The Temple of Jerusalem:

From Moses to the Messiah

 The Brill Reference Library
of Judaism
Editors
Alan J. Avery-Peck (College of the Holy Cross)
William Scott Green (University of Miami)
Editorial Board
David Aaron (Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of
Religion, Cincinnati)
Herbert Basser (Queen’s University)
Bruce D. Chilton (Bard College)
José Faur (Netanya College)
Neil Gillman ( Jewish Theological Seminary of America)
Mayer I. Gruber (Ben-Gurion University of the Negev)
Ithamar Gruenwald (Tel Aviv University)
Maurice-Ruben Hayoun (University of Strasbourg and
Hochschule fuer Juedische Studien, Heidelberg)
Arkady Kovelman (Moscow State University)
David Kraemer ( Jewish Theological Seminary of America)
Baruch A. Levine (New York University)
Alan Nadler (Drew University)
Jacob Neusner (Bard College)
Maren Niehoff (Hebrew University of Jerusalem)
Gary G. Porton (University of Illinois)
Aviezer Ravitzky (Hebrew University of Jerusalem)
Dov Schwartz (Bar Ilan University)
Gunter Stemberger (University of Vienna)
Michael E. Stone (Hebrew University of Jerusalem)
Elliot Wolfson (New York University)

VOLUME 29
 The Temple of Jerusalem:
From Moses to the Messiah

In Honor of Professor Louis H. Feldman

Edited by
Steven Fine
The Center for Israel Studies
Yeshiva University

LEIDEN • BOSTON
2011
This book is printed on acid-free paper.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

The Temple of Jerusalem : from Moses to the Messiah : in honor of Professor Louis
H. Feldman / edited by Steven Fine.
p. cm. — (The Brill reference library of Judaism ; v. 29)
“This volume is the product of the inaugural conference of the Yeshiva University
Center for Israel Studies which took place on May 11–12, 2008”—Preface.
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 978-90-04-19253-9 (hardback : alk. paper) 1. Temple of Jerusalem
( Jerusalem)—Congresses. I. Fine, Steven. II. Feldman, Louis H. III. Center for Israel
Studies (Yeshiva University) IV. Title. V. Series.

BM655.T45 2011
296.4’91—dc22 2010045612

ISSN 1571-5000
ISBN 978 90 04 19253 9

Copyright 2011 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands.

Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Hotei Publishing,
IDC Publishers, Martinus Nijhoff Publishers and VSP.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated,

stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means,
electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior
written permission from the publisher.

Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by

Koninklijke Brill NV provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to
The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910,
Danvers, MA 01923, USA.
Fees are subject to change.
 CONTENTS

Preface ......................................................................................... ix
Steven Fine, Yeshiva University

Words of Celebration ................................................................. xiii

Richard M. Joel, Yeshiva University

1. Inauguration of the Tabernacle Service at Sinai ................. 1

Gary A. Anderson, University of Notre Dame

2. God as Refuge and Temple as Refuge in the Psalms ......... 17

Shalom E. Holtz, Yeshiva University

3. “See, I Have Called by the Renowned Name of Bezalel, Son

of Uri . . .”: Josephus’ Portrayal of the Biblical “Architect” ... 27
Steven Fine, Yeshiva University

4. The Temple Scroll: A Utopian Temple Plan for Second

Temple Times ........................................................................ 45
Lawrence H. Schiffman, New York University

5. From Toleration to Destruction: Roman Policy and the

Jewish Temple ....................................................................... 57
Miriam Ben Zeev, Ben Gurion University

6. Notes on the Virtual Reconstruction of the Herodian Period

Temple and Courtyards ........................................................ 69
Joshua Schwartz and Yehoshua Peleg, Bar-Ilan University

7. Envisioning the Sanctuaries of Israel—The Academic and

Creative Process of Archaeological Model Making ............. 91
Leen Ritmeyer, Trinity Southwest University

8. Construction, Destruction, and Reconstruction: The

Temple in Pesiqta Rabbati ....................................................... 105
Rivka Ulmer, Bucknell University
vi contents

9. The Mosaic Tabernacle as the Only Legitimate Sanctuary:

The Biblical Tabernacle in Samaritanism .......................... 125
Reinhard Pummer, University of Ottawa

10. Why Is There No Zoroastrian Central Temple?:

A Thought Experiment ....................................................... 151
Yaakov Elman, Yeshiva University

11. Rival Claims: Christians, Muslims, and the Jerusalem

Holy Places .......................................................................... 171
Frank E. Peters, New York University

12. Imagining the Temple in Late Medieval Spanish

Altarpieces ............................................................................ 183
Vivian B. Mann, Jewish Theological Seminary

13. Images of the Temple in Sefer ha-Bahir ................................ 199

Jonathan V. Dauber, Yeshiva University

14. Interpreting “The Resting of the Shekhinah”: Exegetical

Implications of the Theological Debate among
Maimonides, Nahmanides, and Sefer ha-Hinnukh ................ 237
Mordechai Z. Cohen, Yeshiva University

15. Remembering the Temple: Commemoration and

Catastrophe in Ashkenazi Culture ...................................... 275
Jacob J. Schacter, Yeshiva University

16. Some Trends in Temple Studies from the Renaissance to

the Enlightenment ............................................................... 303
Matt Goldish, The Ohio State University

17. “Jerusalem Rebuilt”: The Temple in the Fin-de-siècle

Zionist Imagination ............................................................. 329
Jess Olson, Yeshiva University

18. Avi Yonah’s Model of Second Temple Jerusalem and the

Development of Israeli Visual Culture ............................... 349
Maya Balakirsky Katz, Touro College
 contents vii

19. Jerusalem during the First and Second Temple Periods:

Recent Excavations and Discoveries on and near the
Temple Mount ..................................................................... 365
Ann E. Killebrew, The Pennsylvania State University

