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Joh_2:20
The temple in which our Lord taught was substantially the work of Herod the Great.
This Herod was a very lax Jew; in fact, he was more than half a heathen. Or it might be more precise, if not more correct, to say, that he was one of those who could not sympathize in the feeling which made the Jews desirous to maintain themselves in the condition of a separate people; and which, indeed, had in his time risen, among the stricter sort, to a most arrogant pride in their own privileged state, and a most offensive and openly avowed abhorrence and scorn of all other nations. This fretted the mind of Herod, as it formed a stubborn barrier to many of his designs; for he mingled freely with Greeks and Romans, liked their manners, admired their institutions, and even looked upon their idolatry without repugnance. Hence he desired to assimilate the habits and customs of his subjects to theirs; and was continually irritated by the stubborn opposition he met with, and the odium which, on this account among others, he knew that he had incurred.
Herod was a man of magnificent tastes, and had a passion for building. Some towns were founded by him, and others restored or improved on a scale of great magnificence. He enriched Jerusalem and other towns with fine structures: he built palaces, he erected towers, he constructed moles on the coast, he established strong fortresses. All this afforded no ground of offence; but, to the horror of the people, he did not hesitate to build temples for idolatrous worship in places where the inhabitants were principally, or in a large measure, heathens. Scarcely less odious to them, and more effectively resisted, was his attempt to introduce into their cities the savage games of the amphitheater, which were congenial to his own hard and cruel temper, but which were to his people most hateful, both on religious and social grounds; and although he did build some amphitheaters, he could not bring the people in properly Jewish cities, least of all in Jerusalem, to tolerate the use of them.
Becoming at last sensible of the dislike to him which such proceedings, added to the severities of his government, had engendered in the minds of the people, he sought for measures which might conciliate them; and he found one measure, not only calculated to have this effect, but at the same time to gratify his own prevailing taste, and perpetuate, as he thought, the glory of his name as another Solomon; and it must be admitted that in many points his character did resemble that of Solomon—wisdom excepted.
His purpose was to rebuild the Temple, on a scale of magnificence, rivaling, if not eclipsing, that of Solomon. The sacred edifice had fallen into sad decay, not only from the ravages of time, but from what it had suffered from the hands of enemies; for that part of Jerusalem, being by far the strongest, had been the last resort of the inhabitants in times of peril, and therefore the spot against which the most exasperated assaults had been directed.
The Jews, however, though charmed by the prospect which the king held out, and aware that the project was one which he, if only from mere pride, would be likely to carry out, were afraid to trust him implicitly, and they were not without apprehensions that, after having deprived them of what they already had, he might withhold what he had led them to expect. It was all peace and prosperity now; but troubles might arise, the inevitable expenses of which might render Herod, lavish as he was, and possibly all the more for being lavish, unwilling or unable to accomplish what he had undertaken. To meet this apprehension, Herod, who for the various reasons at which we have hinted, was really solicitous in this matter, undertook that he would not disturb the old building until he had made every preparation for the new. Thus preparation took two full years. Josephus declares that a thousand wagons were employed during that time in conveying the stones and timber, that ten thousand artificers fitted all things for the building, and that one thousand priests, who were skilled in architecture, oversaw and directed the works. This last is a very remarkable fact, illustrative and confirmatory of the general impression, that the great Levitical body employed their abundant leisure largely in the cultivation of the higher branches of learning, science, and art, law, medicine, architecture, constituting them, in fact, the professionally learned body of the nation; and, indeed, they were so numerous a body as to be well able to supply from themselves the members of all the professions which we call learned. After two years had thus been spent in preparation, the old temple was taken down, not all at once, as some state, but by degrees, as fast as the parts removed could be replaced by the new building, in the twenty-first year of his own reign, seventeen years before Christ, and therefore just forty-six before the first Passover of our Lord’s ministry. It is true that the main body of the temple was finished, so as to be fit for Divine service in nine years and a half; yet a great number of workmen were still employed in carrying on the out-buildings during all the time of our Savior’s abode on earth, and even for some years after his death; in fact, not until seven years before the temple was finally destroyed by the Romans, that is, in the year 64, when 18,000 men being at once thrown out of employment, the local rulers, compassionating their destitute condition, and dreading the consequences of so large a body of men being at once thrown loose upon society, devised a plan for employing them in rebuilding the eastern cloisters, full wages being given there for merely nominal work. But this was put a stop to by king Agrippa, who, however, sanctioned the plan of employing these men in paving the streets of the city with white stone.
This temple, which, as the frequent place of our Lord’s ministry, is more interesting to us than even that of Solomon, was considerably larger than the temple built by the restored captives, as that had been larger than the first temple. The second temple (properly so called) was seventy cubits long, sixty cubits broad, and sixty high; but this was one hundred cubits long, seventy broad, and one hundred high. The second temple seems also not to have had the porch any higher than the rest of the building; for Herod, in his proposal to the Jews, appeals to their knowledge of the fact that it wanted sixty cubits of the height of the first temple. But in this temple the porch was raised to 120 cubits, as at the first; and, by extending it fifteen cubits beyond each side of the body of the temple, he made the front to be a hundred cubits wide; for twice fifteen added to seventy, which was the breadth of the temple itself, make a hundred. The ground-plan therefore resembled the letter T; the top representing the front of the porch, and the body of the letter the holy and the most holy places.
All the Jewish writers extol this temple exceedingly, both for the beauty of the workmanship and the costliness of the materials; for it was built with white marble, beautifully variegated, and with stones of large dimensions-some of them being not less than twenty-five cubits long, eight cubits high, and twelve cubits thick: explaining the admiration with which, on one occasion, our Lord’s disciples called his attention to the great and goodly stones of the temple. We cannot here enter further into details; but the impression left upon our minds is, that Herod’s temple was, considered architecturally, a more perfect and magnificent work than that of Solomon, though much less lavishly adorned with precious metal. The taste for that species of ornamentation had passed by; and it must be admitted that, in building, fine marble makes a more agreeable impression, better satisfies a correct taste, and is really more magnificent, than any amount of silver or gold.