Temple

I had written here that God dissuaded David from building a permanent temple for God, and that God had said through the prophet Nathan that David’s son would build the temple for Him. Since he had said that David’s son according to the flesh, we know that his son Solomon built a magnificent temple for God. However, history tells us that the temple built by Solomon in 957 BCE only lasted 371 years, was destroyed by the Babylonian army in 586 BCE, and no one has seen the Ark of the Covenant since then.

The later Biblical history states that the Jews who were taken as prisoners of war to Babylon lived there as exiles, and that the Persian king Cyrus the Great, who conquered Babylon in 536 BCE, sent the exiled Jews back to their homeland and granted their only wish by giving them the wealth to rebuild the destroyed temple. Thus, the modestly rebuilt temple was completed in 516 BCE. However, the second temple did not have the Ark of the Covenant, the original lampstand called the Minorah, the table of the showbread, or the altar of incense. About 500 years later, King Herod the Great renovated the temple extensively in 19 BCE. The temple, which Jesus visited many times during his life, was completely destroyed less than 90 years later by the Romans in the year 70 CE.

In the books of Exodus and Leviticus, we see God giving detailed instructions on how to build the tabernacle that was only fifteen feet high, fifteen feet wide, and forty-five feet long. It was dismantable and movable.

So much sadness, pain, and mystery are condensed together, all over the memory of the Jerusalem Temple that stood for almost a thousand years!