20. Digging the Temple Mount: Archaeology and the

Arab-Israeli Conict from the British Mandate to the
Present .................................................................................. 387
Robert O. Freedman, The Johns Hopkins University

Index ........................................................................................... 401

 PREFACE

One who never saw the Temple of Herod has never seen a
beautiful building.
—Babylonian Talmud, Baba Batra 4a
This claim for the beauty of Herod’s temple resonates through-
out Jewish and Roman literature of antiquity, from Josephus to
the Talmud, from Tacitus to Cassius Dio. For the rabbis to make
this claim is nonetheless quite intriguing. The temple that Herod
the Great rebuilt in Jerusalem was surrounded with suspicion from
the very rst, with many Jews fearing that once Herod took down the
Hasmonean temple, he might never rebuild it. These fears were, it
turns out, unfounded. Herod did rebuild the temple, and in record
time. He designed it according to the highest architectural standards
of his day. The architectural identity of the temple was part and par-
cel of the massive imperial construction projects initiated by Herod’s
patron, Augustus, in Rome and across the empire. Herod’s “beautiful”
building was most like a temple to the deied emperor, and on a scale
appropriate to a client king who was soon called not just “Herod” but
“Herod the Great.”
The destruction of Herod’s “one temple for the one God,” (as
Josephus describes it) in 70 CE was perhaps the most signicant
“tipping point” in the long history of the Jewish people and its search
of the Divine. Temple worship was essential to Jewish identity from
hoary biblical antiquity, from the Tabernacle in the desert to Solo-
mon’s Temple and the temple that was rebuilt under Persian imperial
sponsorship and continually under construction—both physically and
conceptually—until it was destroyed by Titus in the summer of 70 CE.
From that day to the present, Jews—at least some Jews—continued to
think about, imagine, and pray for the rebuilding of the Temple and
the messianic advent its reconstruction would signify. Along the way,
Samaritans, bearing their own unique and very ancient traditions, and
their own holy mountain, would, like Jews, ponder the Tabernacle,
and await its messianic return. Christians too developed deep concern
for the Temple, and the Haram al-Sharif is today the site of Islam’s
third most holy site, the Al Aqsa mosque.
x preface

For readers of this volume, none of this is new. What is exciting,

however, is the extent to which recent research across disciplines has
added to our understanding of this most complex phenomenon. The
essays collected here reect the ongoing scholarly concern with the
Temple of Jerusalem, across the ages and disciplines. This volume
is the product of the inaugural conference of the Yeshiva University
Center for Israel Studies which took place on May 11–12, 2008. The
Center for Israel Studies, established in 2007, nurtures excellence in
interdisciplinary scholarship and the teaching of Israel throughout his-
tory and across disciplines, with a keen focus upon both the longue durée
and the modern state. The Center for Israel Studies supports research,
conferences, publications, museum exhibitions, public programs and
educational opportunities that enhance awareness and study of Israel
in all of its complexities.
It is my pleasant duty to thank the many people who have made
this collection possible, beginning with the authors themselves. The
manuscript was prepared for submission by a team of Yeshiva Univer-
sity undergraduate and graduate students. I thank Michael Cinnamon,
David Danzig, Simcha Gross, Gila Kletenik, Joseph Offenbacher,
Jackie Rosenswieg, Anna Socher, Matthew Williams, and especially
James Nikraftar, who led the student team. As always, I am pleased
to thank the people at E. J. Brill for their professionalism and kind-
ness in bringing this volume to press. Finally, the Center for Israel
Studies is the brainchild of Richard M. Joel, the president of Yeshiva
University and Morton Lowengrub, our Vice President for Academic
Affairs. I have been most fortunate to guide and form the Center for
Israel Studies since its inception, and am gratied to present this, the
rst academic publication of the Center.
This volume, like the conference upon which it is based, is ded-
icated to Professor Louis H. Feldman, the Abraham Wouk Family
Professor of Classics and Literature at Yeshiva University. Professor
Feldman is completing his fty-fourth year as a member of the Yeshiva
faculty, an astonishingly long career during which he has taken the
role of mentor to generations of our students. To this day, Professor
Feldman’s inuence and personal charisma animate our campus, as
they do his classroom. With that, Professor Feldman is the doyen of all
scholars of the Second Temple period, the undisputed world authority
on the writings of Flavius Josephus. This volume is a small token of
 preface xi

the respect and affection in which the faculty, students and community
of Yeshiva University hold Professor Louis H. Feldman, a true gavra
rabba be-Yisrael.

Steven Fine
New York City
Israel Independence Day, 5770
April 20, 2010
 WORDS OF CELEBRATION

Richard M. Joel
President, Yeshiva University

It is my honor to join in this celebration of Professor Louis H. Feld-

man. Professor Feldman has taught at Yeshiva University since 1955,
when the renowned scholar of Philo of Alexandria, Jewish thinker and
second president of Yeshiva University, Samuel Belkin, brought this
newly minted Harvard-trained classicist to our campus. A skilled aca-
demic “talent scout,” Belkin could see even then that the young Louis
Feldman was destined to be a great scholar. As a classicist and as a
traditional Jew, Louis was brought to Washington Heights to exem-
plify and teach the careful “synthesis” between traditional Judaism and
western culture that Yeshiva so prizes, a synthesis whose origins Belkin
traced back to Greco-Roman antiquity.
More than half a century later, we can appreciate the richness of
Professor Feldman’s contributions to Yeshiva University and to the
world of scholarship. His writings on Judaism under Greece and Rome
include numerous monographs, hundreds of articles and translations of
enduring and foundational value. Professor Feldman has single hand-
edly moved the great Jewish historian Josephus from the periphery of
scholarly interest to the very center of that discussion. The titles of his
recent monographs, Jew and Gentile in the Ancient World (1993), Josephus’s
Interpretation of the Bible (1999), Remember Amalek!: Vengeance, Zealotry, and
Group Destruction in the Bible According to Philo, Pseudo-Philo, and Josephus
(2004) and Judaism and Hellenism Reconsidered (2006), evoke the range of
Professor Feldman’s interests.
But Professor Feldman’s legacy expands far beyond his written
word. As president of Yeshiva, I am privileged to observe and meet
almost daily with Louis’ greatest achievement, his students. Louis Feld-
man has built his career around mentoring students, bringing to the
task an inimitable passion for teaching which is only matched by his
knowledge, his keen wit and the playful glimmer in his eye. Professor
Feldman’s students are among the most prominent scholars of ancient
Judaism in the world. It is less known that they also number among
the most prominent rabbis, lawyers, judges, economists, doctors, social
xiv words of celebration

