Acts are set. The child Jesus is brought to it (Luke 2:27), and as a man he walks in its colonnades at the feast of Dedication (John 10:22–23). A disciple marvels at its stones, and Jesus answers that not one will be left on another (Mark 13:1–2). The barrier against foreigners lies behind the riot in which Paul was arrested, on the charge that he had brought Greeks into the temple (Acts 21:27–29).