The First and
Second Temples

A specific building, on a specific site

The Temple.

The written record places the First Temple’s construction under King Solomon around 957 BCE, on the elevated platform now called the Temple Mount. The platform, enlarged under Herod to the size it still has, is a roughly 36-acre site in the southeast quadrant of what is today the walled Old City of Jerusalem. The Temple stood for approximately 370 years. In 586 BCE, Nebuchadnezzar II of Babylon besieged Jerusalem, destroyed the Temple, burned the city, and deported much of the population to Babylonia. The exile left a cultural mark that outlived it: Psalm 137, written in its memory, opens “By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yea, we wept, when we remembered Zion,” a line still sung and quoted today.

The Second Temple was built on the same site after an edict of Cyrus the Great, recorded in the Book of Ezra, permitted the exiles to return. An altar came first. Then, after a long stall, the building itself was raised in earnest from 520 BCE and completed around 516 BCE. It stood, modestly at first and then magnificently, for nearly six centuries. In 167 BCE the Seleucid king Antiochus IV, the Greek-speaking ruler of Syria, outlawed Jewish practice, and his officers set up “the abomination of desolation upon the altar” (1 Maccabees 1:54). The Maccabees, a priestly family that led the Jewish revolt, retook the Temple and rededicated it in 164 BCE with eight days of celebration (1 Maccabees 4:52–56), the origin of the festival of Hanukkah. In 63 BCE Rome conquered the region and ruled it through client kings. Beginning around 20 BCE, Herod the Great, the king Rome installed over Judea, expanded the platform to roughly its current dimensions. He rebuilt the Temple in white limestone and surrounded the complex with massive retaining walls cut from Jerusalem stone. His heirs carried the project on until about 64 CE, decades after his death. The result was one of the largest religious complexes in the ancient world.

The Temple was the center of Israelite and then Jewish worship. Priests offered sacrifices there every day (Numbers 28:3). Three times a year, at the festivals of Passover, Shavuot, and Sukkot, the Torah commands all men to appear “in the place that [God] will choose” (Deuteronomy 16:16). In the First Temple, by the account of 1 Kings 8:6, the innermost room, the Holy of Holies, held the Ark of the Covenant. The high priest entered it once a year, on the Day of Atonement, Yom Kippur (Leviticus 16). After the Ark was lost, the Mishnah records, a bare rock stood in the room, called the Foundation Stone (Mishnah Yoma 5:2).

In 70 CE, after a four-year revolt against Roman rule, Titus’s legions besieged Jerusalem, broke through the walls, and destroyed the Second Temple. The plundered Temple treasures, the menorah, the showbread table, the silver trumpets, were carried back to Rome in triumph and are depicted on the Arch of Titus, which still stands today on the Via Sacra. Josephus says Vespasian displayed them in his Temple of Peace. Their final fate is unknown.

Object Spotlight

The menorah on the Arch of Titus.

Look at the carving before you place it. A crowd of men strain forward under a heavy load, caught mid-march. Above their shoulders rises a giant lampstand with seven branches, and beside it a table and a pair of long trumpets. The stone is worn smooth and lit gold by the sun. It reads as a parade: people carrying treasure through a street, showing it off.

That is exactly what it is: the enemy’s victory photo, in marble. This is a relief (a scene carved into stone so the figures stand out from the background). It is cut into the inside wall of the Arch of Titus, a giant stone gateway the Romans built in their own capital soon after 70 CE. They built it to celebrate destroying Jerusalem and burning down the Temple. The objects the carved soldiers are hauling are the real treasures looted from inside that Temple: the golden menorah (the seven-branched lamp that stood in the holy place), the table for the sacred bread, and the silver trumpets. Rome was so proud of the conquest it carved the stolen holy objects onto a monument for everyone to walk under.

This relief is a witness from the other side. The people who destroyed the Temple carved a detailed picture of its contents, within living memory of the event, to celebrate taking them. The Jewish historian Josephus, writing in Rome a few years after the triumph, describes the same procession. He lists “the golden table, of the weight of many talents,” the golden lampstand, and, “the last of all the spoils,” a copy of “the Law of the Jews” (Jewish War 7.5.5). The relief is the best-known ancient image of the objects from the Second Temple, carved for the army that carried them off.

