Bible Synapse
Trumpeting Place inscription
Inscription · 1st century AD, before AD 70 · Time of Jesus
See it on the map and timeline
- Date
- 1st century AD, before AD 70 (the stone's carving)
- Found
- Below the south-west corner of the Temple Mount, Jerusalem. Found in Benjamin Mazar's excavations beside the Temple Mount walls, which began in 1968, on the paved street below the corner from which it is thought to have fallen.
- Now
- Israel Museum, Jerusalem
- Passages
- Matthew 24:1–2, Mark 13:1–2
What it is
A large stone block, thought to come from the top of the Temple Mount's south-west corner, carved in Hebrew square script. Only the beginning survives: “to the place of trumpeting”, followed by the first letters of a third word that scholars complete in different ways, such as “to declare” or “to distinguish”. Josephus says a priest stood at this point at the start and end of each Sabbath and sounded a trumpet to announce it.
How it connects to the Bible
The stone marked the spot from which priests signalled the Sabbath to the city below, a Temple custom in the time of Jesus. It seems to have fallen when the Temple was destroyed in AD 70, one of the many Temple Mount stones whose fall fits Jesus' warning that “there shall not be left here one stone upon another”.
What scholars debate
The missing end of the text, and the exact place on the wall where the stone stood, are matters of reconstruction.