Is the Western Wall part of Herod’s Temple?

A wall that holds up a hill

Herod the Great did not only rebuild the Temple in Jerusalem. He rebuilt the hill beneath it. From around 20 BC his engineers boxed the summit of Mount Moriah inside four enormous walls, then filled and vaulted the space within to make a flat platform of about 14 hectares, more than twenty football fields. The Temple stood near the middle of it.

The Western Wall is a stretch of the platform’s western retaining wall. Counting the parts hidden behind houses and in tunnels, that wall runs 488 meters (1,601 feet); the open-air prayer section is only about 57 meters long. So the stones people touch were never part of the Temple building. They held up the courts around it.

How to spot Herod’s stones

Look at the lowest rows: huge blocks laid without mortar, each with a flat band chiseled around its edges. The first seven courses above ground are Herod’s, and seventeen more lie below the plaza. The smaller stones above them were added from the eighth century on, the smallest under the Mamluks and Ottomans. In the tunnels to the north lies the largest block found so far, about 13.6 meters long and estimated at 250 to 300 tonnes. Visitors in Jesus’s day admired the same masonry:

some were talking about the temple and how it was decorated with beautiful stones and gifts

What stood on top

The sanctuary rose above and east of today’s prayer plaza, most likely near the Dome of the Rock. Its exact spot is still debated, because no one may excavate the Temple Mount. The platform was laid out in rings of holiness:

• The Court of the Gentiles. The great outer court, open to anyone, Jew or not, where the money changers and dove sellers sat. Herod’s columned Royal Stoa ran along its south side.
• The barrier. A low balustrade marked where non-Jews had to stop, with warnings in Greek and Latin, Josephus says. One, found in 1871, reads, in a literal translation: “No foreigner is to enter within the barrier and enclosure around the sanctuary. Whoever is caught will have himself to blame for the death that follows.”
• The inner courts. Courts for Jewish women and men, the priests’ court with the great altar, and the sanctuary with its innermost room, the Holy of Holies.

That line was taken seriously. In Acts a crowd seizes Paul in the Temple, shouting:

Moreover, he also brought Greeks into the temple and has defiled this holy place!

They had only seen him in the city with Trophimus, a Gentile from Ephesus (Acts 21:29).

Not Solomon’s Temple, either

The wall is often called a remnant of Solomon’s Temple. It is not. Solomon’s Temple, built around 960 BC, was burned by Babylon in 586 BC. Returning exiles built a modest replacement, finished around 515 BC (Ezra 6:15), which Herod rebuilt on a far grander scale. Solomon’s house almost certainly stood on the same hilltop, which Chronicles calls Mount Moriah (2 Chronicles 3:1), but nothing of it has been identified above ground.

Why Jews pray there

When Rome destroyed the Temple in AD 70, the platform’s walls survived. Over the centuries Jews came to pray at this western stretch, the nearest reachable point to the vanished Holy of Holies. Hebrew calls it the Kotel, “the Wall.” Nineteenth-century English travelers who watched people mourning there named it the Wailing Wall. Muslims call it al-Buraq Wall, after the winged steed the Prophet Muhammad is believed to have tethered there. In June 1967, after the Six-Day War, Israel demolished the Moroccan Quarter, which pressed against the wall, to open today’s plaza. The Temple’s two destructions are told in When was the Temple destroyed?