workers and teachers as well. At every turn, I meet yet another hasid
of “Professor Feldman,” each with his own endearing “Louis story.”
Astonishingly, while many of these students are well past retirement
age, Professor Feldman’s newest crop of acolytes are Yeshiva College
freshmen.
I am especially excited that the celebration of Louis Feldman
recorded in this volume documents the inaugural conference of
Yeshiva University’s Center for Israel Studies, The Temple of Jerusalem:
From Moses to the Messiah. The Center for Israel Studies, established
in 2007, is an expression of the longstanding relationship between
Yeshiva University and the land and state of Israel—in all of its rich-
ness and complexity. I thank the director of our center, Professor Ste-
ven Fine, for organizing this project, and am especially proud that our
undergraduate and graduate students were brought in to the editing
process and helped to bring this volume to press.
The rabbis of old held that mentorship is the highest level of teach-
ing, and a prerequisite to substantive learning. For more than half
a century, Louis Feldman has been the “mentor” to generations of
students and readers around the globe. Congratulations, Louis! We all
await your next study, and your students await you in class.
AVI YONAH’S MODEL OF SECOND TEMPLE JERUSALEM
AND THE DEVELOPMENT OF ISRAELI VISUAL CULTURE

Maya Balakirsky Katz

Touro College

Before the twentieth century, scale models of the ancient Jerusalem

landscape enjoyed three periods of popularity for reasons that con-
tinue to resonate in contemporary model-making and reception. Dur-
ing the early Renaissance, the desire to establish humanity in a grand
scheme singled out ancient Jerusalem as a singular site of synthesis.
During the Protestant Reformation, the trend towards scriptural liter-
alness gave rise to the fashioning of Bible lands. And in the late nine-
teenth century, the development of the eld of archaeology prompted
the construction of models for analytic use.1 The second half of the
twentieth century should be added to these stages in the revitalization
of the Jerusalem archaeological model, situated within post-Holocaust
conceptions of Jewish patriotism and Jewish statehood in the newly
formed State of Israel. As both an ancient, sacred site and modern,
scientic space, models of ancient Jerusalem vacillate between inter-
pretations of mythic landscapes and empirical materializations of
geography and history.2
The most famous of the post-1948 Jerusalem models, known col-
loquially as the “Holyland Model,” reconstructs the Second Temple
of Jerusalem within its greater urban landscape under the scholarly
direction of archaeologist Michael Avi-Yonah. (Figure 1) The effect of
Avi-Yonah’s model is far-reaching, exerting inuence over subsequent
model-making and serving as a graphic element in Free Masonic

1
For an analysis of the relationship between archaeology, theater, and modern
tourism, see Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett’s Destination Culture: Tourism, Museums, and
Heritage (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1998). On page
194, Kirshenblatt-Gimblett observes that model villages in Plymouth Plantation result
in a “shifting locus of authenticity” between archaeological artifacts and the virtuality
of re-created space.
2
For a survey and discussion of one of the rst such modern scientic model-
makers, see Haim Goren and Rehav Rubin, “Jerusalem and Its Monuments,” Palestine
Exploration Quarterly, 128 (1996), 103–124.
350 maya balakirsky katz

screensavers and Evangelical music CD covers.3 However, I will limit

my discussion here to the model’s role as a contested symbol of Jew-
ish identity. Scholars have long understood the “ancient” as inevitably
political in the modern State of Israel, where land rights debates are
often based on historical claims.4 The Temple model both reects and
shapes this historical discourse; while the model aims to reconstruct an
ancient world, its contemporary reception simultaneously constructs
new meanings that aim to x, in spatial terms, a post-exilic Jewish
State. I will address three stages in the presentation of the model in
order to demonstrate the ways that its creators and curators engaged
it for a variety of political positions: its commission and location at
the Holyland Hotel in a Jerusalem neighborhood, its acquisition and
transfer to the Israel Museum, and its graphic use in popular culture
and artists’ projects.

1. “The Holyland Model”

The Holyland model engages political, rather than strictly archaeo-

logical, concerns, beginning with its construction in 1962–1966 dur-
ing a period of Israeli inaccessibility to the Jordanian-controlled site
of the Temple Mount. Businessman Hans Kroch commissioned the
Jerusalem model in a 1:50 ratio for an archeological-replica-museum
located in the lobby of his luxury hotel in Jerusalem’s Bayit Vegan
neighborhood in memory of his son who died in Israel’s 1948 War of
Independence. The war that claimed his son’s life also scarred much
of Jerusalem’s Old City—its Jewish communal buildings as well as the
Jewish civilian presence—leading to Kroch’s much-quoted sentiment
that, “If Jews cannot get to the holy places, the holy places will come

