Herod and the Rebuilding of the Temple

Herod was the son of the Idumean Antipater and, according to the Talmud, a slave in the Hasmonean household. Backed by Rome, he took the throne of Jerusalem in 3724. His first act was to destroy anyone who could challenge his right: he killed off the remnants of the Hasmonean family, including his own wife Miriam, her brother the young High Priest, her grandfather and her mother. Then, the Talmud reports, he executed nearly all the sages of Israel.

His reign was long and outwardly brilliant: the fortresses of Masada and Herodium, the harbour at Caesarea, palaces and aqueducts. But his great work was the rebuilding of the Second Temple. He tore down the old structure and raised a new one of white marble and gold, on an enlarged platform whose retaining walls still stand — the Western Wall is part of them. Thousands worked on it; priests were trained in the crafts so that no outsider would enter the sacred precincts. The Talmud says rain fell only at night, so as not to interrupt the building.

It was a strange resolution: a man drenched in blood left behind the most beautiful building of his world. Eight decades after the work began, the Romans burned it.