Book review: “The Temple of Jerusalem” by Simon Goldhill

For a building that has been gone for nearly 2,000 years, the Temple of Jerusalem remains a surprisingly vibrant presence and a resonant symbol in world culture today.

And also, at times, a bitter flashpoint.

As Simon Goldhill explains in his 2004 book The Temple of Jerusalem, the spot that the Temple occupied in Jerusalem is sacred to three major world religions: Judaism, Christianity and Islam.

The Temple was the central axis of the Jewish faith until the building was razed to the ground and the land plowed under by the Roman military commander Titus in August of 70 AD. It was the final assault of a campaign to end a Jewish rebellion, the first of what would turn out to be three revolts over a period of seventy years.

The Temple…was the largest and most awe-inspiring religious monument in the world. It glittered with gold and shining white stone, and is magnificence staggered even the hard-nosed Titus, the future Emperor of Rome.

The Temple was a place of sacrifice — the slaughter of sheep and other creatures — in praise of the divinity, the only place for such rituals.

“Noise and smell”

In The Temple of Jerusalem, Goldhill is deft at detailing the physical dimensions of the structure and the rituals it hosted. And, at times, he is able to make the place tangible, such as its “overpowering smell.”  He writes:

It would have been a heady mixture of incense (which was burnt on a small altar), together with the distinctive odors of fresh blood, slaughtered carcasses, animal dung, roasting meat and, no doubt, the smell of the crowd, all exacerbated by the heat of the sun in the open-air courts…

The noise and smell of slaughtering, skinning and roasting thousands of animals, with the detritus of hides and bones and dung, in the dazzle of the reflected light from the Temple’s gold and polished stone walls, would have assaulted the senses.

 

Prayer and study become the new Temple

The Temple was the center of Judaism and its anchor. So, when it was destroyed and erased, the Jewish people were forced to evolve a new form of belief.

After the destruction of the Temple, not only did a new religious expression of Judaism come about, but also a new sense of the religious self.

The role of the rabbis is integral to this development of what it means to be a Jew — and the notion of rabbi also changed fundamentally in this period.

No longer did the faith have a geographical center. Instead, each synagogue served that role, and, instead of sacrifice, the ideal of belief was prayer and the study of the Talmud and related writings.

As the synagogue became the hub of public religious expression, prayer became increasingly extended, significant — and discussed…

Prayer replaces sacrifice as the key form of communication with God, but the Talmud makes prayer a subject for highly involved discussion too.

Studying the Talmud, Goldhill writes, is a way to remember the Temple, to keep the Temple alive as a place, if even only in the mind. And this “became an integral part of the self-definition of rabbinical Judaism…The Temple became a monument to the imagination.”

 

“Destroy this temple”

For Christianity, the Temple was where Jesus, an observant Jew, preached and took part in religious rituals and, in a fit of righteous anger, threw the money changers from its precincts. As the author of the Gospel of John reports:

Making a whip of cords, he drove all of them out of the temple, both the sheep and the cattle. He also poured out the coins of the money changers and overturned their tables.

He told those who were selling the doves, “Take these things out of here! Stop making my Father’s house a marketplace!” (John 2: 15-16)

When he was asked what authority he had for doing this, Jesus said, “Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up.”

While that dumbfounded his questioners, he wasn’t referring to the grand and imposing religious structure but to his own body.  Goldhill writes:

This prophecy sees the architectural Temple replaced by Jesus himself. Indeed, what the Hebrew Bible says about the foundation of the Temple is applied throughout the Gospels to the figure of Jesus Christ: it is through Jesus that man will now experience the presence of God.

 

New Temples

Jesus isn’t only the new Temple; he is also the Sacrificial Lamb whose sacrifice on the cross redeems all of humanity and eliminates the need for any other bloody rituals.

Meanwhile, in his epistle, Paul scolded the Corinthians for their sexual sins and wrote:

“Or do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, which you have from God, and that you are not your own? For you were bought with a price; therefore glorify God in your body.” (1 Corinthians 6:19-20)

So, Jesus’s body replaces the Temple and his sacrifice replaces those that took place in the Temple. And, instead of going to the Temple for purification rites, Christians are told they are responsible for their own purity.

 

The Dome of the Rock

The roots of Islam are in Judaism and Christianity. Abraham is the father of Muslims, and Jesus is recognized as a prophet.

The site of the Temple is now occupied by the Dome of the Rock, a sacred Muslim structure originally built in 691 that dominates the Jerusalem skyline and is covered with beautiful mosaic tiles with a twentieth-century restored roof of a glittering alloy that sparkles in bright daylight like gold.

The Rock itself is honored as the spot of three famous moments of the Hebrew scriptures; it is the altar of Solomon, the site of the binding of Isaac, and the place where King David asked God forgiveness of his sins.

 

The night journey

But the Dome of the Rock was built to commemorate the night journey of Mohammed.

As Goldhill relates, the story of the night journey begins with the angel Gabriel coming to a sleeping Mohammed in Mecca, taking out his heart, purifying it and “filling the cavity with faith and science.”

He kicks Mohammed awake, takes him to Jerusalem where he finds Abraham, Moses, Jesus and the company of prophets. And he rises from the Temple Mount to the seventh heaven to the seat of God.

The grotto under the rock itself shows where the rock tried to rise with Mohammed to heaven, as the indentation on top of the rock shows where Mohammed’s foot kept it attached to the earth.

 

The clash of cultures

Early on in The Temple of Jerusalem, Goldhill makes the point that the history of the Temple has always been a history of the clashing of cultures.

It is the clash of monotheistic Jewry with the surrounding tribes and religions, and with its own non-monotheistic elements; the clash of the Roman Empire and the rebellious Jews; the clash of militant Christians with Romans and with Jews; and it is the clash between the new religion of Islam and the traditions of Christianity and Judaism. Today we must add the clash between secularism and religion itself.

Fighting over Jerusalem has occurred for hundreds of years, and, even though the Temple has been gone for nearly two millenniums, the site and the ideas the site embodies have inspired generations of people and sparked conflict after conflict.

 

“A long history of longing and grief”

As Goldhill writes in the opening pages of his book:

The Temple is never just a destroyed building. It has become the most potent symbol of the human search for a lost ideal, an image of former greatness and greatness to come.

And he returns to the subject at the end:

Because the Temple Mount is so charged a religious site, the wars that have been fought for it make every fight more than a battle for control…

The Temple remains a symbol that goes to the heart of current Middle Eastern politics and is as bitterly contested now in the twenty-first century as at any point in its long history.

And he adds that engaging with the Temple is “to engage with a long history of longing and grief, fantasy and power, artistic dreams and political machinations.”

It may no longer exist.  But it does. And it will.

 

Patrick T. Reardon

6.15.26