3
For a discussion of the Temple’s bearing on the Christian imagination, see Helen
Rosenau, Vision of the Temple: The Image of the Temple of Jerusalem in Judaism and Christianity
(London: Oresko Books, 1979).
4
For a discussion on the relationship between Zionism and archaeology in the
Mandatory era, see Steven Fine, Art and Judaism in the Greco-Roman World: Toward a New
Jewish Archaeology (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 22–34. For relevant
comments in the post-Mandatory era, see Neil Asher Silberman, A Prophet from Amongst
You: The Life of Yigael Yadin: Soldier, Scholar, and Mythmaker of Modern Israel (Reading, Mas-
sachusetts: Addison-Wesley Publishing Co., 1994). For a less sympathetic view of the
relationship between archaeological projects in Israel and Israeli national identity, see
Nadja Abu El Haj, Facts on the Ground: Archaeological Practice and Territorial Self-Fashioning
in Israeli Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001).
 avi yonah’s model of second temple jerusalem 351

to them.”5 Thus, while unable to worship at the physical site of the

Jerusalem Temple, the Jewish observer of the ancient Jerusalem model
in the Holyland Hotel achieved a level of access to a city that inscribed
Jewish presence.
And yet, by depicting Jerusalem in the rst century, Avi-Yonah nec-
essarily relied on Christian and Jewish sources (Mishna, Josephus, and
Gospel ), thereby establishing a period of mutual Jewish and Christian
interest in the City. The model achieved a level of admiration from
the academic community, partially because of Avi-Yonah’s historical
inclusion and equitable treatment of both Jewish and Christian sources.
Soon after the inauguration of the Jerusalem model in the Holyland
Hotel, Avi-Yonah wrote a telling article on “the Eternal City” for Ariel,
a journal published by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs:
Jerusalem’s status as the capital of the Holy Land is inextricably bound
up with its Biblical past: only when it was Jewish, or at least governed by
nations inspired by the Bible, was it this country’s chief city. This may appear
ancillary rather than essential, but its stormy chronicles prove that failing
a material substratum, the link between the heavenly and the worldly
city becomes more and more tenuous. The view of the Jewish Sages that
the Holy City must be a place of human habitation and not merely a
sacred ruin has been vindicated throughout the ages.6
By drawing from both Jewish and Christian source material for
archaeological data, the design of the model reected Avi-Yonah’s
historical approach to the correlation between the status of Jerusalem
and its “Judeo-Christian” presence. The term “Judeo-Christian” has
proven debatable in religious studies as it may describe no real shared
religious core, but it also designates a historical myth that establishes
western society as the only viable foundation of civilization.7 While
this depiction of the Jerusalem landscape appears bi-partisanship, it is
decisively “unmarked” by Islam, the current landlord of the Temple
site.8 Architecture historian Annabel Wharton addresses the “hypo-
thetical Muslim viewer,” who she imagines sees the modeling of Jewish

5
Wall panel in exhibition of model in Israel Museum (last visited August 2009).
6
Michael Avi-Yonah, “The Eternal City,” Ariel, 23 (Winter 1969), 10. Emphasis
my own.
7
Arthur A. Cohen, The Myth of the Judeo-Christian Tradition (New York: Harper and
Row, 1970).
8
On this point and for a discussion on the hypothetical Moslem viewer of the
model, see Annabel J. Wharton, Selling Jerusalem: Relics, Replicas, Theme Park (Chicago
and London: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 221–223.
352 maya balakirsky katz

autonomy in the past as a fantasy of spatial possession in the future.9

This is certainly the way the extremist Yisrael Hatzair movement in
Jerusalem’s Jewish Quarter used Avi-Yonah’s model in postcards that
superimposed Avi-Yonah’s model on the Dome of the Rock to adver-
tise tours of the Temple Mount in the mid-1980s. As such, the model
constructs an idyllic future by furbishing a celebrated past in ways that
could be interpreted as a contemporary military threat.
In other words, while Avi-Yonah’s model presents a tranquil upper-
class urban neighborhood, violence is read into its architectural com-
position, beginning with the designation of a “Jewish quarter” twice
the size of the contemporary Jewish quarter. While marking the
beginning of the end of the Second Temple period, the designation
of 66 CE—the First Jewish Revolt against Rome—singles out Jewish
uprising against oppression in the same vein as the national choice
for the marking of the Holocaust with the anniversary of the War-
saw Ghetto uprising. Despite Jewish defeat, the preference to record
the unagging Jewish spirit forms a vital part of the national ethos
of modern-day Israel. In fact, in order to more fully dramatize the
military threat that the Romans posed in the rst century, the Holy-
land Hotel commissioned life-size reconstructions of some of Rome’s
mightiest war machines, replete with operators to man the machines.
The display of the extraordinary force of Roman military prowess,
which succeeded in taking the city in 70 CE, offered an object lesson
in the battle for Jerusalem. Two millennia ago, Jews rebelled against
the world power of the Second Temple period in the hopes of securing
their rights to the City, and have returned in the twentieth century to
claim their birthright.
Avi-Yonah’s archaeological model was part of a wider attempt to
support and concretize the historic Jewish claim, with the archaeo-
logical past constituting a demonstration of Jewish title to the Land
of Israel. From his early career, Avi Yonah ranked among political
leaders who put stock in archaeology, hoping that archaeological evi-
dence would establish Jewish connections to the Land of Israel. One
of these key gures was Shmuel Zanvil Kahana, ofcially the direc-
tor of the Israeli Ministry of Religious Affairs and unofcially “the
person in charge of the mountain,” who proceeded to imprint “a tra-
ditional Jewish character on the Israeli landscape.” Historian Doron

