Tag: Herod’s Temple

Somewhere on Jerusalem’s majestic Temple Mount—the largest man-made platform in the ancient world, the size of 24 football fields, nearly 145 acres—Herod the Great (37–4 B.C.) built a new Temple to the Israelite God Yahweh, doubtless on the very spot where the exiles returning from Babylonia more than 500 years earlier had rebuilt the original Temple, first erected in the tenth century B.C. by King Solomon. It is well known that Herod the Great approximately doubled the size of the Temple Mount by extending the earlier Temple Mount on the north, south and west. He could not extend it on the east because the land drops off steeply to the Kidron Valley beyond the wall on that side.