The "Third Temple" (, , ) refers to a hypothetical rebuilt Temple in Jerusalem. It would succeed the First Temple and the Second Temple, the former having been destroyed during the Babylonian siege of Jerusalem in and the latter having been destroyed during the Roman siege of Jerusalem in 70 CE. The notion of and desire for the Third Temple is sacred in Judaism, particularly in Orthodox Judaism. It would be the most sacred place of worship for Jews. The Hebrew Bible holds that Jewish prophets called for its construction prior to, or in tandem with, the Messianic Age. The building of the Third Temple also plays a major role in some interpretations of Christian eschatology.
Among some groups of devout Jews, anticipation of a future project to build the Third Temple at the Temple Mount in the Old City of Jerusalem has been espoused as an ideological motive in Israel. The building of the Third Temple has been contested by Muslims worldwide, as the esplanade—known in Islam as Haram al-Sharif—is the site of the Al-Aqsa Mosque and the Dome of the Rock, constituting the third-holiest site in Islam. Because any physical reconstruction would alter or compromise these centuries-old Islamic sanctuaries, advocacy for the Third Temple remains one of the primary religious and political flashpoints of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. The project also faces unresolved internal halakhic disputes within Orthodox Judaism regarding divine intervention, as well as archaeological debate over the sanctuary's exact historical footprint. Most of the international community has refrained from recognizing any sovereignty over Jerusalem due to conflicting territorial claims between Israel and the Palestinian National Authority, as both sides have asserted it as their capital city.
Attempts at rebuilding Since the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE by the Romans, some Jews have expressed their desire to build a Third Temple on the Temple Mount, with a formal petition for a rebuilt Temple included in the Conservative and Orthodox Amidah. Although it remains unbuilt, the notion of and desire for a Third Temple has traditionally been an integral principle in Judaism.
Following the Second Temple's destruction, "most rabbis adopted the position that Jewish law prohibits reconstructing the Holy Temple [Third Temple] prior to the age of messianic redemption, or that the law is too ambiguous and that the messiah must come first."
Bar Kokhba revolt
In the early 2nd century CE, Roman Emperor Hadrian granted permission to rebuild the destroyed Second Temple—probably as a means to pacify the Jews after the wider Diaspora Revolt and the specifically Judaean Kitos War—but changed his mind. There used to be a minority of scholars claiming that the forces of Simon bar Kokhba captured Jerusalem from the Romans in 132 and held it for about three years, but there is little mainstream support for the concept. The dwindling hope for regaining Jerusalem led to the writing of the Mishna, as the religious leaders believed that the next attempt to rebuild the temple might be centuries away, and memory of the practices and ceremonies must be documented, otherwise they would be lost. Following the suppression of the revolt, the Roman authorities killed, enslaved, and displaced large portions of the Judaean Jewish population. Emperor Hadrian rebuilt Jerusalem as a Roman pagan colony named Aelia Capitolina, barred Jews from residing there, and merged the territory into the province of Syria Palaestina; Jews were prohibited from accessing the city except on the day of Tisha B'Av. Some Rabbis who survived the Roman persecution were allowed to continue their Talmudic academies in Syria Palaestina as long as they paid the Fiscus Judaicus tax.
Julian
There was an aborted project under Roman emperor Julian (361–363 CE) to rebuild the Temple. Julian is traditionally called Julian the Apostate because he rejected the Christian faith in which he had been brought up. Once emperor his policy was to seek to revive the traditional religion by enabling traditional religious practices and restoring holy places across the Empire. As part of this policy, Julian permitted the Jews to begin building a Third Temple. Rabbi Hilkiyah, one of the leading rabbis of the time, spurned Julian's money, arguing that gentiles should play no part in the rebuilding of the temple.
According to later ancient sources, including Sozomen (c. 400–450 CE) in his Historia Ecclesiastica and the pagan historian and close friend of Julian, Ammianus Marcellinus,See Britannica Deluxe 2002 and Stewart Henry Perowne. the project of rebuilding the temple was aborted because each time the workers tried to build the temple using the existing substructure, they were burned by terrible flames coming from inside the earth and an earthquake destroyed what work was done:
The failure to rebuild the Temple has been ascribed to the Galilee earthquake of 363 CE, and to the Jews' own ambivalence about the project. Sabotage is a possibility, as is an accidental fire. Divine intervention was the common view among Christian historians of the time.See "Julian and the Jews 361–363 CE" and "Julian the Apostate and the Holy Temple" . When Julian was killed in battle after a reign of less than three years, the Christians reasserted control over the empire, and the opportunity to rebuild the Temple ended.
Sassanid vassal state
In 610 CE, the Sassanid Empire drove the Byzantine Empire out of the Middle East, giving the Jews control of Jerusalem for the first time in centuries. The new rulers soon ordered the restart of animal sacrifice for the first time since the time of Bar Kochba. Shortly before the Byzantines took the area back, the Persians gave control to the Christian population, who tore down the partly built edifice, and turned it into a garbage dump, which is what it was when the Caliph Omar took the city in the 630s.