9
Wharton, Selling Jerusalem, 223.
 avi yonah’s model of second temple jerusalem 353

Bar characterizes this sort of religious archaeology as “a rather new

agenda whose purpose was to link the ancient history of the Land
of Israel to the current history in the making of the State of Israel.”10
Avi-Yonah, working as record ofcer of the Palestine Department of
Antiquities before the War of Independence and, after 1948, serving
as the scientic secretary of the Israel Department of Antiquities until
1953, likewise worked to identify and establish Jewish sacred spaces
and historical landmarks. As part of the efforts to link the modern
Jewish state to biblical or ancient roots, Avi-Yonah compiled the
now-classic Jewish Holy Places for the Jewish National Committee, a
comprehensive list of Jewish holy sites, identifying over 400 signicant
locations.11 Both the list and the model aimed to record the historic
Jewish allegiance to the land and when Avi-Yonah’s principle textual
sources did not address specic design elements from the Temple such
as the façade of the Herodian Second Temple, Avi-Yonah turned to
the somewhat murky eld of “tradition” and images engraved upon
ancient artifacts, such as a second-century coin depicting a standing
Temple minted during the Bar Kokhba Revolt when the sanctuary
lay in ruins but, Avi-Yonah asserts, “must still have been a landmark
in liberated Jerusalem.”12 In drawing upon ancient images of a much-
changed Jerusalem in the era of Hadrian after 135 CE (i.e., almost a
century after the date of the model ), Avi-Yonah incorporated images
of yearning for the restoration of the Temple into his reconstruction
of Jerusalem on the eve of her fall.13
Beyond these relationships between the politicized Mount Zion
and the archaeological model, the stages of development in the Holy-
land Hotel model bear a traceable relationship with Israeli ownership
over the land. Subject to constant and intense academic scrutiny in
the decades after Avi-Yonah’s completion of the model in 1966, the

10
Doron Bar, “Reconstructing the Past: The Creation of Jewish Sacred Space in
the State of Israel, 1948–1967,” Israel Studies 13:3 (Fall 2008), 5; ft 22.
11
Michael Avi-Yonah, Jewish Holy Places in the Western Part of Palestine Under British
Mandate (n.d.) [Hebrew]; idem, A History of the Holy Land ( Jerusalem: Steimatzky’s
Agency and Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1968); also see Avi-Yonah’s earlier edited vol-
ume, Book of Jerusalem ( Jerusalem and Tel Aviv: The Bialik Institute and Dvir Publish-
ing House, 1956) [Hebrew].
12
Michael Avi-Yonah, “The Façade of Herod’s Temple, An Attempted Recon-
struction,” Religions in Antiquity: Essays in Memory of E. R. Goodenough, ed. J. Neusner
(Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1968), 328.
13
Avi-Yonah does not rule out the possibility that Bar Kokhba actually did rebuild
the Temple during his three-year hold on Jerusalem.
354 maya balakirsky katz

model underwent a series of renovations to conform with signicant

ndings established by archaeological excavations once the Old City
was again accessible to the Israeli government in the post-1967 era
(although the Moslem Waqf maintained administration over the Tem-
ple Mount site).14 Archaeological excavations revealed, for instance,
that the model erred on the location of Robinson’s Arch, one of the
entrances to the Temple, and needed to be revised. Scholars, since
1975 under the direction of Avi-Yonah’s student, Yoram Tsafrir,
occasionally re-model and update Avi-Yonah’s miniature city so that
the model is never a completely nished work, but an architectural
palimpsest charting the development of archaeological discovery and
interpretation in the State of Israel. The ow of inuence between
the post-1967 city and the model is somewhat more porous than the
changes recorded on the model suggest. Just as Leon Templo’s 1642
model of Solomon’s Temple inuenced the seventeenth-century archi-
tecture of Amsterdam’s Esnoga synagogue, city planners occasionally
turned to archaeological models of ancient Jerusalem in order to shape
modern Jerusalem.15 The modern Jerusalem planning team consulted
Avi-Yonah in the city planning after the reunication of Jerusalem in
1967, an advisory role earned in part by his extensive knowledge of
the archaeological City as demonstrated by his model. The Commit-
tee for the Master Plan for the Old City, ever mindful of the City’s
standing as a Biblical space, took archaeological ndings into account,
as well as making provisions in the overall scheme for projected future
excavation in the area.16

14
Michael Avi-Yonah, Pictorial Guide to the Model of Ancient Jerusalem at the Time of
the Second Temple in the Grounds of the Holy Land Hotel Jerusalem, Israel, revised by Yoram
Tsafrir (Herzlia: Palphot, circa 1987).
15
For more about the history of Leon’s models, see Adri K. Offenberg,” Jacob
Jehuda Leon (1602–1675) and his Model of the Temple,” Jewish-Christian Relations in
the Seventeenth Century. Studies and Documents, eds. J. van den Berg and E. van der Wall
(Dordrecht: Springer, 1988), 95–115.
16
The Ministry of Interior of the State of Israel and the Municipality of Jerusalem
(Arieh Sharon and planning team of the outline town planning scheme), Planning Jeru-
salem: The Master Plan for the Old City of Jerusalem and Its Environs (Israel: Municipality of
Jerusalem and the Ministry of the Interior of the State of Israel, 1973, republished by
New York: McGraw-Hill Book Co., 1973). See also Michael Avi-Yonah and Ephraim
Stern, Encyclopedia of archaeological excavations in the Holy Land, 4 vols. ( Jerusalem: Israel
Exploration Society and Masada Press, c. 1975–1978).
 avi yonah’s model of second temple jerusalem 355

The model achieved a level of familiarity with the Israeli public

and became a popular destination with tourists, transitioning into a
poignant national symbol of the 1967 War.

2. The Museological Model

With scheduled construction on the hotel’s site in 2005–2006, the

Holyland proprietors negotiated a transfer from the Bayit Vegan neigh-
borhood to the Israel Museum. In its new location, the model and
the viewers’ experience of the model went through several signicant
transformations. In its location on the grounds of the Holyland Hotel,
the adjacent “Holyshop” serviced tourists as pilgrims, selling secu-
lar and sacred souvenirs, such as key chains, postcards, bookmarks,
wallet-sized foldable maps, Sabbath candlesticks, Hanukkah menorahs
in Jerusalem stone, and illustrated catalogs of the model. Previously
the central object in the forested hilltop of the Holyland Hotel, the
model’s appearance at the Israel Museum necessitated its integration
into a complex mix of ne art and signature architecture, including
the Billy Rose Sculpture Garden and the Shrine of the Book complex.
In an effort to connect the modern model and the ancient subject
that it represents, the museum introduced an Information and Study
Center with a theater to show a lm recreation of the period and com-
puter access to a virtual tour of the model.17 The virtual visitor to the
museum enjoys more immediate access to the City of the Temple than
the observer of the model from the museum’s observation deck. The
program simulates a pedestrian’s perspective, allowing, for example,
the female observer to “walk” corridors reserved for the male priestly
class, transforming a tradition of ritual hegemony into a shared and
democratic cultural heritage. This contextual display treated the model
to a more democratic value system, which lent itself to more pluralistic
interpretations of the model’s signicance.
By becoming part of a vast collection of art and archaeological arti-
facts, the model lost some of its authority as a literal recreation of
Jewish sacred space in Herodian Jerusalem, while at the same time

