Temple Mount

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The Temple Mount, known in Arabic as the Haram al-Sharif — the Noble Sanctuary — is a raised, walled platform in the southeastern corner of the Old City of Jerusalem, roughly thirty-five acres of artificial esplanade built up over the natural rock. Its shape is a feat of engineering before it is anything else: a hill leveled into a vast trapezoidal terrace by filling the slopes around a summit outcrop and holding the fill behind four monumental retaining walls. On that made ground three traditions locate the center of the world, and the summit rock beneath the gold-leafed dome is the point on which their accounts converge.

The made platform

The natural feature is a limestone ridge — the eastern of Jerusalem’s hills, between the Kidron and Tyropoeon valleys — whose crown breaks the surface as a broad, irregular outcrop. Everything that makes the site a level platform is construction. The largest single campaign was Herod the Great’s, who from about 20 BCE roughly doubled an older, smaller precinct, extending it north over a saddle, west, and south onto the descending ridge, and packing the new ground with earth and rubble retained by ashlar walls of extraordinary scale. The masonry that survives is unmistakable: limestone blocks dressed with the recessed, drafted margins characteristic of Herodian work, the largest courses running tens of feet in length and weighing tens of tons. The western stretch of that retaining work — not a wall of the sanctuary itself but of the platform that carried it — is the Western Wall, the holiest accessible site in Jewish practice. The southern wall, with its blocked Hulda gates and the springing of Robinson’s Arch at the southwest corner, and the vaulted substructures known since medieval times as Solomon’s Stables, complete the visible Herodian fabric. The platform reads, in other words, as a single enormous box of held earth: the terrace is the monument, and the buildings on it have changed while the box has stood.

The scale was deliberate, and its logic was sacrificial rather than civic. Herod’s enlargement was not a public square enlarged for crowds alone but a sanctuary graded by degrees of holiness, an architecture that translated purity law into stone. An outer court, open to gentiles and the ritually impure, surrounded a low balustrade — the soreg — beyond which only Jews in a state of purity might pass, marked by warning inscriptions in Greek and Latin promising death to the trespasser; two of those very inscriptions have been recovered. Within lay the Court of the Women, then the Court of the Israelites, then the narrow Court of the Priests around the great altar of burnt offering, and at the last the sanctuary building itself, its innermost room — the Holy of Holies — entered by the high priest alone and only on the Day of Atonement. The platform thus mapped a gradient that ran from the open city to a single sealed chamber over the rock, and the whole monumental terrace existed to carry that gradient.

The Jewish sanctuary

For Judaism the platform is the site of the First Temple, ascribed to Solomon and destroyed by Babylon — the Neo-Babylonian army of Nebuchadnezzar II — in 586 BCE, and of the Second, rebuilt after the return from exile, vastly enlarged by Herod, and razed by Rome in 70 CE when Titus took the city. The First Temple belongs to the close of the Iron Age in the Levant; the Second, and the world that gathered around it, is the heart of Second Temple Judaism, the matrix from which both rabbinic Judaism and the early Jesus movement emerged. The Alexandrian philosopher Philo described the sanctuary’s pilgrim crowds and read the cult allegorically; the historian Josephus, who saw the precinct before its fall, left the fullest eyewitness account of Herod’s building.

The sanctuary’s law and layout are preserved most precisely not in stone but in text. Tractate Middot — “Measurements” — of the Mishnah sets out the dimensions of the Temple Mount and its courts: it opens with the Mount as a square of five hundred cubits a side, then walks the gates, the chambers, the great altar, and the priestly watch-posts in turn. The tractate is not a surveyor’s plan but a remembered one, compiled within a generation or two of the destruction from the testimony of sages who had seen the building — its chief reporter the Tanna Eliezer ben Jacob — and it carries no Talmudic commentary, an orphan among the tractates, its purpose to hold the vanished architecture in memory and in expectation of rebuilding. Rabbinic tradition places the inner sanctuary, the Holy of Holies, on the summit rock, and teaches that the divine presence, the Shekhinah, never wholly departed the western side of the sanctuary — a saying that has long governed where the observant will and will not tread, lest they cross unknowing onto the ground of the vanished innermost room.

The summit outcrop itself carries a name and a weight of cosmology. In the rabbinic tradition it is the Even ha-Shetiyya, the Foundation Stone, the point from which the creation of the world began and on which the Ark of the Covenant once rested in the First Temple; the same stone is held to seal the deep, the waters of the abyss beneath it. It is the rock the gold dome now covers, so that the single feature three traditions hold sacred is not a building any of them raised but the bare outcrop that all of them found.

The Noble Sanctuary

For Islam the same outcrop is al-Sakhra, the Rock, from which Muhammad is held to have ascended through the seven heavens on the Night Journey — the Isra and Mi’raj that carried him from Mecca to the farthest place of prayer named in the Qur’an, al-masjid al-aqsa, and from there aloft. Jerusalem held a primacy in the earliest Muslim practice that the city has never since relinquished in memory: it was the first qibla, the direction toward which the community turned in prayer before the orientation was changed during Muhammad’s lifetime to the Kaaba at Mecca — the two harams of Islam thereby distinguished, the Hijazi shrine becoming the axis of daily prayer and the hajj while Jerusalem kept its rank as the place of ascent.

