The city of Jerusalem occupies to-day the northern extremity of a plateau which is bounded on the east by the valley of the Kidron, and on the south and west by the valley of Hinnom. This plateau is divided from north to south by a ravine called the valley of the Tyropœon (“the cheesemakers”) in such a manner as to form two hills. The eastern hill is Mount Moriah, whose southern extremity, now called Ophel, was Zion, the “city of David.”
When Solomon ascended the throne, Jerusalem occupied only Zion, and did not begin to extend to the western and larger hill until under the kings of Judea. Mount Moriah, on the north, was given up to husbandry, and a rich man of Jerusalem, Araunah, owned there a field with a threshing-floor, where camels and oxen trod out the grain at harvest-time. David had bought the field of Araunah as a site for the temple of the true God, and had erected an altar on the threshing-floor.
The work began in the fourth year of the reign of Solomon. The materials had already been in great part fitted. Architects, workmen, and artists were engaged in Tyre by the aid of King Hiram, and the work progressed rapidly. The summit of Moriah was first levelled, and then around the remaining hillock was constructed an immense retaining wall of extraordinary solidity, extending up to the level of the summit. It was built of enormous blocks held together by cramp-irons, and was supported on the outside by embankments. All the space between the interior face of this wall and the rock was filled in with rubble in such a way as to form a square platform.
Movable Vessel of the Temple
(After Mangeant)
Then followed the erection of the temple itself, and so rapidly was it pushed that the dedication feast was celebrated only seven years after the laying of the first stone of the substructure. The temple was to be enclosed by two courts, but Solomon completed only the first or inner one, and the east wall of the second or outer, which was not finished until long after the great king’s death, in the reign of Manasseh.
The Bible gives us a detailed description of the magnificence of the interior of this sanctuary, built and decorated by Phœnician workmen, and of the objects of art accumulated there by the most ostentatious of Hebrew kings.
The architecture and the decorations of the interior were all in Egyptian style, like the temples of the Phœnicians themselves. But of the works of Solomon nothing has remained but the cisterns and the east wall of the outer court. This wall is ornamented with a gate under which Solomon had his throne placed when he assisted at public ceremonies; it was still called Solomon’s gate, even after the time of Herod. Numerous enlargements and restorations were made under the kings of Judea; but in 586 B.C., when the Chaldeans took Jerusalem, the temple was totally destroyed.
Fifty-two years later, the captive Jews in Babylon having been delivered by Cyrus, their leader, Zerubbabel, undertook to rebuild the temple of the true God. Though similar in plan to that of Solomon, the new edifice was less beautiful and of less majestic proportions; the old men who recalled the former one wept. This building stood for nearly five centuries, passing through the domination of the Seleucidæ and the Roman conquest of Pompey without being sacked or demolished.