17
See Miriam Simon, “Jerusalem’s Glory Days,” Eretz Magazine, http://www.eretz
.com/NEW/templemodel.shtml (Last accessed September 12, 2009).
356 maya balakirsky katz

attaining some credibility as a museum-worthy treasure.18 The concep-

tual bridge between the Land of the Bible and the modern city is the
model’s performance as a “work of art,” whose aesthetic—rather than
scientic—qualities justify its place in the Israel Museum.19 The new
location is meaningful, for unlike the more traditional (if also more
commercial ) approach of the Holyland proprietors, whose tourist-
observers treated the model as the literal transcription of history and
scripture, the Israel Museum treats the model as a work of art situated
between Isamu Noguchi’s sculpture garden and Frederick Kiesler’s
and Armand Bartos’ postmodern Shrine of the Book. As a work of art
and not strictly an archaeological model, the museum decided to main-
tain some of Avi-Yonah’s choices while acknowledging their historical
inaccuracy, such as Avi-Yonah’s modeling of red-tiled roofs for the
surrounding villas. The preservation of Avi-Yonah’s art, even when it
represents archaeological errors, for whatever picturesque qualities the
model conveys, marks the model’s transition from a political symbol
to a cultural one.
This new understanding of the model as an Israeli work of art casts
the Temple as a cultural space, and, as such, implicates the model in
some of the debates surrounding Israeli museology. From its rst con-
ception, religious leaders often characterized the Israel Museum as an
institution that contradicted religious Jewish principles, both because
of its display of irreligious works and, more fundamentally, because
of its construction of Jewish identity in cultural terms.20 The museum
director projected that the acquisition of the Temple model would
lead to higher visitor numbers from the Orthodox Jewish community
despite the purportedly problematic human sculptures in the museum
complex, but did not address the ways that the new location would
alter the model itself from the recreation of a Jewish religious site to

18
Yoram Bilu, “The Sanctication of Space in Israel Civil Religion and Folk Juda-
ism,” Jews in Israel: Contemporary Social and Cultural Patterns, eds. U. Rehun and C. I.
Waxman (Hanover and London: University Press of New England/Brandeis Univer-
sity Press, 2003).
19
Yigal Zalmona, The Israel Museum at 40: Masterworks of Beauty and Sanctity ( Jerusa-
lem: The Israel Museum, 2005).
20
For one such example, see my discussion on the correspondence between Rabbi
Menachem Mendel Schneerson and the sculptor Jacques Lipchitz in Maya Balakirsky
Katz, “Trademarks of Faith: Chabad and Chanukah in America,” Modern Judaism
29:2 (May 2009), 239–267.
 avi yonah’s model of second temple jerusalem 357

a cultural object.21 While in recent years a predominantly religious

visitorship frequented the model at the Holyland Hotel, its location
at the avowedly secular Israel Museum challenges the Orthodox view
that religion, rather than culture, denes the Jewish State.22 This epis-
temological hedge between Jewish national identity and Jewish art rst
found roots in the Bezalel School and Museum, the direct predecessor
to the Israel Museum. The model’s residence at the Israel Museum
marked the centennial of the founding of Boris Schatz’s Bezalel as
a Jewish national movement in Jerusalem and a poetic conclusion
to his museological mission to reinvigorate Jewish identity through
culture rather than religion. Schatz infamously dreamed that his
museum would play the part of the future Temple in a rebuilt Jerusa-
lem, describing the Third Temple as a “national museum” that would
one day guard “the nation’s sanctities.”23 In Zev Raban’s frontispiece
illustration to Schatz’s oft-quoted utopian work, Yerushalayim ha-Benuya,
Jerusalem Rebuilt, Schatz is shown receiving instruction on the roof of
the Bezalel building from the Biblical architect of the mishkan, Bezalel
ben Uri. Schatz’s replacement of the sacred Temple with a secular
museum, in which no real distinction is made between implements of
worship and national artistic treasures, continued to reverberate at the
Israel Museum a century later.
In anticipation of the inauguration of Avi-Yonah’s model, the Israel
Museum staged a self-reexive exhibition in which culture formed
a constitutive role in the Israeli national identity. “Masterworks of
Beauty and Sanctity” marked the museum’s fortieth anniversary in
2005, positioning the acquisition of the model in relationship to the
Israel Museum’s institutional mandate. The Beauty and Sanctity exhi-
bition consistently employed the standard rhetoric of contemporary
museums by locating art as emotively inhabiting the place of the
religious artifact.24 “If, in the secular world, the sanctication of an
authentic artwork is a relic of an ancient religious feeling, this is due

