Western Wall

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Stand at the base of the open-air section and the masonry tells its own age before any inscription does. The seven courses that rise directly above the pavement are cut from hard local limestone, their faces dressed smooth and framed by a shallow recessed margin — a band chiseled back a few centimeters around each block so that the flat center stands slightly proud. They are laid without mortar, fitted so closely that a blade will not enter the joints, and they are large past the scale of ordinary building: several courses run the length of a room, and a single concealed block in the buried run weighs as much as a warship’s anchor chain many times over. This is the signature of one builder and one campaign. The Western Wall, called in Hebrew the Kotel — simply “the Wall” — is the exposed face of the retaining work that Herod the Great raised in the last decades before the Common Era to carry the platform of the Temple Mount.

A wall that holds up a courtyard

The first thing to fix is what the wall is not. It is not a remnant of the sanctuary, nor of any room a priest entered. It is engineering — a retaining structure whose only original purpose was to hold earth and fill in place. When Herod, client king under Rome, undertook the enlargement of the precinct around 19 BCE, the natural summit of the hill was too small and too irregular for the court he intended. His engineers solved the problem by encasing the rise inside four enormous walls and packing the space behind them, converting an uneven ridge into a level artificial esplanade of roughly thirty-five acres — the largest such platform in the ancient world. The Temple of the Second Temple period stood somewhere on the upper surface; the Western Wall is one wall of the box that made the surface possible. What the worshipper faces today, then, is the outside of a foundation, turned by history into a frontage.

The masonry confirms the date without ambiguity. The drafted, recessed-margin ashlar — broad flat center, narrow chiseled border, dry joint — is the diagnostic Herodian hand, repeated across the precinct’s surviving courses and nowhere else in the same combination. The margin was not ornament for its own sake: cutting the border back left the heavy center untouched until the block was seated, so that the proud face could be dressed flush only after the stone was in place, and the recessed bands threw a fine line of shadow down each joint that gave the vast flat wall a rhythm the eye could read. Each course was set back a few centimeters from the one beneath, so that the whole rises with a slight inward batter — a lean toward the fill it restrains, the geometry of a wall built to be pushed against from behind.

The largest of these stones is a buried giant in the northern tunnels, the so-called Western Stone: about thirteen and a half meters long and three to four high, its weight reckoned by ground-penetrating radar in 2006 at something on the order of two hundred and fifty to three hundred tonnes, with older estimates running far higher. It ranks among the heaviest objects human beings have ever moved without machines, and it sits low in the wall, where the load above it is greatest — placed, not for display, but where the engineering wanted mass. The whole western retaining line runs close to four hundred and eighty-eight meters; the prayer plaza exposes only a short stretch of it, while the rest disappears behind the medieval and modern city that grew against the platform’s flank. Two named features along the same wall — Robinson’s Arch, the springer of a monumental stair at the southwest corner, and Wilson’s Arch, the first of the spans that once carried a bridge across to the upper city — survive as broken witnesses to the traffic the platform once bore, when crowds climbed from the streets below into the courts above.

70 CE and what was left standing

The platform served its purpose for less than a century. In 70 CE, in the war that ended the great revolt against Rome, the legions under Titus took Jerusalem and burned the sanctuary; the buildings on the esplanade were thrown down and the priestly cult ended. This was the work of the Roman Empire at the height of the Flavian ascendancy, not of any earlier republican Rome — a distinction the ruined stones do not make but the record does. The retaining walls, however, were structural mass with nothing above them worth the labor of demolition, and they largely stood. The destruction that emptied Judaism of its altar left its outer foundations more or less intact. From that asymmetry — sanctuary gone, substructure surviving — everything the wall later became follows.

For the rabbinic tradition the catastrophe of 70 did not so much end the relation to the place as transform it. The Talmud and the midrashic literature that took shape in the centuries after the destruction read the loss of the Temple as a wound carried in the body of the people and recited in the liturgy: the daily prayers turned toward Jerusalem, the fast of the Ninth of Av and the weeks before it mourned the two destructions, and the hope of rebuilding became a fixed petition. The surviving walls gave that hope a physical edge to stand against. Over the medieval and early-modern centuries the western stretch — the side that lay nearest the inner sanctuary on the platform above — drew the mourning and the petition to itself, and became the customary place of Jewish prayer for restoration.

The grief in the older name

The European name Wailing Wall preserves that meaning exactly. It named the weeping, not the stone: travelers from Christendom found Jews gathered before the courses to lament the Temple, and the wall took its foreign label from the act performed there rather than from its construction. In Hebrew usage the older and plainer term is ha-Kotel ha-Ma’aravi, the Western Wall, a phrase that long predates the European one and appears already in the early medieval midrash. The two names mark two standpoints on the same masonry: one from outside, watching the grief; one from inside the tradition, naming the place.

