Bible Synapse
Western Wall and Herod's Temple Mount
Site · c. 19 BC – 1st century AD · Time of Jesus · also called Western Wall, Wailing Wall, Kotel
See it on the map and timeline
- Date
- c. 19 BC – 1st century AD (Herod's enlargement of the Temple Mount)
- Found
- Old City of Jerusalem. The upper courses have always stood above ground. Excavations by Benjamin Mazar from 1968, and by the Israel Antiquities Authority since the 1990s, exposed the foundations and the paved street along the foot of the wall.
- Now
- At the site
- Passages
- John 2:19–21, Mark 13:1–2, Luke 21:5–6
What it is
The western retaining wall of the vast platform that Herod the Great began to build around the Jerusalem Temple in about 19 BC. The lowest seven courses above today's ground are Herodian, made of large dressed limestone blocks, and one stone further north, near Wilson's Arch, is about 13.5 metres long. Coins found in 2011 in a filled-in ritual bath under the wall's foundations, near Robinson's Arch, were struck in AD 17/18, so that part was still being built some twenty years after Herod died.
How it connects to the Bible
This is the Temple Mount on which the Gospels set Jesus' teaching in Jerusalem. The disciples' remark, “see what manner of stones and what buildings are here!”, fits blocks of this size. The long building works also fit the comment in John 2 that the Temple had been “forty and six years” in building.
What scholars debate
The 2011 coin find suggests the south-western part of the wall was finished after Herod's death, as Josephus implies; some scholars question how far this applies to the whole wall.