21
See Judy Siegel, “Improved Second Temple Model a Natural Fit for Israel
Museum,” Jerusalem Post ( July 6, 2006), 6.
22
The catalog hailed Danziger’s sculpture of Nimrod as the quintessential modern
Israeli icon.
23
Boris Schatz, Jerusalem Rebuilt ( Jerusalem: Bezalel Academy, 1924), chapter 1
[Hebrew]. These sorts of statements need to be considered in view of the prevalent
freemasonry in Schatz’s milieu and not necessarily as Jewish messianism.
24
See Rosalind Krauss, Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths (Cam-
bridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1986).
358 maya balakirsky katz

to the fact that the artwork did initially have a ritual and magical
role—one that for centuries cast its shadow over what later became
its aesthetic role.”25 The exhibition brought together works such as
Nicolas Poussin’s The Destruction and the Sack of the Temple of Jews (1625–
26) in order to emphasize that Jerusalem and the Temple remained
points of fascination throughout history and, by virtue of the work’s
provenance history, ultimately belonged to the modern State of Israel.26
Museum Director James Snyder wrote that the Beauty and Sanctity
exhibition is “presented in the context of our standing as Israel’s pre-
eminent museum,” which offers “a unique opportunity to experience
the history of world culture in relation to the rich archaeological past
and modern visual traditions of Jewish and Israeli culture.”27 These
sliding denitions of “beauty” and “sanctity” provided a framework
for the transportation of the Holyland model to the Israel Museum.
While museums have often been compared to cathedrals, the location
of a Second Temple model in Jerusalem’s Israel Museum situates the
Temple in the context of the national museum. The Second Temple
model’s new location at the Israel Museum cast the museum as the
cultural successor to the Temple as the site for the national treasures
of the Jewish people.

3. The Messianic Model

Soon after Avi-Yonah’s model moved to the Israel Museum, Ortho-

dox institutions commissioned their own Second Temple models in an
attempt to re-establish the stewardship of the religious narrative. The
best-known of these recent projects is the Jewish Quarter’s Temple

25
Zalmona, The Israel Museum at 40, 130.
26
Curator Yigal Zalmona emphasized this point when he summarized a prov-
enance history for Poussin’s work that articulated the museum’s sense of its institu-
tional mandate: “After Richelieu’s death, the painting changed hands many times
and eventually reached England. Its whereabouts were unknown from the late 1700s
until 1995, when it was rediscovered by the art historian Sir Denis Mahon, covered
in layers of lacquer and dust, and presented as the work of a minor artist depicting
the conquest of Carthage. Restored to its original state, it was donated to the Israel
Museum in 1998, thus returning “home” to the site in which the events it describes
originally took place.” Zalmona, The Israel Museum at 40, 82.
27
James Snyder, “Forward,” The Israel Museum at 40, 131. For the role that muse-
ums play in Israel’s national identity, see William Schack, “The Art Museums of
Israel,” Art Journal 25:4 (Summer, 1966), 378–384.
 avi yonah’s model of second temple jerusalem 359

Institute that not only built a Temple model, but fashioned its sacred
implements for a future Temple in the hopes of becoming “active par-
ticipants and not simply spectators” in the Redemption. Aish HaTo-
rah, an Orthodox outreach (kiruv) organization and yeshiva, recently
installed model-maker Michael Osanis’s Second Temple model (1:60)
on the roof of its headquarters’ building in the Old City of Jerusa-
lem. Following on the heels of other Aish HaTorah projects such as
video-cam tours of tunnels adjacent to the Western Wall, which Aish
HaTorah bills not only as an archeological wonder, but “a whole
new spiritual world,” the model emphatically ties religion to land.28
Located directly across from the historic Temple Mount, the model
sits on a balconied glass observation deck that presents an aerial view
of the Dome of the Rock and the Western Wall. (Figure 3) Here, the
model of the Second Temple is a pedagogic tool for the demonstra-
tion of the centrality of religion in Jewish national life, targeted mainly
towards non-observant Jews who have made their way to Jerusalem
as tourists. The display is the rst step in a broader initiative for Aish
HaTorah’s projected “Exploratorium of Jewish History,” which direc-
tor Ephraim Shore imagines as an “interactive, dynamic museum that
will basically give people an experience of all of Jewish history from
Abraham to the present day.”29 According to Shore, the exhibition of
the Second Temple makes connections between the Jewish identity
and its spiritual heritage, arguing that Judaism’s greatest contributions
“were nurtured, studied and exported to humanity from the center
of our spiritual world, in the Temple.”30 The adoption of the Temple
model by organizations such as the Temple Institute and Aish HaTo-
rah allows the organizations to engage the “objective” archaeological
model for some of its most subjective or faith-based claims.
Rather than commissioning new models of the Temple the way
Aish HaTorah did, many Orthodox visual projects directly employed
Avi-Yonah’s Temple model for images of messianic Jerusalem by using
a graphic version of Avi-Yonah’s Temple decontextualized from its
Herodian environment oating in the heavens for ephemeral effect or

28
http://international.aish.com/seminars/tunneltours/ (Last accessed February
13, 2010).
29
http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/132752 (Last accessed
September 12, 2009).
30
http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/132752 (Last accessed
September 12, 2009).
360 maya balakirsky katz

collaged into the modern landscape over the Islamic Dome of the Rock.
One of the most public and contentious uses of Avi-Yonah’s model
within Jewish contexts comes from the public messianic campaign of
Brooklyn-based Chabad Hasidim. When Chabad’s last dynastic leader,
Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson (1902–1994), interpreted the
fall of the Soviet Union and the American war with Iraq in 1990–1991
as signs of the arrival of the messianic era, some of his followers visu-
ally presented their leader as the long-awaited Messiah by combin-
ing façade-images of Chabad’s Brooklyn headquarters building at 770
Eastern Parkway with Avi-Yonah’s decontextualized Temple model.31
(Figure 4) The linkage between buildings, one familiar and prosaic and
the other distant and mythic, situated the Brooklyn religious leader as
the future leader of the Jewish people. Whereas the model’s context
in the ancient world necessarily relies on literary interpretations of
extant sources, the placement of the model in a future city throws the
model into an allegorical light. By adopting a house in Brooklyn and
linking it to Avi-Yonah’s model in the guise of the future Temple,
Chabad historicized its Brooklyn building, not in ancient Jewish his-
tory, but in its anticipated role as a prophetic landmark.32
The life and work of the artist Yael Avi-Yonah, daughter of Michael
Avi-Yonah, demonstrates the complex and layered codes of mean-
ing assigned to the “archaeological” Second Temple model and its
transition into a subject for messianic images. The model played a
formative role in Yael’s professional and personal life, even serving as
the location of her wedding, presumably the only such ceremony ever
held at either the original site or the model. (Figure 5) Yael Avi-Yonah
worked as a draftsman for her father and some of Israel’s leading
archaeologists while a student at Bezalel School of Art, and the ancient
Jerusalem landscape is one of her career’s most frequently recurring
themes. In one example, Yael painted her father’s model surrounded
by “the special aura of the dawn light” and a “cloud formation” in
the shape of the Hebrew letter “shin”—which stands for one of the
names of God—as a sign of Divine presence.33 Although Yael utilizes

