Third Temple
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. Building the Third Temple has been contested by Muslims due to the existence of the Dome of the Rock, which was built by the Umayyad Caliphate on the site of the destroyed Solomon's Temple and Second Temple; tensions between Jews and Muslims over the Temple Mount have carried over politically as one of the major flashpoints of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, and the area has been a subject of significant debate in the Israeli–Palestinian peace process. 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 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. As punishment for the revolt, the Romans induce the Jews in Judea through mass killings, widespread enslavement, and displacement of many of the Jewish populations; the Romans also renamed Jerusalem to Aelia Capitolina, a Roman pagan city, and Judea to 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 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 in his Historia Ecclesiastica and the pagan historian and close friend of Julian, Ammianus Marcellinus, 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. 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 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.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.Attempts to re-establish a Jewish presence on the Temple Mount
In August 1967, after the Israeli capture of the Mount, Rabbi Shlomo Goren the former Chief Rabbi of the Israel Defense Forces , 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.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, 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. 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 Mount and in January 2005, a declaration was signed confirming the 1967 decision. 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.
Obstacles
The most immediate and obvious obstacle to the realization of these goals is the fact that two historic Islamic structures, which are 13 centuries old, namely the Al Aqsa Mosque and the Dome of the Rock, are built on top of the Temple Mount. Any efforts to damage or reduce access to these sites, or to build Jewish structures within, between, beneath, beside, cantilevered on top of, or instead of them, could lead to severe international conflicts, given the association of the Muslim world with these holy places.The Dome of the Rock is regarded as occupying the actual space where the Second Temple once stood, but some scholars disagree and instead claim that the Temple was located either just north of the Dome of the Rock, or about south of it, with access to the Gihon fresh water spring, or perhaps between the Dome of the Rock and the Al Aqsa Mosque.
In addition, most Orthodox Jewish scholars reject any attempts to build the Temple before the coming of the Messiah. This is because there are many doubts about the exact location where it must be built. For example, while measurements are given in cubits, there exists a controversy whether this unit of measurement equals, the scholarly consensus, or, put forward by respected historian Asher Selig Kaufman. Without exact knowledge of the size of a cubit, the altar could not be built. The Talmud recounts that the building of the Second Temple was only possible under the direct prophetic guidance of Haggai, Zechariah, and Malachi. Without valid prophetic revelation, it would be impossible to rebuild the Temple, even if the mosques no longer occupied its location.