Look closer at the menorah itself. The carving is so detailed that for centuries it has been studied as evidence of what the real Temple menorah looked like.

The image had a long afterlife. The Temple was gone and its treasures were hauled to Rome and lost, but the image on the arch survived. When the modern State of Israel chose its official emblem in 1949, it chose the menorah from the Arch of Titus, lifting the lamp straight off the Roman victory monument and making it the seal of a Jewish state. By long tradition, Jews in Rome avoided walking under the arch. After the United Nations voted for a Jewish state on November 29, 1947, Rome’s Jews gathered at the arch and walked through it the other way. Some accounts place that walk after the founding of Israel in 1948.

The Western Wall

Not the Temple, but the retaining wall of its platform.

No part of the Temple building itself is known to survive. Of Herod’s massive retaining walls around the platform, sections survive, most prominently a 187-foot exposed segment of the western retaining wall, which has been known for centuries as the Western Wall (Hebrew: HaKotel HaMa’aravi, “the Western Wall”). In English it has also been called the Wailing Wall. Muslims know it as the al-Buraq Wall, after the steed that, in Islamic tradition, carried the Prophet Muhammad on his Night Journey and was tethered there.

An important distinction, often confused: the Western Wall is not a remnant of the Temple itself. The Temple, the actual sanctuary, was destroyed completely. The Western Wall is a section of the retaining wall that Herod built to hold up the expanded Temple Mount platform. It is the most accessible place near the site of the destroyed Temple where Jews can pray freely at any hour. For centuries, that adjacency has made it the most important Jewish prayer site in the world after the Temple Mount itself.

Israel’s founding war ended with the Old City in the hands of neighboring Jordan. From 1948 to 1967 the Western Wall stood in Jordanian-controlled East Jerusalem, and Jews were barred from it. On June 7, 1967, during the Six-Day War, Israeli forces reached the wall for the first time in nineteen years. Photographs from that morning, paratroopers leaning their helmets against the stone, became some of the most reproduced images in modern Israeli history. Within days, the Israeli authorities demolished the Moghrabi (Moroccan) Quarter, a neighborhood that had stood in front of the Wall since the fourteenth century, and cleared the open plaza that stands there today. The site became a national pilgrimage destination.

The significance of the site to Jews today

Three concrete continuities.

First, the direction of prayer. From antiquity, and by tradition since the Babylonian exile, Jewish prayer has been oriented toward Jerusalem and specifically toward the Temple Mount. A Jew praying in New York faces east and a Jew praying in Tehran faces west, by conventions that all point the same way: toward Jerusalem. The orientation of the synagogue ark (the cabinet holding the Torah scrolls) is traditionally set by it.

Second, the liturgical calendar. The Jewish year contains several fasts and festivals that explicitly commemorate the Temple’s destruction. The most central is Tisha B’Av, the ninth day of the Hebrew month of Av, traditionally the date of both Temples’ destruction. It is observed by a full 25-hour fast and the reading of the Book of Lamentations. The three weeks leading up to Tisha B’Av are themselves a period of restricted mourning. The destruction is referenced in the standard daily liturgy, in the Grace After Meals, and at traditional Jewish weddings, where the glass broken underfoot came to be read as mourning for it, even at the moment of greatest joy.

Third, visiting the site. The Temple Mount itself today is administered as an Islamic religious site by the Jordanian Waqf, an Islamic religious trust, and Israeli police restrict the hours when non-Muslims may visit. On Jewish holidays the Western Wall plaza below can hold tens of thousands. The Wall itself is open twenty-four hours a day, every day of the year, with no entry fee. It is among the most visited Jewish religious sites in the world.

Notes in the Wall. Visitors place folded paper notes containing prayers, personal requests, and the names of people who are ill or in need into the gaps between the ancient stones. People who cannot travel to Jerusalem send their notes by mail, fax, email, and online forms. The rabbi of the Western Wall arranges for the notes to be placed in the Wall on their behalf, free of charge, from anywhere in the world. The notes are periodically removed when the gaps fill up and are buried with religious respect on the Mount of Olives.

The Temple Mount today

What stood where.

