Where the Ancient Temple of Jerusalem Stood

It is almost axiomatic among scholars that no trace of the Jewish Temple is to be found on Jerusalem’s imposing Temple Mount.¹

“The Temple is gone. Not a stone, not a trace, remains,” wrote the venerable J. L. Porter in 1887.²

More recently, Dame Kathleen Kenyon echoed the same thoughts. Just before her death in 1978, the eminent British archaeologist wrote a small volume entitled The Bible and Recent Archaeology that appeared posthumously in which she stated, “Absolutely nothing survives of the Temple built by Herod” (the Second Temple).³

Despite this scholarly consensus, there are, however, traces of remains—a line of stones, a worked rock-mass, a cistern—and these ancient relics are sufficient, when added to the literary sources, to locate precisely the Second Temple, and even to trace out the First Temple, on the Temple Mount.