The Temple Mount is a large, raised courtyard where the Jewish Temple stood in Jesus’ time. It occupies the southeast corner of Jerusalem’s old city, as shown above, and is sacred ground for Jews, Christians, and Muslims. Today, the compound is known as the Haram esh-Sharif (“Noble Sanctuary”), and holds the Islamic shrine, the Dome of the Rock, which is covered in gold leaf like Notre Dame’s golden dome.

Beneath the courtyard shown above is buried a hill that held a large and significant rock outcropping. Tradition holds that this is the place where Abraham prepared to sacrifice his son, Isaac. King Solomon built a Temple there to hold the Ark of the Covenant, which contained the stone tablets of the Ten Commandments, and the site was the center of Jewish worship for more than 500 years.

In 19 BC, Herod the Great used 10,000 workers to greatly expand the courtyard around the Temple, doubling its footprint. He did so by leveling the space around the Temple—cutting into the hill behind it and filling in the valley in front of it. Workers built large retaining walls (some of the stones weigh 80 tons) around the hill and filled in the empty space with dirt and rock. The courtyard that resulted is still visible and covers 36 acres. The image below shows a model of what Herod’s reconstruction, known as the “Second Temple,” looked like—this is how the space would have appeared in Jesus’ time.

The raised, white building in the center held the inner sanctuary of the Temple—the Holy of Holies. Within the colonnades around the edges of the courtyard stood vendors selling animals for sacrifice and other goods. Because Roman money had an image of Cesar on it, it was considered a graven image and could not be used in the Temple, so there were stations in the bazaar for people to change their Roman coins into shekels for the Temple tax. 

There was a whole economy within and surrounding the Temple, especially for the provision of animals for sacrifice. Because sacrificial animals had to be unblemished, it was too risky for pilgrims to bring a lamb or ox with them from far away—there was a chance it would be injured on the journey and rendered unfit. So they brought money and bought one near the Temple. (In fact, when a lamb intended for sacrifice was born, it was bound tightly to protect its limbs—in effect, it was “swaddled,” which puts new imagery on the story of the birth of Jesus, the Lamb of God.)

Filled with people and animals, one can imagine the Temple Mount to be a bustling, busy, noisy space. The Second Temple was one of the wonders of the ancient world, and there are accounts of people visiting Jerusalem just to see it.

Recent Archeological digs have uncovered a set of stone steps on the south side of the Mount (on the left side of the model shown above) that would have been used by people entering the Temple area at the time of Jesus. It is very likely that Mary and Joseph used these steps to take Jesus to the Temple as a child—probably carrying him when he was too small, and frantically rushing up them to search for him when they lost track of him here when he was a boy. Jesus and his disciples would have walked these very steps as they went to the Temple to worship.

To quash a Jewish rebellion, Romans destroyed this Second Temple in 70 AD, tossing down all the stones, walls, and structures that stood atop the courtyard. The image hereshows some of that wreckage uncovered in an archeological site on the southern side of the Temple Mount.

Though the courtyard remained, the Temple was never rebuilt. After destroying the Temple, Romans constructed a temple to Jupiter on the site; later, Christians of the Roman Empire disregarded the whole Temple Mount in favor of the Holy Sepulcher.

Invading Muslims replaced the Roman temple there with a shrine to mark the place where the prophet Muhammad ascended to heaven with the angel Gabriel in his famous Night Journey. After Mecca and Medina, the Dome of the Rock is the third most important shrine in Islam. The Dome of the Rock encloses the Foundation Stone (pictured here) which is where Muhammad prayed—the same rock where Abraham sacrificed a ram instead of his son, where the Ark of the Covenant was kept, and where the high priests met with God in the Holy of Holies.

The Western Wall—a specially designated space on the external wall supporting the Temple Mount—is one of the most sacred sites for the Jewish people, but only because of its proximity to the site where the Temple used to stand. At the time of Jesus, there was nothing significant about Western Wall—it was simply one of the large retaining walls holding up the Temple courtyard. Now that the Temple is gone, though, it is the closest Jews can get to the location of the Holy of Holies. Jews are not permitted to pray atop the Haram esh-Sharif, and many refuse to go there for fear of treading on a place that used to hold the Holy of Holies.

Jewish people of many different movements come to the Western Wall to pray and study the Torah. The experience is—all at once—prayerful, social, and studious. The plaza around the Western Wall is full of desks and books and all kinds of people. Many leave notes and prayers tucked into the cracks between the stones of the wall. The place used to be known as the Wailing Wall because it was where Jews lamented the destruction of the Temple. The beginning of Sabbath every week is a particularly busy time around the Wall as Jews gather to usher in the day of rest. They sing and dance, congregate and talk, study and pray.

We typically think of walls as things that divide, but the Western Wall holds something up—it is both a retaining wall that supports the Temple Mount, and it also holds the tradition and hopes and longing of the Jewish people.