An aerial view of the Temple Mount makes the relationship between the destroyed Temple, the still-standing retaining walls, and the present-day architecture concrete. The platform is the same platform Herod built. The perimeter walls are mostly the same walls. The buildings on top changed.

Five landmarks on and around the platform:

• ★ The Holy of Holies of the Second Temple stood approximately where the Dome of the Rock (the gold-domed octagonal shrine at the platform’s center) now stands. The Dome was completed in 691–692 CE under the Umayyad Caliph Abd al-Malik. The exact correspondence between the Dome and the location of the Holy of Holies is debated. Historians do not doubt that the Temple stood on this platform.
• Al-Aqsa Mosque: the lead-domed building at the southern end of the platform, near where the Second Temple’s Royal Stoa, the great columned hall at the platform’s southern end, stood.
• The Western Wall: visible along the lower-left edge of the platform. The 187-foot exposed segment is part of the retaining wall Herod began about 20 BCE. It is not part of the Temple itself.
• Robinson’s Arch: the surviving springer of an arch on the western wall that carried a monumental stairway up from the street below to the Royal Stoa. Excavated and visible in the Jerusalem Archaeological Park today.
• The Mount of Olives: the ridge east of the platform, facing it across the Kidron Valley, holding the great Jewish cemetery and centuries of pilgrimage.

What stood there before

The Second Temple of Herod.

The platform that holds the Dome of the Rock today is the same platform the Second Temple stood on. The clearest way to picture what occupied that space before 70 CE is through reconstructions built from the archaeological record and from the detailed account of the first-century historian Flavius Josephus, who saw the building before it was destroyed.

What is there now, and why

The buildings on top changed.

From the Roman destruction of the Temple in 70 CE to the Arab conquest of Jerusalem in 638 CE (five and a half centuries), the Temple Mount platform was left mostly as ruin. Under Hadrian, the Romans, by the account of the historian Cassius Dio, planned a temple to Jupiter on the site around 130 CE, a step Dio counts among the causes of the revolt that followed. Where that temple actually stood is debated, since the platform has never been excavated. After the empire became Christian in the fourth century, the Byzantines, the Christian empire that continued Roman rule in the east, left the site desolate. Christian tradition read the ruin as fulfillment of Jesus’s words about the Temple: “There shall not be left here one stone upon another, that shall not be thrown down” (Matthew 24:2). In 363 CE the emperor Julian, who had turned away from Christianity, ordered the Temple rebuilt. The Roman historian Ammianus Marcellinus, an officer of Julian’s, records that “terrifying balls of flame kept bursting forth near the foundations of the temple,” and “the enterprise halted.” Later Muslim accounts of the conquest describe the platform as a refuse heap when Caliph Umar arrived in 638 CE.

The Dome of the Rock (691 CE). The Dome was built under Abd al-Malik, caliph (ruler of the Islamic empire) of the Umayyad dynasty, about half a century after the Arab conquest. It is the oldest surviving major work of Islamic architecture and one of the most architecturally accomplished. Its position is significant. Islamic tradition holds that the rock beneath the dome, the same rock at the platform’s center, is the site of Muhammad’s Night Journey (Isra and Mi’raj), traditionally dated to about 621 CE. He is said to have ascended through the heavens from this place. Jewish tradition holds the same rock to be the Even ha-Shetiyah, the Foundation Stone, the spiritual center of the universe in rabbinic literature, and the location of the Holy of Holies of the Temple. Both traditions converge on the same stone. The architectural form of the Dome (octagonal plan, gilded dome over a central rotunda) was modeled on the Christian memorial shrine-churches of the era (martyria, churches built over holy sites). It is a shrine over the rock, not a congregational mosque.

Al-Aqsa Mosque (c. 705 CE). Built under Abd al-Malik’s son al-Walid I about fifteen years after the Dome, Al-Aqsa is the working congregational mosque of the Temple Mount complex. The name Al-Aqsa (“the farthest”) derives from the Qur’an’s reference to the “farthest mosque” Muhammad reached during the Night Journey (Qur’an 17:1). Together with Mecca (Masjid al-Haram) and Medina (Masjid al-Nabawi), the Al-Aqsa precinct is one of the three holiest sites in Islam.

