According to the Bible, Moses commanded that there be a place for sacrifices to the Almighty. At that time the people of Israel lived in the desert and their place of worship was a tent, the Tent of Meeting. After David made Jerusalem the capital of Israel, his son Solomon built the First Temple that took on the same form as the Tent of Meeting.
The Temple was described as being thirty metres long and ten metres wide. It had forecourt and an inner court, where the Ark of the Covenant was stood the Holy of Holies. Sacrifices were offered daily on the altar at the Temple. For the great Jewish feasts, the Passover, the Feast of Weeks and the Feast of Booths the Jews made pilgrimages to the Temple for worship. Under Kings Hezekiah and Josiah the Temple became the sole place of sacrificial worship. In 587BC the Temple was destroyed by the Babylonians.
The Second Temple was built between 520BC and 515BC and this was rebuilt in a grander form by Herod the Great who transformed it into a greater and more beautiful sanctuary for the Jewish people. It was razed by the Romans in 70AD and was never rebuilt.
Josephus recounted how Herod trained an army of priests as stonecutters and carpenters specially to build his Temple and an ossuary discovered in Jerusalem hints at those involved in the construction with an Aramaic inscription to Simon the Temple Builder.
In his book The Jewish War, Josephus wrote that ‘the expenditure devoted to his work was incalculable, its magnificence never surpassed.’ The Temple, its platform and its porticos, were no doubt typical of Roman architecture at that time. Cassius Dio called the Temple ‘extremely large and beautiful.’ Tacitus, no friend of the Jews, described the Temple as having been built ‘with more care and effort than any of the rest, the very colonnades around the Temple made a splendid defence.’
To the north-western corner of the Temple Mount was the Antonia Fortress. At the time of Herod the Great, Jerusalem was surrounded by valleys on every side except the north, which was in fact the only way of approach for an attack on the city. It was here Herod built the huge Antonia Fortress, designed to protect the Temple Mount from the north, on the site of an earlier Maccabaean fortress built by John Hyrcanus I. Its name was given by Herod after Mark Antonio. Josephus Flavius described the fortress as being 115 metres from east to west, with the western side 35 metres long and the eastern side 42 metres long, with four towers.
The fortress was defended against the Roman army of Titus in the siege of Jerusalem in 70AD and its capture resulted in the fall of the city and the sack of the Temple.
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A Documentary
The Legacy of Solomon Page 21