When was the Temple in Jerusalem destroyed?

The first time: Babylon, 586 BC

Solomon’s Temple stood for almost four centuries. Then Judah rebelled against Babylon. In 597 BC Nebuchadnezzar took Jerusalem and carried King Jehoiachin into exile, a capture also recorded on a clay tablet of the Babylonian Chronicle. When the next king, Zedekiah, rebelled again, the Babylonians besieged the city for a year and a half and broke through. A month later the captain of the guard arrived to finish the work.

He burned Yahweh’s house, the king’s house, and all the houses of Jerusalem. He burned every great house with fire.

Kings dates this to the seventh day of the fifth month; Jeremiah gives the tenth (Jeremiah 52:12). The year is 587 or 586 BC, depending on how Zedekiah’s reign is counted, and scholars are still divided. The bronze pillars were broken up and hauled to Babylon, and the Ark of the Covenant is never mentioned again.

Rebuilt, then remade by Herod

Persia conquered Babylon in 539 BC and let the exiles go home. Their plainer Temple was finished in the sixth year of King Darius, 515 BC (Ezra 6:15): the Second Temple. Antiochus IV defiled it in 167 BC, the crisis behind Hanukkah, but did not destroy it. From around 20 BC Herod rebuilt it so lavishly that the rabbis later said whoever had not seen Herod’s building had never seen a beautiful one (Babylonian Talmud, Bava Batra 4a).

Not one stone on another

In his last week, as Jesus leaves the Temple, his disciples point out its buildings. His answer is blunt.

You see all of these things, don’t you? Most certainly I tell you, there will not be left here one stone on another, that will not be thrown down.

The words mean demolition, not damage, and Mark, Matthew and Luke all record them. Readers take them two ways. Many scholars think the Gospels, written around AD 70 or later, shaped the saying in the light of events. Others note that Jesus stood in a line of prophets who warned of the Temple’s fall: his “den of robbers” quotes Jeremiah, who had said God would do to this house what he did to Shiloh (Jeremiah 7:11–14).

The second time: Rome, AD 70

In AD 66 Judea rose against Rome. In April 70 Titus, son of the new emperor Vespasian, besieged Jerusalem with four legions, and famine gripped the city. Josephus, a Jewish commander who had gone over to Rome and watched from the Roman lines, says the sanctuary burned on the tenth of Av, the same day of the year on which Babylon had burned the first (Jewish War 6.250). He claims Titus tried to save it. The Christian writer Sulpicius Severus, around 400, says Titus ordered it destroyed, and most historians doubt Josephus. By September the whole city had fallen.

The treasures went to Rome, where the Arch of Titus still shows the lampstand carried in triumph and Vespasian displayed the gold vessels in his new Temple of Peace (Jewish War 7.158–162). At the foot of the Western Wall, archaeologists found the platform’s top stones lying in heaps on the paved street below, where they fell when the Romans pried them off.

Tisha B’Av

Jewish tradition mourns both disasters on one date. The Mishnah lists five calamities of the ninth of Av, among them the destruction of the first and the second Temple and the fall of Betar, the last fortress of the Bar Kokhba revolt, in AD 135 (Mishnah Taanit 4:6). On Tisha B’Av, in July or August, many Jews fast for about twenty-five hours, sit low like mourners and read the book of Lamentations.

How the city sits solitary, that was full of people! She has become as a widow, who was great among the nations!

That evening crowds gather at the Western Wall, the retaining wall Herod built around the Temple platform.