The Crusader century (1099–1187). When the First Crusade took Jerusalem in 1099, the Dome of the Rock was converted into a Catholic church (the Templum Domini, “Temple of the Lord”). Al-Aqsa became the headquarters of the Knights Templar, whose name derives from the building they occupied. The Crusaders added a cross to the Dome and a Christian altar inside. When Saladin retook Jerusalem in 1187, he removed the Christian alterations and restored both buildings to Islamic use. The Mamluk sultans, the Muslim dynasty ruling from Egypt (1250–1517, masters of this land from 1260), renovated the complex extensively and built most of the surviving fountains and madrasas (religious schools) around the platform’s edges.

The 1948–1967 prohibition. Between Israel’s founding war in 1948 and the Six-Day War in 1967, the entire Old City, including the Temple Mount and the Western Wall, was under Jordanian control. The 1949 armistice agreement called for a committee to arrange “free access to the Holy Places and cultural institutions and use of the cemetery on the Mount of Olives.” Jews were never granted access. Jordan’s Arab Legion destroyed the Hurva Synagogue in the Jewish Quarter. Tombstones from the Jewish cemetery on the Mount of Olives were taken for military fortifications and road building. An Israeli government report in 1967 described the cemetery as almost totally destroyed.

1967 to the present. After Israel took the Old City on June 7, 1967, the Israeli government made a controversial decision. It left administration of the Temple Mount platform to the Jordanian-administered Waqf (Islamic religious endowment), rather than placing it under Israeli or Jewish religious authority. The Western Wall plaza was rebuilt as a national gathering place, and it is administered by the Israeli government and the Western Wall Heritage Foundation. The Temple Mount platform itself follows a status-quo arrangement. Non-Muslims may visit during restricted hours, entering by the Mughrabi Bridge. Non-Muslim prayer on the platform is officially prohibited, a rule increasingly tested in recent years. The Waqf manages religious matters. Traditional Jewish religious authorities, across most Orthodox movements, likewise rule against Jewish visitors ascending the platform, on different grounds. They are concerned that a visitor might walk unknowingly over the former site of the Holy of Holies, which only the High Priest could enter, and only once a year. The two prohibitions, religious and political, long produced the same result. The Wall below remains continuously accessible to anyone, every day of the year.

The evidence: why this place, why this rock

Four lines of evidence converge.

The construction of the Dome of the Rock in 691–692 CE is one of the best-documented architectural decisions in early Islamic history, because the building itself documents it. Four lines of evidence bear on why the Umayyad caliph Abd al-Malik built where and what he built: the inscriptions on the Dome, the geographer al-Muqaddasi’s testimony, the architectural plan, and the choice of the rock at the platform’s center.

1. The Dome’s own inscriptions. A 240-meter band of Kufic script runs along the top of both sides of the octagonal arcade inside the Dome. The dedicatory text is dated AH 72, the year 691–692 CE. It named Abd al-Malik as patron until the Abbasid caliph al-Ma’mun overwrote that name with his own in the early ninth century, leaving the original date in place. The inscriptions on the inner arcade contain some of the earliest dated Qur’anic verses surviving anywhere in the world. Much of their content concerns the nature of Jesus. They cite verses stating that Jesus is a messenger of God and not God’s son, and rejecting the Trinity. The Israeli historian S.D. Goitein, working at the Hebrew University, argued that the inscriptions form a deliberate theological argument addressed to Christians.

The text of the inscriptions is preserved in scholarly publications and partially visible in high-resolution photographs of the interior. Representative passages from the inner-arcade band follow, drawn from the established scholarly editions (van Berchem, Matériaux pour un Corpus Inscriptionum Arabicarum, 1927; Grabar, The Shape of the Holy, 1996). Most are Qur’anic verses, addressed in part to Christians, given here in a modern English rendering:

“There is no god but God alone. He has no associate. Muhammad is the Messenger of God.”

