Herod Rebuilds the Temple in White Marble and Gold

Herod was half-Idumean and completely brutal. Rome had put him on the throne, and he kept it by killing anyone who might take it. He murdered his Hasmonean wife Mariamne over a rumor and — the histories report — preserved her body 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 of plotting against him. The emperor Augustus is said to have remarked in Rome that he would rather be Herod's pig than Herod's son.

As if to answer for it, Herod launched the largest construction project the country had ever seen. The Second Temple was already five centuries old and worn. He would take it down and put it back up bigger.

He doubled the size of the Temple Mount by building massive retaining walls to hold up the added platform. Some of the stones weighed five hundred tons. One piece of those walls is still standing tonight: the Kotel. He raised the Sanctuary itself to a hundred cubits and clad it in white marble and gold. Josephus, who saw the finished building, wrote that from a distance in the morning it looked like a snow-covered mountain, and that anyone standing before it at sunrise had to shield his eyes. The Talmud is briefer: whoever had not seen Herod's building had never seen a beautiful building.

But the House was still a Second House. The Ark did not return. The fire from heaven did not return. The Urim ve-Tumim stayed dark. Prophecy did not resume. The priests served in beauty without the Presence. This dazzling white-and-gold mountain rising over the valley is what would burn ninety years after Herod's death, in a war that his family and his appointees would do much to start.