JRV1315

Temple Mount – Evidence of Our Jerusalem Claim Written in Stone

#1315 March 29,, 2026

Among the misstatements we ourselves make, exacerbating calumnies hurled at our Jewish people’s homeland and us, is that “the Western Wall prayer area is all that remains of Jerusalem’s Temple Mount.” On the contrary, the Temple Mount substantially stands, eloquent evidence of our claim to Jerusalem written in stone.

Temple Mount – Evidence of Our Jerusalem Claim Written in Stone

These days that we’ve got our hands full refuting untrue things others say about our people’s homeland and us, it’s doubly unhelpful for we ourselves, hopefully unappreciatively, to be saying such things ourselves.  Examples include we ourselves calling the Western Wall prayer area “all that remains of the Temple Mount”; we ourselves saying we were “exiled” by Rome and came back eighteen hundred years later; we ourselves calling applying sovereignty to Judea-Samaria, which is ours, “annexation,” as though it was foreign, of “the West Bank”; and we ourselves succumbing to thinkability of the historic Jerusalem and Judea-Samaria-forfeiting “two-state solution.”

I’ll focus this week on the first of those untruths. Time and again I’ve read statements even by otherwise-informed Israelis that “the Western Wall is the sole surviving remnant of the Temple Mount.”  By far, it’s not.  In Secrets of Jerusalem’s Temple Mount (fuller edition The Quest: Revealing the Temple Mount in Jerusalem), archeological architect Leen Ritmeyer, who spent many years on excavations at its site, takes us on a tour of Herod’s Mount’s four walls and a bit inside, but before I get into that I’d have you understand:

[1] that this tour isn’t just of a still-picture of what stood there when the Romans destroyed the Temple and Mount in 70 CE, but extant evidence, written in stone, of Jewish Jerusalem presence and action over a thousand years by Herod, before him by Maccabbee/Hasmoneans and before them even First Temple Israelites; and

[2] that citing this answers not only “from the River to the Sea” chanters denying our history, but dispossessors of our claim to the core of the core of our homeland, like my hometown paper, the Philadelphia Inquirer, which calls (5/24/21) the entirety of our Temple Mount “a mosque,” and “the third holiest site in Islam” at that.

How strong is our extant evidence case?  Distinguished commentator Elder of Ziyon (blog post 5/16/23) put it this way:

“… the entire Temple Mount was built by Jews, in sections, from the time of the Biblical kings to the Hasmonean extensions to the Herodian extensions.  These extensions can be seen from the Eastern Wall of the Mount.

“The entire Temple Mount is proof of the Temples.”

Western Wall

So let’s start that tour with what’s most familiar to us – the prayer area of the Western Wall.

Not only is this not “the sole standing remnant of the Temple Mount,” it’s not even that of the Mount’s western wall.  The seven bottom visible courses at the prayer area are Herodian (the higher ones being others’ later repairs), but underneath your feet as you stand in justified awe there are nineteen Herodian courses, revealed in a Warren-dug shaft lighted today, reaching down to bedrock. (By me, Israel should make a broader exposure of this.)

And not just the prayer area, but the entirety of the Mount’s western wall still stands.  North of the prayer area is Wilson’s Arch, eastern end of what had been a bridge over the valley, connecting the western hill residential area to the Mount.  That huge arch itself is a later replacement, but the eastern end stones connecting it to the Herodian western wall are Herodian.  North of that along the Herodian wall is a Herodian street-level Herodian gateway and passage into the Mount, Warren’s Gate.  In a western wall tunnel at Herodian street level dug from Wilson’s Arch north can be seen, as Ritmeyer believes Herod intended, near Warren’s Gate the hugest Herodian ashlars anywhere on the Mount. 

Just to the south of the prayer area is the second ancient text-mentioned western wall street-level gate and passageway up to the Mount, partially still-exposed Barclay’s Gate.  To its south, near the Mount’s southwest corner is the remains of Robinson’s Arch, a grand stairway that had ascended from street level to the entrance to the Royal Stoa, a mammoth structure of four rows of huge columns extending across the top of the Mount’s southern wall.

Southern Wall

Much of all of Herod’s Mount’s four corners, not least its southwestern, built of huge ashlars laid in alternating header-stretcher construction, still stand. The southern wall’s lower courses still stand, including remains of its Double and Triple Gates, for pilgrims and priests respectively.  Inside these gates’ underground passages remain Herodian piers, interior walls and other elements of the substructure of the enormous Royal Stoa with its four rows of huge columns that had stood above.  Still to be seen inside the Double Gate are four passageway domes, two of which still have intricately carved Herodian ceiling designs cut in the stone.

Eastern Wall

The lower and some higher courses of the Mount’s eastern wall still stand. When Herod doubled the size of the Mount in the first century BCE, he expanded it to the north, west and south, but on the east, where the existing wall ran close to precipitous decline just extended it to the north and south.  The southernmost part is Herodian, ending at a visible straight joint or seam where it meets the Mount’s earlier southern end. Stonework to the north of the seam is that of the Mount’s earlier Hasmonean southern extension. On both sides of today’s Golden Gate in the oldest center area of the eastern wall, the lowest courses are more crudely cut First Temple era stonework. At the eastern wall’s northern end is again Herodian stonework.

Northern Wall

Thanks to the Romans and later centuries’ rebuilding, far less of Jewish Temple-time northern wall stonework remains, but among other evidence of where the Herodian northern wall had lain, Herodian stones in header-stretcher layout can still be seen in the northern face of the northeast tower.

Epilog: Extant Evidence of First Temple Remains

As an epilog to this four walls Temple Mount tour, let me tell you, while you stand on one leg, what else Leen Ritmeyer found.

Ancient Jewish sources tell us the First Temple’s Mount was a five hundred cubit square.  Ritmeyer makes what BAR’s Hershel Shanks called “quite a good case” that he not only found where it had lain, but had located the First Temple upon it, positioned the walls and floor of its Holy of Holies, and identified on that Holy of Holies’ floor the slot, still extant today, that King Solomon had carved three millennia ago as the resting place of the Ark of the Covenant!  Indiana Jones and Philadelphia Inquirer, Eat Your Heart Out.