4 buildings · 6 points not in dispute
Most of the Bible is oriented around one building, and a reader who does not know its layout will miss what several scenes are actually about. Which court someone is standing in changes the story. A curtain tearing is reported as news because of what it separated. A riot starts over an accusation about a line in the pavement.
It is also worth saying at the start that the Bible is more ambivalent about the building than its own architecture suggests. God never asks for one, says so plainly when the idea is proposed, and the prayer at the dedication states that the building cannot contain him.
People say the temple and mean any of these. The last two are usually counted as one, because sacrifice never stopped during Herod’s rebuilding.
A tent, and the design is the point. It comes apart, travels on poles, and is pitched wherever the camp stops. Exodus gives its specification more space than it gives the creation of the world, and then repeats the whole specification a second time in the building account. Whatever else that repetition is doing, it is signalling that the details matter.
The first permanent building, on the same floor plan as the tent but in stone and cedar, and roughly twice the size. It stood for something close to four centuries and was destroyed by Nebuchadnezzar's army, with the vessels carried to Babylon. The ark is not in the list of what was taken, and it is not mentioned again.
Built by the returned exiles under Zerubbabel, and modest enough that the old men who had seen the first one wept when the foundation was laid, while everyone else shouted for joy, and Ezra says the noise could not be told apart. Haggai addresses the disappointment directly, asking who is left who saw this house in its former glory.
Not a fifth building. Herod massively rebuilt and extended the second temple, and Jewish tradition counts it as the same one because sacrifice never stopped during the work. This is the temple of the Gospels. The platform he built is the one still standing, and the western retaining wall of it is the Western Wall. The remark that it took forty-six years to build refers to this project, which was in fact still unfinished at the time.
You did not simply go to the temple. You went as far in as your status allowed, and each boundary was a real wall or step. The outermost court was open to anyone, including . Inside that was the court of the women, then the court of Israel for Jewish men, then the court of the priests with the altar, then the holy place, and at the centre the .
So the geography is a diagram of access. Distance from the centre is the message, and every person in the building knew exactly which line they could not cross.
A low barrier called the soreg ran around the inner courts, and stone notices in Greek and Latin warned that no foreigner might pass it, on pain of death. This is not a reconstruction. Two of those inscriptions have been found, one complete in 1871 and a fragment in 1935, and they can be read in museums today.
That is the wall in the background when Ephesians says he has broken down the middle wall of separation. And it is the actual charge that starts the riot leading to Paul's arrest: the crowd assume he has brought a Greek past the line, which Acts is careful to say they had assumed rather than seen.
The trading Jesus disrupts is in the court of the Gentiles, the only part of the complex a non-Jew could use. When he quotes Isaiah, he quotes the whole line, a house of prayer for all the nations, and Mark is the Gospel that keeps those last three words.
Read with the geography in view, the objection is not only that commerce is happening in a holy place. It is that it is happening in the one space set aside for the people furthest out.
Agreed across the traditions, and included because these are usually the parts a reader has not been told.
God never asked for a temple, and says so
When David proposes building one, the answer that comes back through Nathan is a question. In all the places I have walked with Israel, did I ever say a word to any of the leaders, why have you not built me a house of cedar? God then turns the word house around and promises to build David a house instead, meaning a dynasty. The permission to build is real and comes in the same passage, but the ambivalence is in the text from the start and is not a modern reading imposed on it.
In the second temple, the most holy place was empty
The ark did not return from Babylon and is never mentioned again. So for the entire period of the second temple, including all four Gospels, the entered once a year into a room with nothing in it. Jewish tradition records a bare foundation stone where the ark had stood. Roman writers noted the emptiness and misunderstood it, since a shrine with no image made no sense to them.
It stands on a threshing floor bought at full price
Chronicles identifies the site as the threshing floor of Ornan, which David bought to build an altar and stop a plague. He refuses to take it as a gift, saying he will not offer to God what costs him nothing. So the ground the temple occupies is a working farm surface, acquired in a transaction the text records the price of, in the middle of a judgment.
The dedication prayer says the building cannot hold God
At the opening of the very building he has spent seven years constructing, Solomon asks whether God will really dwell on the earth, and says that heaven and the highest heaven cannot contain him, how much less this house. The temple's own founding document states the limit of the temple. Stephen quotes that tradition centuries later, and Paul makes the same point in Athens.
Herod's temple was finished a few years before it was destroyed
Work continued on the complex for decades after Herod's death, and it was completed in the early 60s AD. It was burned by Roman forces in AD 70, within a decade of completion. The disciples pointing out the size of the stones are admiring a building site in its final phase.
You are God's temple is plural
In 1 Corinthians 3 the you is plural in the Greek and the temple is singular. Paul is telling a divided congregation that together they are one sanctuary, and the warning that follows is against destroying it, which in context means the factions tearing it apart. He does apply the image to the individual body later in the same letter, in a different argument about sexual conduct. English cannot distinguish the two, and the first is regularly read as though it were the second.
Jesus answers a demand for a sign by saying destroy this temple and in three days I will raise it up, and John adds an explanatory note that he was speaking of the temple of his body. The saying is thrown back at him at his trial in a garbled form, and the witnesses who quote it are described as not agreeing with each other.
John's Gospel has already set this up in its opening, where the word usually translated dwelt among us is literally tabernacled, pitched a tent.
The letters then use the building vocabulary of the church as a whole, and they use all of it: foundation, cornerstone, stones, joined together, growing into a holy sanctuary. Peter's version is the odd one, calling believers living stones, which is a deliberate contradiction in terms.
The priesthood language moves with it. A holy priesthood, a royal priesthood, offering spiritual sacrifices. What the traditions do with that is one of the real differences between them, and it is a large part of what the Reformation argument about the was over.
The last vision of the Bible describes a city with no temple in it, and gives the reason: the Lord God the Almighty and the Lamb are its temple. It is worth noticing what shape that city is. The most holy place in both the and Solomon's temple is a perfect cube, and the new Jerusalem is measured and found to be a cube as well, on an enormous scale.
On that reading the direction of travel is not that the temple is abolished but that it expands until it is the whole city, and the grading of access that the courts existed to enforce has nothing left to enforce.
Everything above is common ground. This is not. It is named here and argued in full elsewhere, so that each disagreement lives in one place.
Is a future temple expected?
Ezekiel 40 to 48 describes a temple in enormous detail, with sacrifices, and it has never been built to that plan. Dispensational readings generally expect a literal future building and read passages about a coming desecration as still ahead. Amillennial and most Reformed readings take Ezekiel's vision as symbolic and hold that Christ and the church fulfil it, so no further building is looked for. Historic premillennial readers are divided. Jewish expectation of a rebuilt temple is a separate matter again and should not be folded into the Christian argument. This one is carried at length, in the house format, under Israel and the church.
What the sacrifices in Ezekiel's temple would be for
This is the sharpest question inside the first one, and those who expect a literal future temple do not all answer it the same way. Some hold the offerings would be memorial, looking back as the Lord's Supper does. Some hold Ezekiel's vision is conditional on a return that did not happen. Those who read the vision symbolically do not face the question. Hebrews is the text everyone has to account for, since it argues at length that a single offering has been made once for all.
Both are carried at length under Israel and the church.
Keep reading
Read the specification at Exodus 26, the dedication at 1 Kings 8, the purchase of the site at 2 Samuel 24, and the city with no temple at Revelation 21.
The furniture and the practices are glossed in the reader as you read: the veil, the altar of incense, the threshing floor, and the cornerstone.
Dates for the buildings are the standard ranges and are debated at the edges. The texts are given so you can weigh them yourself.