Inside that tradition runs a claim the documentary record can report but cannot measure. The midrashic sources — the saying is given in the name of Rabbi Acha, a teacher of the fourth century, and preserved in collections such as Shemot Rabbah and Bamidbar Rabbah — hold that the Shekhinah, the indwelling divine presence, never departs the western wall. In its original setting the phrase referred to a wall of the sanctuary itself; later usage carried it to the surviving retaining wall, so that the place came to be felt as keeping a nearness to God that the fall of the building did not sever. The presence stayed where the structure failed. The fuller theology of that presence — the Shekhinah read as the lowest of the divine emanations, the indwelling that goes into exile with the people and is gathered home in prayer — belongs to the kabbalists of Safed and to the wider currents of Jewish mysticism; here it is enough to note that the wall inherited a saying older than that systematization and gave it a local home.

The customs of the place

The practices that gather at the wall are practices of mourning turned toward hope. Worshippers come to read psalms before the stones, to recite the fixed prayers facing the place the Temple stood, and to keep the fasts that recall the destruction — above all the Ninth of Av, the midsummer fast on which both Temples are mourned together, when the plaza fills and the book of Lamentations is read low against the masonry. The same grief threads the ordinary year: the turn toward Jerusalem built into the daily liturgy finds at the wall a literal direction, the place the words have always meant. The custom for which the wall is most widely known is the writing of notes — small folded papers bearing petitions, pressed into the gaps between the ancient blocks. The practice is attested for centuries; one early witness, the pilgrim Gedaliah of Siemiatycze, recorded prayers written and left in the wall when he reached Jerusalem in 1699, and the habit has only grown, with more than a million notes placed in the joints each year and the gaps cleared and the papers buried, rather than discarded, when they fill. The architecture of the practice is simple and bodily: a written word, a chosen crevice, the stone closing over it. Beyond that description the operative content is the worshipper’s own. What gives the gesture its weight is the conviction the wall carries — that this particular stone is the nearest a petition can come to the place from which it was once answered.

Access to the place has not been continuous, and the wall’s modern history is bound up with the contests over the ground it abuts. Through long stretches under Ottoman and later rule, Jewish prayer at the wall was permitted but constrained, the narrow alley before it crowded and its use repeatedly disputed. From 1948 to 1967 the Old City lay under Jordanian control, and across those nineteen years — despite an armistice clause meant to guarantee it — Jews were in practice unable to reach the wall at all. In June 1967, on the third day of the war, Israeli paratroopers entered the Old City; the commander Mordechai Gur sent the signal that the Temple Mount was in their hands, and the alley before the wall was shortly cleared to make the wide plaza that stands there now. The wall as a modern Jewish prayer site at the present scale dates, in that sense, from a moment within living memory, laid over a devotion many centuries old.

A contested ground

The Western Wall does not stand alone. It is the outer western face of the same platform that Islam reveres as the Haram al-Sharif, the Noble Sanctuary, where the Dome of the Rock and the Al-Aqsa Mosque crown the esplanade above, and the masonry the worshipper touches at the bottom is continuous with the wall that carries those buildings at the top. The plaza below and the sanctuary above are claimed within distinct and weighty frames — Islam holds the precinct its third holiest place, the destination of the Night Journey; Judaism holds the platform the site of both Temples and the wall its nearest accessible point to the vanished Holy of Holies. Competing national and religious claims contend over the whole, and the wider dispute over the platform belongs properly to the Temple Mount and its administration rather than to the retaining wall as such. The wall’s own history is the narrower thread: a foundation that became a frontage, and a frontage that became a place of prayer.

Reading the stones: scholarship and the record

What can be established about the wall as a structure rests on a century and more of excavation along its exposed and buried length. The principal modern synthesis is the work of the archaeological architect Leen Ritmeyer, chief architect of the Temple Mount Excavations directed by Benjamin Mazar and of the Jewish Quarter Excavations directed by Nahman Avigad; his The Quest: Revealing the Temple Mount in Jerusalem (Carta, 2006), a four-hundred-and-forty-page reconstruction built from three decades of first-hand survey, works from the perimeter inward and treats the Western Wall as the best-preserved segment of the Herodian retaining system. The Biblical Archaeology Society has published the fullest popular accounting of the tunnel survey, which traces the wall’s full height through the courses hidden behind the later city: in the northern run the masonry rises through roughly forty-five courses, of which a minority stand above the present ground and the majority lie buried, including the giant Western Stone. The contrast with the plaza is instructive — there only seven Herodian courses are visible, seventeen more lie below the modern surface, and above the ancient work sit later additions: a band of large Umayyad stones from around 700 CE and, higher still, the small stones of the medieval and Ottoman repairs.

The textual side of the record is older and of a different kind. The mourning that fixed the wall as a place of prayer is documented in pilgrim accounts and in the rabbinic literature surveyed by reference works such as My Jewish Learning, which traces the names — Kotel, Western Wall, Wailing Wall — and the midrashic saying about the Shekhinah to their sources. Between the two bodies of evidence lies the wall’s peculiar doubleness: the archaeology can date a course and weigh a stone and tell a retaining wall from a sanctuary, while the tradition reads the same masonry as the last edge of a holiness that the destruction could not reach. The radar can measure the Western Stone; it cannot weigh what is pressed into the gaps above it. The wall holds both at once — a foundation whose engineering is fully legible, and a presence the chisel never touched, each addressed to the same stone and neither reducible to the other.

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