Buried Cities and Bible Countries

by George St. Clair

The Holy House, with its courts, was not in the centre of the enclosure, but had a position north-west of the centre. The altar court was at a lower level than the Holy House; and lower still, by successive descents, were the court of Israel, the court of the women, and the court of the Gentiles. The courts being in terraces one above another, and the Holy House at the summit, the temple was a far more conspicuous object than is the Dome of the Rock at the present day.

The Talmud describes the Temple area as 500 cubits square. The prophet Ezekiel says “it had a wall round about, the length five hundred and the breadth five hundred, to make a separation between that which was holy and that which was common” (xlii. 20). Then we are told by Maimonides, the learned Jewish writer, that “the men who built the second temple, when they built it in the days of Ezra, they built it like Solomon’s, and in some things according to the explanation in Ezekiel.”

Taking then the centre of the Sakhrah as the centre of the Holy of Holies, and allowing ourselves to be guided by the Talmud measurements, which are given with great exactitude, we shall not be far wrong if we draw the boundaries as follows:—On the north, the northern limit of the present platform, the line of which if continued eastward would cut the east wall of the Haram a little north of the Golden Gate. The platform is raised 12 feet above the present general surface of the Haram enclosure. One day when the rain had loosened a stone near the north-eastern corner of the platform and revealed the existence of vaults, Warren went down and took measurements; and it appears that the northern end of the platform consists of rock which has been scarped away perpendicularly. On the south the boundary would come to within a few feet of the entrance of El Aksa mosque, and would fall short of the south wall of the Haram by 300 feet. On the east and west the boundaries would fall a little way within the present walls of the Haram. We may reasonably conclude that the present east and west walls of the Haram either represent walls of the Temple enclosure, or else were built a little without them, as retaining walls for gradually accumulating debris.

When the Temple of Solomon was destroyed, with all the buildings that surrounded it, the debris would be piled up in the courts. Probably it would never be thought worth while to remove it all from the lower courts, but rather to cover it over and lay a neat pavement on the surface. Spaces and corners where the rubbish was less gathered would be filled in or built up to complete the levelling; and as the rubbish increased, both within and without the walls, after successive sieges, the walls themselves were further built up, to keep them of sufficient height. It never was intended in the first instance, to build walls up from the foundation and make them 150 feet high. By successive changes, the result of calamities as much as the fruit of improvement, the terraced mountain grew to be an elevated plateau, such as the Haram enclosure is at the present day. Josephus says that when Herod rebuilt the Temple he extended the area of the courts and made it twice as large as it was before. With that, however, we need not concern ourselves while we are seeking to restore the city of Old Testament times.

Solomon’s Palace we find reasons for placing south of Solomon’s Temple, on the slope of the terraced mountain, with its south-eastern angle coinciding with the present south-eastern corner of the Haram. Those deep-buried stones with the Phœnician masons’ marks upon them may be the very foundation stones of the palace. The palace was a great work, and occupied thirteen years in building. It was necessary to build up at this corner, but as soon as a level was reached that permitted the work to be carried through from east to west, the six-feet course was laid as the true base for the more splendid superstructure. This six-feet course extends for 600 feet westward from the south-east angle, and gives us the limit in that direction. Northward we are limited by the courts of the temple to 300 feet. This, then, is where Sir Charles Warren places Solomon’s palace, and these are the dimensions he assigns to it. Mr James Fergusson had already been led, from architectural reasons, to consider it an oblong of 550 feet by 300. The level of the six-feet course is 60 feet below the summit of the mountain. A patient examination of the wall led Warren to the conclusion that all below this great course is old work, and that the walls of the Haram generally correspond to the description of Josephus, in whose day the great wall of Solomon still existed.

The Temple and the palace being thus located, there is left, beyond the west end of the palace, a plot of ground, 300 feet square, not enclosed at the time we are speaking of, although at the present day it forms the south-western corner of the Sanctuary and has the mosque El Aksa covering it. But the great depression of the Tyropœon Valley falls just there, and it would not be raised and enclosed until a late day. Warren says, in the “Recovery of Jerusalem”: “Our researches show that the portion of the wall to the west of the Double Gate is of a different construction to, and more recent than that to the east. This is a matter of very great importance, and, combined with other results, appears to show the impossibility of the Temple having existed at the south-west angle, as restored by Mr Fergusson and others. The only solution of the question I can see, is by supposing the portion to the east of the Double Gate to have formed the south wall of Solomon’s palace, and that to the west to have been added by Herod when he enlarged the courts of the Temple.”

Before this addition was made the south wall was but 600 feet in length. The Triple Gate stood in the middle of it, and as we have seen, it is exactly on the ridge of the hill. The sill is 38 feet below the present level of the Sanctuary, and from the gate three avenues ascend gently to the Sanctuary floor. May they not represent “the way by which Solomon went up to the House of the Lord”?

The Wall of Ophel, as already described, has been discovered by Warren, and abuts against the south-eastern angle of what we are now prepared to regard as Solomon’s palace.

The Tower of Antonia.—Josephus tells us that the tower which Herod built and named in honour of Antony stood on a rock 50 cubits high, at the north-west corner of the Temple. The rock was separated from Bezetha by a cutting made on purpose, yet the tower was so near to Bezetha that it adjoined the New City. At the same time it was so near to the Temple that the south-eastern turret overlooked the Temple courts, while passages from the tower led to the west and north cloisters. This description is precise enough. As Conder says, there is just such a rock fortress in the north-west part of the Haram. It is a great scarp, with vertical faces on the south and north, standing up 40 feet above the interior court, and separated from the north-eastern hill of Jerusalem by a ditch 50 yards broad, in which are now the Twin Pools—the Bethesda of St. Jerome. This block of rock is “the top of the hill” spoken of by Josephus, and occupies a length of 100 yards along the course of the north wall of the Haram. No other such scarp exists in or near the enclosure of the High Sanctuary. Can we then hesitate to place Antonia here?

Herod, after all, only repaired and strengthened this tower, for it had been built by Hyrcanus and passed under the name of Baris before being renamed Antonia, and even Hyrcanus was not the first at this work (page 265).