Smith's Bible Dictionary.pdf - Online Christian Library

Smith's Bible Dictionary
of carved ornament, and the beauty of the textile fabrics, which made up their splendor and rendered
them so precious in the eyes of the people. TEMPLE OF Ezekiel.—The vision of a temple which
the prophet Ezekiel saw while residing on the banks of the Chebar in Babylonia, in the twenty-fifth
year of the captivity, does not add much to our knowledge of the subject. It is not a description of
a temple that ever was built or ever could be erected at Jerusalem, and can consequently only be
considered as the beau ideal of what a Shemitic temple ought to be. TEMPLE OF Herod.—Herod
the Great announced to the people assembled at the Passover, B.C. 20 or 19, his intention of restoring
the temple; (probably a stroke of policy on the part of Herod to gain the favor of the Jews and to
make his name great.) if we may believe Josephus, he pulled down the whole edifice to its
foundations, and laid them anew on an enlarged scale; but the ruins still exhibit, in some parts,
what seem to be the foundations laid by Zerubbable, and beneath them the more massive
substructions of Solomon. The new edifice was a stately pile of Graeco-Roman architecture, built
in white marble gilded acroteria . It is minutely described by Josephus, and the New Testament has
made us familiar with the pride of the Jews in its magnificence. A different feeling, however,
marked the commencement of the work, which met with some opposition from the fear that what
Herod had begun he would not be able to finish. he overcame all jealousy by engaging not to pull
down any part of the existing buildings till all the materials for the new edifice were collected on
its site. Two years appear to have been occupied in preparations—among which Josephus mentions
the teaching of some of the priests and Levites to work as masons and carpenters—and then the
work began. The holy “house,” including the porch, sanctuary and holy of holies, was finished in
a year and a half, B.C. 16. Its completion, on the anniversary of Herod’s inauguration, was celebrated
by lavish sacrifices and a great feast. About B.C. 9—eight years from the commencement—the
court and cloisters of the temple were finished, and the bridge between the south cloister and the
upper city (demolished by Pompey) was doubtless now rebuilt with that massive masonry of which
some remains still survive. (The work, however, was not entirely ended till A.D. 64, under Herod
Agrippa II. So the statement in (John 2:20) is correct.—Schaff.) The temple or holy “house” itself
was in dimensions and arrangement very similar to that of Solomon, or rather that of
Zerubbabel—more like the latter; but this was surrounded by an inner enclosure of great strength
and magnificence, measuring as nearly as can be made out 180 cubits by 240, and adorned by
porches and ten gateways of great magnificence; and beyond this again was an outer enclosure
measuring externally 400 cubits each way, which was adorned with porticos of greater splendor
than any we know of as attached to any temple of the ancient world. The temple was certainly
situated in the southwest angle of the area now known as the Haram area at Jerusalem, and its
dimensions were what Josephus states them to be—400 cubits, or one stadium, each way. At the
time when Herod rebuilt it, he enclosed a space “twice as large” as that before occupied by the
temple and its courts—an expression that probably must not be taken too literally at least, if we are
to depend on the measurements of Hecataeus. According to them, the whole area of Herod’s temple
was between four and five times greater than that which preceded it. What Herod did apparently,
was to take in the whole space between the temple and the city wall on its east side, and to add a
considerable space on the north and south to support the porticos which he added there. As the
temple terrace thus became the principal defence of the city on the east side, there were no gates
or openings in that direction, and being situated on a sort of rocky brow—as evidenced from its
appearance in the vaults that bounded it on this side—if was at all later times considered unattackable
from the eastward. The north side, too, where not covered by the fortress Antonia, became part of
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William Smith