The monuments that fixed that sanctity in stone are Umayyad. Around 691–692 CE the caliph Abd al-Malik raised the Dome of the Rock over the outcrop — an octagon enclosing a domed rotunda, set on a double ambulatory, its form drawn from the vocabulary of Late Antique and Byzantine martyria and its interior sheathed in mosaic. A band of inscription running for hundreds of feet around the arcades carries some of the earliest dated Qur’anic text in existence, the profession of faith and verses addressed pointedly to the Christian theology of the city it crowned. To its south the congregational mosque of Al-Aqsa was built in the years that followed, under Abd al-Malik or his son al-Walid early in the eighth century, and rebuilt many times after earthquakes by Abbasid, Fatimid, Crusader, Ayyubid, Mamluk, and Ottoman hands. Together the golden dome over the rock and the silver-grey mosque at the southern edge made the precinct the third holiest site in Sunni Islam, after Mecca and Medina, and Muslim authorities have administered it, under varying overlords, for most of the time since. The Dome of the Rock in particular is among the very oldest works of Islamic architecture to survive substantially intact — a building, as Oleg Grabar argued, made to hold several readings at once, devotional and triumphal and commemorative, on a site already saturated with the memory of others.

The Temple of the Gospels

Christianity’s claim is older than the dome and quieter than the wall. This was the Temple of the Gospels: the place to which the infant Jesus was brought, where the boy disputed with the teachers, where the man taught in the porticoes and overturned the tables of the moneychangers in the outer court, and over which he is shown foretelling that not one stone would be left upon another — a saying the year 70 was read as fulfilling. The Herodian courts the evangelists describe are precisely the courts whose retaining walls still stand. In the centuries when the city was Christian, before the Muslim conquest, the Temple platform was largely left in ruins, a deliberate desolation read as the wreck of the old covenant against the rising churches of Golgotha; it was the Umayyads who built the empty mount back into a sanctuary.

The platform through the centuries

The mount’s later history is a sequence of overwritings, each tradition building on the foundations of the last without ever effacing them. After the revolt of 70 the city was refounded by Hadrian as the Roman colony Aelia Capitolina, the ruined precinct given over — by some accounts — to a shrine of Jupiter, and Jews barred from the site, a prohibition tightened after the failure of the Bar Kokhba revolt in 135. For five Byzantine centuries the platform lay deliberately desolate while the Christian city flourished around it. The Muslim conquest of the 630s reversed the desolation: the caliph Umar is remembered as having cleared the neglected rock, and within two generations Abd al-Malik’s dome stood over it. When the Crusaders took Jerusalem in 1099 they read the two monuments as Christian buildings in disguise — the Dome of the Rock became the church of the Templum Domini, the Lord’s Temple, surmounted by a cross, and Al-Aqsa, the Templum Salomonis, served as palace and then as the headquarters of the Knights Templar, who took their name from it. Saladin’s recovery of the city in 1187 returned both to Muslim use, stripping the cross from the dome and restoring the mihrab. Each later overlord — Ayyubid, Mamluk, Ottoman — added gates, fountains, colonnades, and madrasas around the edges of the esplanade, so that the open court of today, ringed by arcades and dotted with smaller domes, is itself a museum of a thousand years of building, all of it standing on Herod’s held earth.

The sources and the scholarship

Because the rock cannot be dug, the precinct is known through texts and through its own surviving fabric, and the corpus that describes it is itself layered by tradition. The earliest detailed Jewish description survives in the Mishnah’s Tractate Middot, the “Measurements,” whose five chapters preserve the Herodian sanctuary’s plan from the memory of those who had seen it; its account is read alongside the eyewitness report of Josephus in the Jewish War and the Antiquities, and the allegorical reading of the cult by Philo of Alexandria. The standing Islamic monuments are the subject of a deep architectural literature, anchored for the early period by Oleg Grabar — whose The Dome of the Rock and his synthesis The Shape of the Holy: Early Islamic Jerusalem (Princeton, 1996) reconstruct how the Umayyads remade the Haram physically and ideologically — and treated for a general reader in resources such as the Smarthistory account of the Dome of the Rock, which sets out its octagonal plan and the dating of its mosaic inscriptions. The Herodian fabric of the walls and gates has been mapped in detail by the Biblical Archaeology Society’s survey of the Temple Mount in the Herodian period, drawing on the excavations against the southern and western walls. Where the surface cannot be excavated, the discarded earth has been: the Temple Mount Sifting Project has recovered tens of thousands of artifacts from soil removed from the platform, a method born precisely of the impossibility of digging the mount itself.

What the ground will not yield

What scholarship can establish about the platform’s earliest layers is thin, and the reason is the same sanctity that makes the place what it is. The Herodian retaining walls and the Umayyad monuments are firmly dated and visible; the location of the Solomonic and Second Temple structures beneath them is inferred — from Middot, from Josephus, from the rock’s own contours, from the surviving courses of wall — but not excavated. The precinct is a living sanctuary controlled by a religious endowment, and systematic archaeology on its surface has never been possible; what is known of the subsurface comes almost entirely from the edges, from the tunnels along the western foundations, from the digs against the southern wall, and from the laborious sifting of soil that had been removed from the mount and discarded. The summit rock has therefore never been dated by spade. Each tradition that reveres it does so on the testimony of its own texts, and the stone itself confirms none of them and contradicts none of them; it lies under the dome unprobed, the one fixed point three scriptures place at the center of the world. Solomon’s Holy of Holies, Muhammad’s place of ascent, and the court where Jesus taught are not three sites but three accounts of a single outcrop of Jerusalem limestone, and on that outcrop they meet.

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