Herod's Temple

An explorable reconstruction of the Temple Mount as it stood in the time of Christ, c. AD 30 — the platform and its walls, the outer court and porticoes, the Court of the Women, the Court of Israel, the altar and laver, the sanctuary, the veil, and the Holy of Holies with the Foundation Stone within it.

Every location is annotated from the New Testament, Josephus, the Mishnah and the Talmud, with notes where the sources disagree. Forty-three locations, one hundred sixty-two passages.

Beta

This model is a documented synthesis, not a recovered floor plan. It uses Mishnah Middot for much of the inner plan, Josephus for elevations and outer works, surviving perimeter archaeology where available, and named modern reconstructions for disputed placements. The inner sanctuary footprint has not been comprehensively excavated in modern times. Dimensions, decoration, rooflines and several event locations remain debated; alternatives are identified at the point of use rather than settled quietly.

This visualization combines surviving perimeter archaeology with ancient literary descriptions and modern reconstruction. The destroyed inner precinct is not presented as a modern excavated plan.

On the measurements

Dimensions come from the Mishnah's tractate Middot, with the cubit taken at 0.5 m — a round figure within the range scholars propose — and cross-checked against Josephus. Small differences of a cubit or two are inside the margin of the sources themselves. Where the archaeology gives a figure directly — the Royal Stoa's columns, the width and tread of the southern stairway, the line of the walls — the excavated measurement is followed instead, chiefly as published by Leen Ritmeyer from Benjamin Mazar's Temple Mount excavations. Ritmeyer reckons in the royal cubit of 52.5 cm rather than 0.5 m, so his figures for the same building run about five per cent larger than the ones used here.

The temple stands in the middle and everything else is a way of asking a question about it. Click any structure to read it.

Moving around

Orbit surveys the whole site from above: drag to turn, scroll to zoom. The compass keeps you oriented — the facade genuinely faces the rising sun.
Walk in puts you on the ground: WASD to move, drag or ← → to look, Shift to run. On a phone a drive pad appears at the corner.
Double-click the ground anywhere in Orbit and you are put on that spot on foot, facing the way you were already looking — the quickest way into a particular corner of the court. On a phone, arm Stand here under More and tap the place you want.
All 43 places lists every annotated location; ‹ Prev and Next › step through them in order, and Esc closes whatever is open.

Seeing inside

Labels pins the names to the model; City adds Jerusalem around the mount — Olivet, Siloam, Golgotha, Hinnom — and can be turned off on a slower device.
Plan shows a small schematic of the precinct, north up, with a wedge marking where you stand and which way you face — useful when the courts start to look alike.
Morning cycles the hour. The first four — dawn, morning, noon, dusk — are stylised. The next four are astronomical simulations: the sun's altitude and bearing computed for the latitude of Jerusalem on selected representative dates for Passover, the Day of Atonement and Tabernacles — an approximation, not an exact recovered calendar day.

Under More

Roofs and Cutaway lift the portico and sanctuary roofs and open the house, so the Holy Place and the Holy of Holies can be seen from outside. Everything is on by default: nothing in the model is hidden until you hide it.
People turns off the figures. They are there for scale: a court three hundred metres across reads as a diagram until there is someone standing in it.
Certainty colours the whole model by how much of it is actually known — green where there are standing remains or an explicit measurement, gold where the sources describe what no longer stands, red where they are silent or contradict each other and this is one defensible reconstruction among several.
Phases colours the platform by building period: the 500-cubit square described in Middot, the Hasmonean extension south of it, and everything Herod added north, west and south — with the two lines Ritmeyer's argument turns on, the seam in the eastern wall and the surviving step of the old western wall.
Measure turns the pointer into a tape: tap two points for the distance in metres and in cubits, which is the unit the sources argue in.
Sound adds a quiet crowd — loudest in the outer court, quieter through each boundary, and silent behind the veil. Off unless you ask for it.
The arrival runs ninety seconds from the ridge of Olivet to the Holy of Holies, narrated, and stops the moment you press Esc.

Reading and teaching

Each panel carries the scripture passages for that place, a scholarly note, its sources, and “where the sources differ.”
Begin runs a guided sequence — the full tour, the Day of Atonement, a Passover pilgrimage, how a sacrifice was actually offered, Jesus in the temple, the apostles' temple, or Into greater light, which climbs the gradient of access from the open outer court to the Holy of Holies — visiting the places in the order the day required.
The same list carries sight lines: where the publican stood against the Pharisee, what a gentile could see from the lattice, the pinnacle of the temple, and the fact that no one then alive had seen the innermost room. Camera positions and a paragraph, rather than another list of places.
Handout opens the whole study guide, all 43 locations and 162 passages, ready to print or save as PDF — and while a tour is selected it prints that tour instead: its stations in order, with the narration and ruled space to write. The full handout also carries an index from the reading block to the stations worth opening in class.
Study opens that index in the Places sidebar: thirty reading blocks across the Old Testament and the New Testament, each with the places in this model worth opening for it. Tap a place and the model flies there. Because the curriculum renumbers its weeks every year, the index is keyed to the reading block rather than to a week number.
Copy link gives a link straight to one place, in orbit or on foot, to paste into a lesson.
Keyboard: M switches orbit and walk, [ and ] step through the current sequence, Esc closes, and the list of places takes arrow keys.