“O People of the Book, do not exaggerate in your religion, and do not say of God anything but the truth. The Messiah, Jesus, son of Mary, was only a messenger of God, and His word that He cast unto Mary, and a spirit from Him. So believe in God and His messengers, and do not say ‘Three.’ Cease, it is better for you. God is only one God. Glory be to Him above having a son. To Him belongs whatever is in the heavens and whatever is on earth.” (Qur’an 4:171)

“So peace upon him the day he was born, and the day he dies, and the day he is raised alive. That is Jesus, son of Mary, a statement of truth about which they doubt.” (Qur’an 19:33–34)

“It is not for God to take a son. Glory be to Him. When He decrees a matter, He only says to it, ‘Be,’ and it is.” (Qur’an 19:35)

These verses run around the inner arcade of a building completed in the late seventh century, on ground sacred to Jews, Christians, and Muslims.

2. Al-Muqaddasi’s testimony, c. 985 CE. The Jerusalem-born Muslim geographer Shams al-Din al-Muqaddasi, writing about three centuries after construction in his geographical treatise The Best Divisions for Knowledge of the Regions, records a conversation with his uncle about the great Umayyad buildings. Defending the caliph al-Walid’s costly mosque at Damascus, the uncle explained that Syria was full of Christian churches “so enchantingly fair, and so renowned for their splendour.” He then turned to Jerusalem: “is it not evident how the Caliph ’Abd al Malik, noting the greatness of the Dome of the [Holy Sepulchre] and its magnificence, was moved lest it should dazzle the minds of the Muslims, and hence erected above the Rock the Dome which now is seen there?” The passage records the uncle’s view that the Dome was built to rival the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. A much later Jerusalem historian, Mujir al-Din (writing about 1496), reports that Abd al-Malik was said to have spent seven years of Egypt’s revenue on the Dome and the Aqsa mosque.

3. The architectural plan. K.A.C. Creswell was the foundational scholar of early Islamic architecture. In Origin of the Plan of the Dome of the Rock (1924), he argued that the Dome’s builders took their interior measurements from the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. The octagonal plan with a central rotunda is a Byzantine Christian martyrium form. The Dome adopted the architectural vocabulary of the Christian buildings around it. Marble columns inside the Dome are spolia, reused from earlier Byzantine structures.

4. The choice of this rock. The exposed bedrock at the platform’s center (visible inside the Dome today, the same rock the building was constructed to enshrine) was not a neutral location. In Jewish tradition it is the Even ha-Shetiyah, the Foundation Stone. Rabbinic literature makes it the spiritual center of the universe, the location of the Holy of Holies in the destroyed Temple, and the rock from which the world was created. In Islamic tradition, the same rock came to be identified as the site of Muhammad’s Night Journey (Isra and Mi’raj), the place from which he ascended through the heavens. Scholars debate whether that link was made before or after the Dome was built. Many historians read the decision to build a costly Islamic monument directly over this rock as a deliberate religious and political statement, one that took up the older Jewish and Christian sanctity of the site and added an Islamic one.

The political context. Abd al-Malik built the Dome in the immediate aftermath of the Second Fitna, the civil war that had divided the early Islamic community for roughly twelve years (680–692 CE). His rival Ibn al-Zubayr had controlled Mecca and Medina during much of that period. The Dome’s construction in Jerusalem was completed in 692 CE, the same year Abd al-Malik’s forces finally took Mecca. Abbasid historiography, two centuries later, claimed Abd al-Malik intended to substitute Jerusalem for Mecca as the destination of the pilgrimage (hajj). Many modern scholars have rejected this claim as later anti-Umayyad polemic. A common reading instead treats the Dome, from its inscriptions, its design, and the account of the tenth-century geographer al-Muqaddasi, as a statement aimed at Christians and in support of the ruling Umayyad dynasty. Some scholars see further meanings. Most of these readings share two points: the Dome is a shrine rather than a congregational mosque, and its site was chosen with care.

Thirteen centuries later, the platform holds both records at once: the retaining wall of the Second Temple below, and the Dome of the Rock above.

Discussion questions

Working from the evidence.

Classroom Connections

Where this Chapter fits.

Teaching Connections

• World History & Belief Systems: Solomon’s Temple, the Babylonian destruction, the Persian return, and the Temple Mount as ground sacred to all three Abrahamic faiths.
• Ancient & Classical History: the Herodian Temple and the Roman destruction in 70 CE.
• World Religions: the Temple’s relationship to Christianity and Islam, and the Dome of the Rock.
• Art History & Archaeology: the Arch of Titus relief, the Western Wall, and the material record of the site.
• Geography: Jerusalem and the Temple Mount across the regimes that have held it.
• Historical Thinking: weighing a monument made by the enemy, and continuity of meaning at a contested site.

