Kind: captions
Language: en
[Music]
You're watching a NOVA video podcast.
I'm Gary Glman from Providence Pictures,
producer, writer, and director of Nova's
The Bible's Buried Secrets.
I'm Tristan Barco, associate producer
and senior researcher.
The temple of Solomon is the archetype
of sacred space for not only Judaism but
for Christianity and Islam. The irony is
that not a stone of Solomon's temple
survives. There are two sources of
information for what Solomon's temple
looked like. One is the Bible. So in the
first book of Kings, there's a very
detailed description of what Solomon's
temple looked like. When you cross
reference that description in the Bible
with excavated temples in the ancient
near east, you can get a pretty good
idea of what it looked like. So, we went
to Syria to a site called Andara where
the the the closest parallel exists. I
have a background in biblical
archaeology. It's what my degree is in.
And I've done a lot of excavating in in
Israel and traveled throughout uh the
Middle East. I had been studying the
site for for years and I had only seen
pictures of it. I know very few people
who have been there. That was a real
highlight for me to visit Daro.
These are what are called in the Bible
cherubim. These these uh winged
creatures in other words sphinxes and
they guard the the entrance to the
temple. They were in Solomon's temple
too. And then unique to anar are these
enormous footprints that are on the
threshold and then then they progress
inward. If you did a a direct proportion
of the foot size to the body size, this
would be about a 30 foot tall god. And
when he or she got inside, she sat he or
she sat on the throne in the holy of
holies. And here you see the Anara
temple side by side with the plan for
Solomon's temple. And that plan is based
on the biblical description.
This 3D recreation is set on the Temple
Mount, what's today called the Temple
Mount. And this is where the first and
second temples were constructed. And
it's where the Dome of the Rock stands
today. And this was almost the most
ancient part of Jerusalem.
So here we're going in through the front
porch or portico
into the what's called the heal or the
sanctuary and into the deer which is the
the innermost sanctuary or the holy of
holies. And inside you see the two
sphinxes or the two cherubim. And
beneath and those two cherubim
functioned as as a throne for Yahweh and
the ark of the covenant that box in
between them was Yahweh's foottool. And
inside as tradition holds it is the uh
tablets of the law or the ten
commandments.
The other thing that we were very
excited to portray here is that today
very often uh Jews call their synagogues
temples. Um but this what we're
depicting here is in fact the temple and
how it differs from synagogues today is
that the main function of the ancient
temple was in fact animal sacrifice.
When we were doing a recreation of the
temple, our art director, he couldn't
believe what we wanted him to do because
there's all this pagan imagery in the
temple and he said, you know, this is
impossible. This is, you know, an
Israelite temple. These look like
Egyptian gods. But many people forget
that ancient Israelite religion as
practiced, not in theory, was quite
pagan in many ways.
I'm hoping people get a sense of the
astonishing story of how these people,
no different from anybody else, coming
from a land of many gods and animal
sacrifice, come up with the idea of one
God and create what we know today as
modern religion.
[Music]