Richard Nowitz

Where Solomon’s Temple stood in Jerusalem. Somewhere near the place where the golden Dome of the Rock mosque now stands, Solomon built the First Temple. Along the steep slope, covered here in spring green, Solomon constructed a retaining wall and then piled earth behind it to support the eastern side of the rectangular platform on which the Temple stood. Solomon’s Temple was destroyed in 587 B.C. by the Babylonians. But did Nebuchadnezzar’s forces also demolish the wall along the eastern valley? At the base of this wall, 107 feet from the southeast corner of the Temple Mount, is a clear joining of two kinds of stones. To the left of the joint is the extension of the eastern wall built by Herod the Great in the first century B.C., when he enlarged the platform and rebuilt the Second Temple, originally constructed by the resuming exiles. To the right of the joint are distinctly different stones which the author says are likely to be some of the very stones that Solomon first placed there in the tenth century B.C.