31
See Maya Balakirsky Katz, “On the Master-Disciple Relationship in Hasidic
Visual Culture: The Life and Afterlife of Rabbinical Portraits in Chabad,” Images: A
Journal of Jewish Art and Visual Culture, 1 (Fall 2007), 55–79.
32
I devote a lengthy discussion to this subject in my forthcoming book on Chabad
visual culture, The Visual Culture of Chabad [Cambridge University Press].
33
http://www.art.net/~vision/yael2d1.htm (Last accessed March 3, 2010).
 avi yonah’s model of second temple jerusalem 361

an urban organization and stylized buildings indicative of her father’s

Jerusalem landscape, she also employs surreal color combinations and
atmospheric manipulations to her view of Jerusalem. Since the 1970s,
Yael moved from delicate, intricate drawings to looser, translucent
shapes in large oil-paintings, embracing anaglyphic art, essentially the
illusionistic effect facilitated by the red-green glasses handed out at 3-D
movies. With a more limited color palette and the use of the glasses
to achieve this effect, Yael reveals an “inherent ‘dual’ reality.”34 The
insistence on mediated viewing produces unstable, interactive, and
evolving forms of vision for subjects, which the artist singles out as
inherently dichotomous. Becoming afliated with the Chabad move-
ment later in her life, Yael executed numerous portraits of Schneerson
using this technique, both alone and oating over the future city with
a Temple model crowning his head. (Figure 6) Imbuing her work with
mysticism, Yael Avi-Yonah returns the mythic to the image of the
Temple, despite her father’s attempts to make its scientic processes
manifest in archaeological model-making. And despite a generation of
concerted effort to place her father’s model within the contemporary
Jewish possession of the land, Yael’s re-modeling demonstrates how
the ancient Jerusalem model continues to fuel the non-Zionist mes-
sianic imagination as well.
Michael Avi-Yonah’s model mirrored the Jewish psyche through
the last four and a half decades of nation building and self-reection.
The migration of the Second Temple Jerusalem model from one exhi-
bition to another, and from one discipline to another, helped to pro-
duce a powerful denominational symbol that has developed its own
condensed and imbedded signage. Within the archaizing trends of
modern Israeli culture, the model accommodated dialogue between
competing ideologies and offered opportunities to “model” global
worldviews in miniature.

34
http://www.art.net/~vision/yael2f.htm (Last accessed July 3, 2009).
362 maya balakirsky katz

Figure 1: Temple Model, Israel Museum. Photo by author.

Figure 2: Moving the model to Israel Museum. Photo by Yaffa Phillips.

 avi yonah’s model of second temple jerusalem 363

Figure 3: View from observation deck of Aish HaTorah Temple model

exhibition. Photo by Ilya Yablonsky.

Figure 4: Temple model and 770 from 770live.com.

364 maya balakirsky katz

Figure 5: Yael Avi-Yonah and Robert Goldfarb wedding.

Figure 6: Yael Avi-Yonah, The Future City.

 JERUSALEM DURING THE FIRST AND SECOND TEMPLE
PERIODS: RECENT EXCAVATIONS AND DISCOVERIES ON
AND NEAR THE TEMPLE MOUNT

Ann E. Killebrew
The Pennsylvania State University

When Jerusalem rst appears in biblical history, it is a location unaf-

liated with any individual Israelite tribe. In the Bible, Jerusalem is
described as a Jebusite settlement, conquered and chosen by David to
be the capital of his newly united kingdom (II Samuel 5:4–11). Today
it is again the capital of a Jewish state. In the three thousand years that
separate the modern city from David’s settlement on the southeast-
ern spur of Mount Moriah, Jerusalem is a contested city, considered
sacred by the world’s three monotheistic faiths: Judaism, Christian-
ity and Islam. Its spiritual signicance encompasses past, present and
future. Jerusalem represents the glories of the past and encounters
between humankind and God as in the Akedah, where tradition places
Abraham at Mount Moriah in connection with the binding of Isaac
(Genesis 22:1–3). The city’s fate was determined with the building of
the rst Temple by King Solomon, when God descended to earth to
reside among humankind (I Kings 9:10). Jerusalem also represents the
future, the ultimate union between humanity and God, when the in-
gathering of the exiles will bring the people to the divine fold, to be
united forever. And lastly, Jerusalem expresses the present desire for
spiritual uplifting—for a personal, religious and mystical experience.
In more recent history, Jerusalem has become the center of erce
political conict which has cast a shadow over its idealized image as
a heavenly city.1 No less disillusioning are the at times ambiguous
physical remains from archaeological excavations and modern critical

1
See e.g. Meron Benvenisti, City of Stone: The Hidden History of Jerusalem (Los Ange-
les: University of California Press, 1996); Bernard Wasserstein, Divided Jerusalem: The
Struggle for the Holy City, 2nd ed. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002); Rivka
Gonen, Contested Holiness: Jewish, Muslim and Christian Perspectives on the Temple Mount in
Jerusalem ( Jersey City, NJ: Ktav Publishing House, 2003); Tamar Mayer and Sulei-
mann Ali Mourad, eds., Jerusalem: Idea and Reality (New York: Routledge, 2008).