Herod the Great Coins

And now Herod …undertook a very great work, this is, to build himself the Temple of God, and make it larger in compass [than the Temple that stood there]. And to raise it to magnificent altitude…and this would be sufficient for an everlasting memorial of him.

(Josephus, Antiquities 15:380)

Whoever has not seen Herod’s Temple has never seen a beautiful building.

(Baba Batra 4a)

 There are ten portions of beauty in the world. Nine are in Jerusalem, one in the rest of the world.

(Avot DeRabbi Natan B, 48)

 As much as the Jewish masses and Rabbis despised Herod throughout the course of his reign, he continuously tried to placate them to preserve the peace of his realm. At one point, during a particularly bad famine, he even bought grain for the masses from his own personal funds. Indisputably, the most important and famous project devised by Herod for the Jewish people was the rebuilding of the Second Temple complex. He replaced the modest structure, by then over four centuries old, with a magnificent cultic complex on a greatly expanded site. This structure was considered one of the most splendid human endeavors of the Roman era. Towering over bustling streets with imperial grandeur, Herod’s rebuilt Second Temple and the plaza surrounding it rested on colossal foundations. The massive retaining structures doubled the size of the Temple Mount. This tremendous construction project was “the greatest in the history of the Land of Israel and one of the greatest in the world at the time.”

According to Josephus, it took a trained workforce of ten thousand men eight years to complete the magnificent edifice. In actuality, the Temple Mount project was halted in 64 CE, before total completion, less than a decade before the Temple’s destruction. It was the largest cultic site in the ancient world and dwarfed any comparable place of worship. Because Herod could not make the biblically mandated size of the area of the actual Temple building itself any bigger, he ordered his engineers and artisans to enlarge the platform on which the Temple stood. The resulting platform was approximately rectangular in shape, with asymmetrical sides (measuring 485 meters in the west, 280 meters in the south, 460 meters in the east and 315 meters in the north) and was one-seventh of the size of the entire city of Jerusalem! The Temple, the spiritual epicenter for Jews throughout the world and, of course, in Judea itself, accommodated as many as 100,000 pilgrims on the pilgrimage festivals of Passover, Shavuot, and Sukkot.

Only the finest materials were used in the Temple’s construction. The Temple’s retaining walls were up to 45 m high and 5 m thick. It was financed by a combination of Herod’s own funds and the annual half-shekel Temple tax contribution given by every Jew throughout the world.

As Herod was not trusted by the people, he readied all the materials and manpower before he began to disassemble the former, modest building in order to build his Temple. He built the Temple from the bedrock up. The building was built using dry construction and stood entirely supported by its own weight. The stones in the supporting wall weigh up to 600 tons. Each layer was slightly recessed from the one below by 2 to 3 cm, thus ensuring the stability of the walls. Even now, two millennia after the Temple’s construction, the stones of the supporting walls of the Temple Mount that were not deliberately destroyed or moved have not budged, not even one millimeter, despite numerous earthquakes in the region!

The upper exterior face of the supporting walls of the platform was built to resemble half columns. The Temple, atop the man-made platform, was described with awe by many contemporary or near-contemporary sources including the Mishna, Roman historians, the New Testament, and most famously Josephus’s description of the Temple building itself covered in white marble and gold:

Now the outward face of the Temple in its front wanted nothing that was likely to surprise either men’s minds or their eyes; for it was covered all over with plates of gold of great weight, and, at the first rising of the sun, reflected back a very fiery splendor, and made those who forced themselves to look upon it to turn their eyes away, just as they would have done at the sun’s own rays. But this Temple appeared to strangers, when they were coming to it at a distance, like a mountain covered with snow; for as to those parts of it that were not gilt, they were exceeding white.

(Josephus, Wars 5:5)

Material:Bronze

Historical Period: 37-4 BCE

Dimensions: Prutah

Ruler: Herod the Great

Mint: Judea (Jerusalem)

Size and Weight: 14mm, 1.35g