A Killer Builds the Most Beautiful House Anyone Has Ever Seen

Herod was half-Idumean and completely brutal. Rome had put him on the throne, and he kept the throne by killing anyone who might take it. He murdered his beautiful Hasmonean wife Mariamne over a rumor and then, the histories say, kept her body preserved in honey and mourned her like a madman for years. He killed most of the Sanhedrin. He killed three of his own sons on suspicion. Even the emperor Augustus said in Rome that he would rather be Herod's pig than Herod's son.

To try to make peace with his people — maybe to make peace with his own conscience — he started the biggest building project the country had ever seen. The Second Temple was already five hundred years old and worn out. He would take it down and put it back up bigger.

He doubled the size of the Temple Mount by adding huge stone walls to hold up the extra ground. Some of those stones weighed five hundred tons each. One piece of those walls is still standing tonight: the Kotel. He raised the Temple building itself to a hundred cubits high and covered it in white marble and gold plate. Josephus, who saw it with his own eyes, wrote that from far away in the morning it looked like a snow-covered mountain, and that people had to shield their eyes if they stood in front of it at sunrise. The Talmud says it simply: whoever hasn't seen Herod's building has never seen a beautiful building in his life.

But this beautiful House was still a Second House. The Aron did not come back. The fire from the sky did not come back. The special breastplate stayed dark. Prophecy did not return. The priests served in beauty without the Presence. And this — this dazzling white-and-gold mountain rising over the valley — is what will burn ninety years after Herod's death, in a war that his own family and his own appointees will do a lot to start.