Standards Alignment

• NYS Global History & Geography: 9.2 (Belief Systems) and 9.3 (the classical world).
• Common Core ELA-Literacy: RH.6–8.2 and RH.9–10.2 (central ideas of a primary source): the Dome of the Rock inscription and al-Muqaddasi’s treatise.
• C3 Framework: Dimension 2 (D2.His.2, D2.His.5, D2.His.10, D2.His.14: evaluating sources, continuity and change, and perspectives).

Sources and citations

Primary sources

A primary source is a record from the time. It was made by people who were there. Examples: letters, diaries, photos, decrees, trial records, and newspapers.

• Library of Congress: The G. Eric and Edith Matson Photograph Collection of Palestine 1898–1946, with hundreds of high-resolution photographs of the Temple Mount, the Western Wall, and the Old City of Jerusalem.
• National Library of Israel: Hebrew manuscript collections, biblical commentaries, and the largest collection of Jewish historical documents in the world. Free English-language lesson plans for K–12 educators.
• The Hebrew University Institute of Archaeology: Ongoing excavation reports for sites in the Old City of Jerusalem, including the Jerusalem Archaeological Park (the southern wall excavations at the Temple Mount).
• Israel Antiquities Authority: Official authority over archaeological excavation in Israel, and custodian of the state’s archaeological collections, including primary material relating to the Second Temple.
• Flavius Josephus. The Jewish War and Jewish Antiquities, 1st century CE. The principal literary witness to the Second Temple and its destruction. The triumph in Rome is in Jewish War 7.5.5, Whiston translation, on the Perseus Digital Library.
• Ammianus Marcellinus. Res Gestae 23.1.2–3, late 4th century CE. Translated by J. C. Rolfe. (Julian’s attempt to rebuild the Temple in 363.) On LacusCurtius. Primary source.
• 1 Maccabees 1:54 and 4:52–56. (The desecration of the Temple in 167 BCE and its rededication in 164 BCE.) On Sefaria. Primary source.
• Mishnah Yoma 5:2. (The Foundation Stone in the Holy of Holies.) On Sefaria. Primary source.
• The New Testament, Matthew 24:2 (King James Version). Primary source.
• Israel–Jordan General Armistice Agreement, April 3, 1949, Article VIII. On Yale Law School’s Avalon Project. Primary source.
• The Temple Warning Inscription (the Soreg inscription), Second Temple period. Istanbul Archaeology Museums.
• The Hebrew Bible. 1 Kings 6–8 (Solomon’s Temple); 2 Kings 25 (Babylonian destruction); 2 Chronicles 36; Ezra 1–6 (return and rebuilding); Psalm 137; Leviticus 16 (the Day of Atonement); Numbers 28:3 (the daily offering); Deuteronomy 16:16 (the three pilgrimage festivals). Primary source.
• The Dome of the Rock dedicatory inscriptions, AH 72 (691–692 CE). Primary source.
• al-Muqaddasi, Shams al-Din. Aḥsan al-Taqāsīm fī Maʿrifat al-Aqālīm (The Best Divisions for Knowledge of the Regions), c. 985 CE. Translated edition by Basil Anthony Collins, Garnet Publishing, 1994. Primary source.
• Karo, Joseph. Shulchan Arukh, with the glosses of Moses Isserles, 16th century. Orach Chayim 94 (facing Jerusalem in prayer), 150:5 (setting the synagogue ark in the direction of prayer), and 560:2 (the cup broken at a wedding to remember Jerusalem). Primary source. Free at Sefaria.
• Josephus, The Jewish War 5.5.2 (the Temple’s warning pillars, “some in Greek, and some in Roman letters”). Trans. William Whiston. Perseus Digital Library. perseus.tufts.edu.
• “Cabinet Report Says Jordan Destroyed 56 Old City Synagogues, Desecrated Cemetery.” Jewish Telegraphic Agency, November 2, 1967. (The Israeli inter-ministerial report on the Jewish Quarter and the Mount of Olives cemetery.) jta.org.