Muslim conquest of Syria An Armenian chronicle from the 7th century CE, written by the bishop Sebeos, states that the Jews and Arabs were quarreling amongst each other about their differences of religion during the Siege of Jerusalem in 637 CE but "a man of the sons of Ishmael named Muhammad" gave a "sermon of the Way of Truth, supposedly at God's command" to them saying that they, both the Jews and the Arabs, should unite under the banner of their father Abraham and enter the Holy Land.Sebeos' History. Translated from Classical Armenian by Robert Bedrosian. Sebeos also reports that the Jews began a reconstruction of the temple, but the Arabs expelled them and re-purposed the place for their own prayers. In turn, these Jews built another temple in a different location.Sebeos' History, Chapter 31. See also Crone & Cook, Hagarism: The Making of the Islamic World (Cambridge University Press, 1977), p. 10; Suermann, H. "Early Islam in the Light of Christian and Jewish Sources" in Neuwrith, Sinai, & Marx (eds.), The Qur'ān in Context (Brill, 2010), pp. 135–148; and Wright, Robert, The Evolution of God, ebook edition, chapter 16 (Little, Brown and Company, 2009) for discussions of this and related accounts.
During the Mongol raids into Syria In 1267, during the Mongol raids into Syria, an interregnum period between the complete domination of the Levant by the crusader states until 1260 and the conquest of Levant by the Mamluks in 1291, Nachmanides wrote a letter to his son. It contained the following references to the land and the Temple:
Modern rebuilding efforts In mainstream Orthodox Judaism, the rebuilding of the Temple is generally left to the coming of the Jewish Messiah and to divine providence. A few organizations, representing a small minority of Orthodox Jews, want to realize the construction of a Third Temple in present times. The Temple Institute, the self-proclaimed "Temple Mount Administration" and the Temple Mount and Eretz Yisrael Faithful Movement each state that its goal is to build the Third Temple on the Temple Mount (Mount Moriah).
Attempts to re-establish a Jewish presence on the Temple Mount In August 1967, after the Israeli capture of the Mount, Rabbi Shlomo Goren (deceased 1994) the former Chief Rabbi of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) (and later chief rabbi of the State of Israel), began organizing public prayer for Jews on the Temple Mount. Rabbi Goren was known for his controversial positions concerning Jewish sovereignty over the Temple Mount. On August 15, 1967, shortly after the Six-Day War, Goren led a group of fifty Jews onto the Temple Mount, where, fighting off protesting Muslim guards and Israeli police, they held a prayer service. Goren continued to pray for many years in the Makhkame building overlooking the Temple Mount, where he conducted yearly High Holy Days services. His call for the establishment of a synagogue on the Temple Mount was reiterated by his brother-in-law, the former Chief Rabbi of Haifa, She'ar Yashuv Cohen (deceased 2016).
Goren was sharply criticized by the Israeli Defense Ministry, who, noting Goren's senior rank, called his behaviour inappropriate. The episode led the Chief Rabbis of the time to restate the accepted laws of Judaism that no Jews were allowed on the mount due to issues of ritual impurity. The secular authorities welcomed this ruling as it preserved the status quo with the Jerusalem Islamic Waqf. Disagreeing with his colleagues, Goren maintained that Jews were not only permitted, but commanded, to ascend and pray on the mount.
Goren advocated building a Third Temple on the Temple Mount from the 1960s onward. In the summer of 1983, Goren and several other rabbis joined Rabbi Yehuda Getz (deceased 1995), who worked for the Religious Affairs Ministry at the Western Wall, in touring a chamber underneath the mount that Getz had excavated. The tunnel was shortly discovered and resulted in a massive brawl between young Jews and Arabs in the area. The tunnel was quickly sealed with concrete by Israeli police. The sealed entrance can be seen from the Western Wall Tunnel, which opened to the public in 1996.
The Chief Rabbis of Israel, Isser Yehuda Unterman and Yitzhak Nissim, together with other leading rabbis, asserted that "For generations we have warned against and refrained from entering any part of the Temple Mount." A recent study of this rabbinical ruling suggests that it was both "unprecedented" and possibly prompted by governmental pressure on the rabbis, and "brilliant" in preventing Muslim–Jewish friction on the Mount.Hassner, Ron E., "War on Sacred Grounds," Cornell University Press (2009), pp. 113–133. Rabbinical consensus in the Religious Zionist stream of Orthodox Judaism continues to hold that it is forbidden for Jews to enter any part of the Temple MountThese rabbis include: Mordechai Eliyahu, former Sephardi Chief Rabbi of Israel; Zalman Baruch Melamed, rosh yeshiva of the Beit El yeshiva; Eliezer Waldenberg, former rabbinical judge in the Rabbinical Supreme Court of the State of Israel; Avraham Yitzchak Kook, Chief Rabbi of Palestine (Mikdash-Build (Vol. I, No. 26) ); Avigdor Nebenzahl, Rabbi of the Old City of Jerusalem. and in January 2005, a declaration was signed confirming the 1967 decision.These rabbis include: Rabbis Yona Metzger (Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi of Israel); Shlomo Amar (Sephardi Chief Rabbi of Israel); Ovadia Yosef (spiritual leader of Sefardi Haredi Judaism and of the Shas party, and former Sephardi Chief Rabbi of Israel); Eliyahu Bakshi-Doron (former Sephardi Chief Rabbi of Israel); Shmuel Rabinowitz (rabbi of the Western Wall); Avraham Shapiro (former Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi of Israel); Shlomo Aviner (rosh yeshiva of Ateret Cohanim); Yisrael Meir Lau (former Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi of Israel and current Chief Rabbi of Tel Aviv). Source: Leading rabbis rule Temple Mount is off-limits to Jews On the eve of Shavuot in 2014, or 6th Sivan, 5774 in the Hebrew calendar, 400 Jews ascended the Temple Mount; some were photographed in prayer.
Status of Temple Mount