According to Jewish legends recorded in several books of the Old Testament, a temple to the Jewish god constructed in Jerusalem in c.975 BCE by Solomon, king of Israel, to replace the tabernacle used to house the Ark of the Covenant since the time of Moses. According to the biblical texts the temple was a small structure, 30 feet wide and 90 feet long (9 x 27 meters), with a porch 15 feet (4.5 meters) deep in front of its doors, covered inside and out with gold leaf. The space inside was divided into a main room, the Holy Place, and an inner room, the Holy of Holies, where the Ark of the Covenant and several other sacred objects were kept. Only priests entered the Holy Place, and the high priest alone had the right once a year to enter the Holy of Holies. Outside were a series of open courts: the Court of the Priests, where sacrifices took place; the Court of the Children of Israel, where Jews gathered to worship; and the Court of the Gentiles.
According to the same sources, this First Temple was looted and destroyed during the fall of Jerusalem to the Babylonians in 586 BCE. The Second Temple was begun by Zerubbabel, a Jewish aristocrat who served the Persian empire as governor of Judah, in 535 BCE and finished in 515. The Third Temple, the most magnificent of the three, was built by Herod the Great in 18 BCE and destroyed along with the rest of Jerusalem during the Jewish revolt against Rome in 70 CE. A few traces of this final temple have been discovered by archeologists, but no definite traces of the first two have ever been found. While this seems likely enough, given the history of continued construction and reconstruction on the site, some historians have argued on this basis that the First Temple never existed outside Jewish folklore.
As the most lavishly described building project in the Bible, and a constant source of metaphors for Christian churches from the late Roman period onward, the Temple of Solomon became a central symbol in the Christian west. The Knights Templar took their name from the location of their original headquarters, near the supposed site of the Temple, and the medieval stoneworkers’ guilds that eventually became Freemasonry used legends set during the Temple’s construction as a basis for their rituals. See Freemasonry; Hiram Abiff; Knights Templar.
SOURCE:
The Element Encyclopedia of Secret Societies : the ultimate a-z of ancient mysteries, lost civilizations and forgotten wisdom written by John Michael Greer – © John Michael Greer 2006