Secondary sources

A secondary source was written later. It is a book or article by a historian who studied those records and explains what they mean.

• The Israel Museum, Jerusalem: The Holyland Model of Jerusalem (the 1:50 scale reconstruction of the city at the end of the Second Temple period) and the Bird’s Head Haggadah. The largest collection of Judaica and Holy Land archaeology in the world.
• Brooklyn Museum: James Tissot’s The Life of Our Lord Jesus Christ series, including the watercolor reconstruction of Jerusalem and the Temple of Herod (accession 00.159.6), accessible online with open-access digital images.
• Levine, Lee I. Jerusalem: Portrait of the City in the Second Temple Period (538 BCE to 70 CE). Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 2002.
• George Adam Smith, Atlas of the Historical Geography of the Holy Land (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1915), cartography by J. G. Bartholomew. Public domain. The two Jerusalem plans in this Chapter are from plates 47–48; the whole atlas is on the Internet Archive.
• Le Strange, Guy. Palestine under the Moslems: A Description of Syria and the Holy Land from A.D. 650 to 1500. London: Palestine Exploration Fund, 1890. English translations of the medieval Arab geographers and historians on Jerusalem, including al-Muqaddasi on why the Dome was built (pp. 117–118) and Mujir al-Din on the seven years of Egypt’s revenue (pp. 144, 164). The whole book is on the Internet Archive.
• Western Wall Heritage Foundation: The body that administers the Western Wall plaza, open to visitors all day, every day of the year. Its visitor pages describe the centuries-old tradition of prayer at the Wall. thekotel.org.
• Berkovits, Shmuel. “The Risk of Changing the Status Quo on the Temple Mount.” Strategic Assessment, Institute for National Security Studies, Tel Aviv, February 2025. The 1967 status quo (non-Muslims may visit but not pray), the Chief Rabbinate’s 1967 ruling against Jewish entry, and the recent erosion of the prayer ban. inss.org.il.
• “Titus, Arch of.” The Jewish Encyclopedia. New York: Funk & Wagnalls, 1901–1906. Records the Roman tradition that no Jew passed under the arch. jewishencyclopedia.com.
• Fine, Steven. “Hanukkah at the Arch of Titus.” Yeshiva University, December 2015. On the Jews of Rome marching through the arch in 1947 to celebrate the United Nations vote for a Jewish state. yu.edu.
• St. Laurent, Beatrice. “Preservation of Cultural Heritage in Jerusalem: The Tiles of the Dome of the Rock.” ACOR Newsletter 21.1, Summer 2009. Suleiman’s tile program of 1545–1585 and the replacement of the old tiles with new ones made in Istanbul in 1960–1961. acorjordan.org.
• Iliffe, J. H. “The ΘΑΝΑΤΟΣ Inscription from Herod’s Temple: Fragment of a Second Copy.” Quarterly of the Department of Antiquities in Palestine 6 (1936): 1–3. The report on the fragment of a second Temple warning inscription found in 1935 near the Lions’ Gate.
• “Western Wall.” Encyclopaedia Judaica, 2nd ed. Detroit: Macmillan Reference USA, 2007. encyclopedia.com. (The Muslim tradition of al-Buraq, the Moghrabi Quarter from the fourteenth century, and its demolition in June 1967.)
• The Temple Institute, “About Us.” templeinstitute.org. (The organization’s own statement of its goal of rebuilding the Temple.)
• Creswell, K.A.C. Origin of the Plan of the Dome of the Rock. London: British School of Archaeology in Jerusalem, 1924.
• Kessler, Christel. “’Abd al-Malik’s Inscription in the Dome of the Rock: A Reconsideration.” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, 1970.
• Goitein, S.D. “The Sanctity of Jerusalem and Palestine in Early Islam.” In Studies in Islamic History and Institutions. Leiden: Brill, 1966.
• Grabar, Oleg. The Shape of the Holy: Early Islamic Jerusalem. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996.

Finding these documents: many primary sources are free online. Good places to start are the Fordham Internet Jewish History Sourcebook, Yale’s Avalon Project (law and diplomacy), German History in Documents, the collections of the US Holocaust Memorial Museum and Yad Vashem, the National Library of Israel, and Sefaria (for Jewish texts). Search the document’s name and date.