The Temple | Knights Templar | Ark of the Covenant

KNIGHTS TEMPLAR | KNIGHTS OF MALTA | MEDIEVAL KNIGHTS

Stunning new revalations on the most sought after holy relic in the world ...

Solomon's Temple
Ark of the Covenant

A quarry from the late Second Temple Period that produced stone to build the Temple Mount's supporting walls has been uncovered in central Jerusalem, the Antiquities Authority said Monday.

The latest discovery brought to three the number of quarries found in the city over the past two years which archeologists believe were used in the construction of the Temple walls.

The 2,030-year-old quarry, which spans more than one dunam (0.1 hectare), was discovered during a salvage excavation on the city's Rehov Shmuel Hanevi ahead of planned construction of residential buildings at the site, the Authority said.

The immense size of the stones found at the site, reaching a height of 2 meters, indicate that they were used in the construction of King Herod's magnificent projects in Jerusalem, including the Temple Mount walls, said Dr. Ofer Sion, the director of the dig at the site.

"We know from historical sources that in order to build the Temple and other projects which Herod constructed, such as his palace, hundreds of thousands of various size stones were required - most of them weighing between two and five tons each," he said. "The dimensions of the stones that were produced in the quarry that was revealed are suitable for the Temple walls."

Sion added that the quarry that was exposed was actually a small part of a large series of quarries that was spread across the entire slope, from Musrara to the Sanhedria neighborhood.

He said the recent exposure of the quarries in Sanhedria and in the Ramat Shlomo neighborhood, farther north, indicate that Herod began quarrying closest to the Temple Mount, and then worked away from it.

In those days the world of hi-tech focused on quarrying, removing and transporting stones," Sion said.

Historical sources record that Herod trained more than 10,000 people to be involved in this work: They prepared transportation routes and then moved the huge stones in a variety of ways - on rolling wooden fixtures that were drawn by camels, in pieces on carriages, etc.

Among the artifacts discovered in the excavation were metal plates that were used to severe the stones from the bedrock, as well as coins and pottery shards that date to the end of the Second Temple period.

Dozens of quarries have been found in Jerusalem, but these are the first three that archeologists think were used in the construction of the Temple Mount.

A few dozens quarries were likely used in the building of the Temple Mount, said Prof. Amos Kloner, a former Jerusalem district archaeologist at the Antiquities Authority.

Although Israel is one of the most excavated places in the world, explored continuously since the 1850s, the Temple Mount has been surveyed but never excavated.

Two chambers in the Temple are named in the Mishnah. One, the Chamber of Secrets, was where the devout placed their gifts in secret. The poor received support from these gifts also in secret. The Chamber of Utensils was also a room for storing gifts from which distribution was made every 30 days.

The vaulted Chamber of the Hearth (also mentioned in the Mishnah) was the room the eldest sons could stay and young priests sleep with the keys of the Temple Court in their custody. A fired burned continuously there to keep the occupants warm.

Incense for the temple was prepared by a family named Abtinas in the upper story of a special building in the courtyard, the Chamber of Abtinas.

We can easily imagine that rooms were needed for wood storage, for extra copies of the sacred vessels, for priestly garment storage, for temple records. Access tunnels came into the temple underground (according to more than one historical account) and some of the storage rooms were underground. These underground rooms and tunnels have apparently not been cleared, entered nor explored since the destruction of Solomon's Temple on the 9th of Av, 586 BC.

The Romans grabbed as much as they could, but left behind innumerable traces of the Temple and of life in the Second Jewish Commonwealth, in the age when Jesus preached and the Mishnah was composed. There must be other archaeological treasures up there too, fragments of Jewish, Roman, Byzantine, and Muslim life in the centuries following the Roman rampage. Infrared photographs and other survey techniques suggest the presence of vast underground halls beneath the platform's surface. Some ancient rabbinic sources assert that the Ark of the Covenant, lost since the destruction of the First Temple in 586 B.C., was buried on the Temple Mount; it might conceivably be standing in one of those underground chambers.

A huge platform is balanced atop the Mount, shored up by enormous earth-and-stone works. King Herod the Great of Judea built this platform in the first century B.C. as a base for an enlarged, rebuilt Temple. (The Temple was the focus of Jewish ritual and pilgrimage.) But Herod's magnificent Temple was burnt to the ground by Roman forces under Titus, later emperor of Rome in 70 A.D. The Jews had rebelled against Roman overlordship -- Herod himself had been a Roman client; they fought hard and lost. Rome was the only superpower of the day. On Titus' arch of triumph in Rome you can still see carvings of the plunder that the Romans carted home from Jerusalem -- including the famous seven-branched Temple menorah, later destroyed accidentally by fire.