One Rock, Four Sacred Buildings: The Stone Beneath Solomon's Temple
Beneath the most sacred room Solomon ever built lies a single piece of bare rock. It has sat at the centre of this hill for thousands of years, and across roughly three thousand of them, tradition holds that four different sacred buildings have been raised over the very same spot, one after another.
The Holy of Holies
Inside Solomon's Temple, this rock lay hidden beneath a floor entirely covered in gold, in a room built as a perfect cube where, remarkably, there were no windows at all. Ahead stood the Ark of the Covenant, gold through and through, watched over by two enormous winged cherubim rising some five metres tall. Only one person, the High Priest, was ever permitted to enter, and only once a year, on Yom Kippur, having purified himself, entering barefoot and in complete silence.
The rock at the centre
Tradition names this bare stone the Foundation Stone, said to be the very point from which the world itself was first formed, and it sat, hidden and unseen, beneath the single most sacred spot in the entire complex. What makes it remarkable is not only what tradition says of it, but what has stood above it since.
Four buildings, one spot
After Solomon's Temple fell, tradition holds that the Second Temple rose on this same ground, standing for hundreds of years in its turn. Long after that, the Roman emperor Hadrian built a temple to Jupiter on the site, before Christian tradition later left the area deliberately empty. Today the Dome of the Rock stands here, sacred in its own right to Islam, its shrine built directly around the bare stone itself, still visible at its centre. The site's significance stems in large part from this rock, known as the Foundation Stone, which holds deep meaning for Jews, Christians and Muslims alike.
A thread across three thousand years
Few places on earth have carried this kind of continuous sacred meaning across so many different traditions and so many centuries. Solomon's Temple, the Second Temple, a Roman temple to Jupiter, and the Dome of the Rock, four buildings, one small piece of rock beneath every one of them.
Standing above the stone
In TimeLens, you can stand in the reconstructed Holy of Holies, in the room almost no one in the temple's long history was ever permitted to enter, and see it exactly as the old accounts describe it, after passing through the courts and thresholds that led here. This reconstruction is created with Ofer Becker and Becker Innovation, whose work brings this hidden room back into view for the first time in millennia.
