According to the Bible, Solomon's Temple is located in Jerusalem, where the continents of Europe, Asia, and Africa meet.
In Jewish national legend, King Solomon was the son of King David. David once wanted to build a legendary temple, solomon, on top of Moriah Hill in Jerusalem. Before his death, King David provided the materials needed to build Solomon's temple, and King Solomon later supplemented with sufficient materials and drew up a plan for its construction.
According to the Bible, this temple is majestic from the top of the mountain, sitting west to east. The main wood used in the construction of the temple is precious woods such as cedar, pine and sandalwood. The timber was mainly harvested from Lebanon. The stone used to build the temple was chiseled directly from the mountain.
Illustration of solomon's temple
Solomon asked jehovah to "bring some cedar, pine, and sandalwood from Lebanon" and build temples from precious metals such as gold, silver, copper, and iron, and by carvers who were good at using purple, scarlet, and blue threads.
"Solomon built a temple, placed the beams of the cedar wood, and covered it with cedar planks. The side houses built against the temple, each floor is five cubits high, and the beams of cedar wood rest on the wall of the temple. ”
"The interior of the temple was covered with cedar wood, from the ground to the roof of the shed, covered with wooden planks, and paved with pine planks. The inner sanctum, the Holy of Holies, is twelve cubits long, from the ground to the roof of the shed, covered with cedar woodblocks. ”
Illustration of solomon's temple
According to the Bible, "The outer temple is not revealed at all of the stones, but is covered with cedar wood, and is inscribed with wild melons and flowers that have just bloomed." The inner sanctum was prepared for the Ark of the Lord. The walls of the inner nave are covered with fine gold. Solomon attached the walls of the temple with fine gold, and hung a gold chain on the front door of the inner temple, wrapped in gold. The whole hall was affixed with gold. The altar in front of the inner temple is also wrapped in gold. ”
In the courtyard outside the temple, there are also 100 pools of phnom penh planted with lotus flowers.
Illustration of solomon's temple
Legend has it that in 344 years after Solomon's death, the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar led his iron horse to capture Jerusalem. They burned the magnificent Great Temple with a single fire, and from then on, the once-prosperous Jerusalem was reduced to a charred ruin.
The descendants of the Jews, who had picked up the rubble all over the place, built a wall in place, and rebuilt the "Second Temple" here.
Hundreds of years later, the Second Temple was burned down by the Romans, and all that remained was this wall. For a long time, Jews exiled all over the world returned to this wall, which symbolized Jewish faith and suffering, and whispered prayers, mourning the glory of the nation and the vicissitudes of history, which later became known as the "Wailing Wall".
Wailing Wall
So, did solomon's temple really exist in history?
Given the size of Solomon's Temple and its remarkable location, if it really existed, there would have been foundations and other remains that biblical archaeologists would have discovered.
In 2015, Finkelstein, director of the Institute of Archaeology at Tel Aviv University in Israel, crushed the efforts of biblical archaeologists, saying that exhaustive excavations had found no signs of major structures or Solomon rule in Jerusalem.
In his essay Deconstructing the Walls of Jericho, the Israeli archaeologist Ze'ev Herzog called Solomon's Temple a religious legend to express jewish glory.
Traditionalists believe that Solomon's temple did exist, but due to the lack of conclusive archaeological evidence to support this claim, many modern researchers have come to different conclusions about King Solomon's life and his temple. Is the temple a symbol of something else? Perhaps a metaphor for the door of God? Perhaps there were many Solomon temples in the ancient world, when in fact the size and orientation of the temples mentioned in the Bible are only a profound geometric indication of the sacred.
Due to the lack of evidence, the existence of Solomon's Temple has until now been a controversial issue.
In the nearly 2,000 years after the destruction of the second temple, until the 19th century, there was no intention of building Solomon's Temple.
But that changed in the early 20th century.
The Zionist movement, launched in 1896 by the Hungarian journalist Herzl, proposed the establishment of a complete Jewish national state on Palestinian land. To this end, the movement claims the right to own Palestine and Jerusalem. He even said that Palestine is a land without people, waiting for a people without land.
This is actually an inaccurate statement. According to the 1922 census, there were about 25 inhabitants per square kilometre in Palestine at that time.
At the turn of the 20th century, under the influence of the Zionist movement in Europe, the idea of rebuilding Solomon's Temple began to be mentioned in Western newspapers.
Proponents of Solomon's Temple claim that the remains of the temple lie beneath the Al-Aqsa complex. The proposal to demolish the monastery has become a crazy idea of radical Zionists.
Because the Al-Aqsa complex is too sensitive and sacred, the consequences once demolished are unimaginable.