How Many Israelite Temples Were Built?

According to the Bible, David gathered building materials for a temple that was to replace Israel’s mobile house of worship, called the tabernacle, which had been built under Moses’s direction during Israel’s nomadic years in the Sinai Peninsula. David’s son and successor Solomon brought the project to fruition. This temple was destroyed, rebuilt, renovated, and then finally destroyed again never to be rebuilt. But the two (or three, counting Herod’s renovation) iterations of the Jerusalem Temple are joined in the historical record by three other ancient Israelite temples.

Solomon’s temple was built after the middle of the tenth century BCE and served Israel for almost four hundred years before it was destroyed by Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon in 586 BCE. The sacking of Jerusalem and subsequent exile of many of the inhabitants of Israel’s southern kingdom, called Judah, is one of the most important developments in Israel’s history. This exile came a little less than a century and a half after a similarly convulsive series of events in the northern kingdom, which was called (confusingly) Israel.

While the temple had been the center of religious life in Judah those four centuries, the northern kingdom had been separated from Jerusalem for almost all of those years. By the time of their own exile in 722 BCE, northern Israelites had already spent more than two centuries in religious innovation apart from the temple. But after its destruction, Solomon’s temple became only a memory for Israelites of all stripes. 

Where Was the Second Temple?

The rising Babylonian Empire left numerous destroyed cities in its wake, including Jerusalem. Though Jerusalem had become the heart of Israelite identity, Israelites taken captive to Mesopotamia by the Babylonians maintained their national distinctiveness long enough to see Babylon itself fall to the Persian conqueror Cyrus II. In order to foster loyalty, the Achaemenid Dynasty, which Cyrus inaugurated, adopted a more generous policy to minority groups than had their empirical predecessors.

This policy worked well among exiled Israelites, who would soon be known as “Jews” (after the name “Yehud,” which the Persians gave to the imperial province that had once been the kingdoms of Israel and Judah). Cyrus commissioned an exiled Jew named Zerubbabel to oversee the rebuilding of the Temple in 516 BCE, and it was dedicated by the celebrated scribe Ezra, for whom the book of the Bible that tells the story is named. 

Thinking his conquest a fulfillment of biblical prophecy, Alexander the Great reverenced the Jews’ religion. But Antiochus IV, Alexander’s Seleucid successor in the region, tried to abolish Judaism, rededicating the Temple to Zeus in 167 BCE. This desecration provoked the Maccabean Revolt, in which the Jews threw off their Greek oppressors while soliciting Roman support for their newly-established kingdom.

But the Jewish-Roman peace was doomed to crumble. The death of Queen Salome Alexandra, who reigned alone over Judaea from 76–67 BCE, precipitated the painful decline of what would later be called the Hasmonean Dynasty. Her sons Hyrcanus II and Aristobulus both claimed her throne, leading to all-out civil war. 

By 64 BCE, Hyrcanus had besieged Aristobulus inside Jerusalem. The Roman general Pompey, having conquered Spain, Greece, and much of Anatolia, decided to join Hyrcanus’s side in the conflict, and proceeded to overwhelm Jerusalem. The Temple was once again desecrated when Pompey entered its holiest space. 

What Was Herod’s Temple?

In 40 BCE, the Roman Senate installed Herod, an Idumean (Arab) Jew from a family loyal to Rome, as King of Judaea after the Parthians invaded Palestine. This brought a final end to the Hasmonean Dynasty. The Hasmonean kings were also priests, but Rome’s crowning of Herod separated the throne from the priesthood, echoing ancient Israel’s distinction between the two institutions. 

Nevertheless, Herod’s greatest legacy was to be religious. The size and condition of the second temple, being much smaller and less glorious than the first, had long kept painful memories alive for Jews. Herod was a great architect and completed many magnificent projects during his reign, but the most spectacular was to be his renovation and expansion of the temple, which was completed around 20 BCE. It was this, Herod’s Temple, that was finally destroyed by the Roman general Titus in 70 CE, after which it was never to be rebuilt.  

According to the biblical telling of Israel’s history, God chose Jerusalem alone to be the site of a temple, while all other places of worship were judged spurious. However, a group that came to be known as the Samaritans, who claimed descendancy from Israelites even as the Jews, told the story differently. Accepting only the Torah (the first five books of the Bible) as holy scripture, this group believed that Mount Gerizim, in the north of what is today the West Bank, was God’s chosen holy place. 

Though the story is absent from the Bible, a Samaritan temple was built around 450 BCE, only about half a century after the second Jerusalem temple. The two sanctuaries were actively used simultaneously for more than three centuries until the Hasmonean king Hyrcanus I (grandfather of the Hyrcanus mentioned above) destroyed it near the end of the second century BCE. Like the Temple at Jerusalem, it remains in ruins today. 

Where Was the Temple of Elephantine?

The temples discussed above are all Israelite and all in the land of Israel. But there are two more Israelite temples in the historical record. Built in the Persian period, the temple on the island of Elephantine, in the Nile River in Egypt, was an early attempt by diaspora Jews to maintain their national culture and religion while living far from their ancestral land. Unlike those who made the Samaritan temple, the Elephantine temple’s builders shared with their fellow Jews a belief in Jerusalem’s divine election. But practically speaking, it was not possible for Jews living in Egypt to worship without a local house of worship. 

Archaeologists date the temple at Elephantine to around 500 BCE, which suggests it may have been sponsored by Persia. It lasted only about one hundred years before being destroyed in the midst of Egypt’s rebellion against Persia, whom the Jews had aided. Though later rebuilt, historians say that it was eventually abandoned. 

Yet another Jewish temple was erected at Leontopolis in Egypt in the second century BCE. In 73 CE the Roman emperor Vespasian, who had only three years previous ordered Titus to destroy Jerusalem’s temple, also ordered that the sanctuary at Leontopolis be razed to the ground. This was the last of the Israelite temples to be confined to history. 

Judaism has since evolved into a temple-less faith, mobile and vibrant throughout the world—but with many Jews cultivating a hope that a temple will someday stand again in Jerusalem. Samaritans, meanwhile, have returned to their pre-temple religious practices, which continue to galvanize this—one of the world’s most ancient, living religious traditions.