Temple Mount #51

The Temple Mount is the large elevated platform in the eastern part of Jerusalem’s Old City where the temple of the Lord stood in ancient times. It is the site where Solomon built the first temple, where the second temple was later rebuilt and expanded, and where Jesus taught during his final days. Today it is sacred to Jews, Christians, and Muslims, and it is known in Arabic as the Haram al-Sharif, the Noble Sanctuary.

Biblical Significance

The Bible traces the sanctity of the site to David. After a plague struck Israel following his census, the angel of the Lord stood at the threshing floor of Araunah, also called Ornan, the Jebusite, and David bought the threshing floor and built an altar there (2 Samuel 24:18-25; 1 Chronicles 21:18-22:1). David declared that this would be the house of the Lord God and the altar of burnt offering for Israel (1 Chronicles 22:1). Solomon began the temple on Mount Moriah, on the site David had prepared at the threshing floor of Ornan (2 Chronicles 3:1). Many identify this Moriah with the mountain where Abraham was told to offer Isaac (Genesis 22:2), though the Bible does not state the link outright.

The first temple was destroyed by the Babylonians in 586 BC, and the second temple was completed under Zerubbabel after the exile. Herod the Great later began an enormous expansion of the temple and its surrounding platform, a project so long that the Jews remarked in Jesus’ day that it had taken forty-six years so far (John 2:20). It was in these courts that Jesus drove out the money changers and merchants (John 2:13-22; Mark 11:15-17), taught daily during his last week, and warned that the magnificent buildings would be thrown down, with not one stone left on another (Mark 13:1-2). The Romans destroyed the temple in AD 70.

Today

The Temple Mount is a walled esplanade of roughly thirty-five acres. Its immense retaining walls, including the Western Wall, date largely to Herod’s expansion and are the most visible remains of the second temple period. The current buildings are Islamic: the Dome of the Rock, completed in AD 691 to 692, and the Al-Aqsa Mosque. The Dome of the Rock stands over an exposed outcrop of bedrock, and the precise placement of the ancient temple and its altar relative to that rock is disputed among scholars. Under a longstanding arrangement, the site is administered by an Islamic trust, and non-Muslim prayer there is restricted, while archaeological excavation on the platform itself has not been permitted. For this reason, our knowledge of the first temple’s location rests mainly on the biblical text and on excavations around the mount rather than on remains from the platform itself.