Sources

Dimensions and courts: Mishnah Middot, with Tamid, Yoma and Talmudic material for the service.
Elevations, porticoes and the fabric of the building: Josephus, Jewish War and Antiquities.
Excavated measurements and the building phases of the platform: Leen Ritmeyer, The Quest: Revealing the Temple Mount in Jerusalem (2006), from the Temple Mount excavations of Benjamin Mazar, 1968–78.
Scripture is paraphrased in the author’s own words and cited by book, chapter and verse — not quoted verbatim from any translation.

Taylor Halverson, Ph.D.

Author · Teacher · Tour leader · Scripture scholar

Taylor Halverson is a scholar of scripture and a teacher of learners — an entrepreneurship professor in the BYU Marriott School of Business who spends his working life helping people find and act on the best ideas and tools available to them.

He is the author and editor of more than fifty books and nearly a thousand articles and blog posts, and a builder of scripture study resources: the ScripturePlus app with Scripture Central, whose scripture YouTube channel he co-hosted to more than fifty million views, and BYU's Virtual Scripture Group, whose team spent more than five years reconstructing New Testament Jerusalem in three dimensions. This reconstruction of Herod's Temple belongs to that same body of work — tools made so that ordinary readers can see what specialists see.

He leads tours to Israel and the Middle East, China, India, Central America, Europe, and the national parks of the American West, where he unfolds how geology, geography, civilization, and scriptural texts created our beautiful present day.

Academic training

Ph.D., Judaism & Christianity in Antiquity — Indiana University
Ph.D., Instructional Systems Technology — Indiana University
M.A., Biblical Studies — Yale University
B.A., Ancient Near Eastern Studies — Brigham Young University

Two doctorates in two separate fields — the ancient world, and the design of learning. Both of them are in this model.

Elsewhere

insights.taylorhalverson.com books.taylorhalverson.com exodustours.com

Credits

Reconstruction, research, geometry and text — Taylor Halverson, Ph.D. The three-dimensional reconstruction, the forty-three location commentaries, the guided tours, the sight lines, the certainty and phase overlays, the printed study guide and the reading index are his work.

The geometry, textures and ambient sound are generated in code at run time.

Ancient sources

Mishnah, tractate Middot, for the plan and the dimensions of the courts, with Tamid, Yoma, Shekalim, Sukkah and Parah for the daily and festival service.
Flavius Josephus, The Jewish War and Jewish Antiquities, for elevations, the porticoes and the fabric of the building.
The Babylonian Talmud, for the service and for the memory of the second temple.
The New Testament, for the events set in these courts.

These works are in the public domain. The descriptions in this product are the author's own, and cite each source by book, chapter and line.

Archaeology and scholarship

Excavated dimensions of the Royal Stoa, the southern stairway, the walls and the gates, and the building phases of the platform, follow Leen Ritmeyer, The Quest: Revealing the Temple Mount in Jerusalem (Jerusalem: Carta, 2006), and his published articles — the standard account of the mount's development, and the source of the two lines the phase overlay turns on.
Those excavations are the work of Benjamin Mazar and the Hebrew University expedition to the area south and west of the Temple Mount, 1968–1978, and of Ronny Reich and Eli Shukron for the Herodian street and the stepped ascent.
The geometry in this model was drawn from those published measurements.

Software and typefaces

three.js r184 — WebGL rendering, orbit controls and geometry utilities. © 2010–2025 three.js authors, used under the MIT License.
EB Garamond — Georg Duffner and Octavio Pardo, used under the SIL Open Font License 1.1.
Cormorant Garamond — Christian Thalmann, used under the SIL Open Font License 1.1.

The full text of these licences travels with the product in its notices file.

Scripture

Scripture passages are paraphrased in the author's own words and cited by book, chapter and verse. No modern translation is quoted verbatim, so no scripture-translation licence or permission is required anywhere the product is distributed.

Remote services

This application loads three.js modules from unpkg.com and typefaces from Google Fonts. Those providers receive standard web-request information, such as IP address, browser information, requested resource, and time of request. This product itself does not use analytics, accounts, advertising trackers, or form submissions.

Curriculum index

The reading index maps scripture reading blocks to locations in this model, and is keyed to the reading block rather than to a published week number, since those are renumbered each year. It covers the Old Testament and the New Testament, the two volumes whose reading meets this building.

The Study index is a generic reading-block guide and does not name any single publisher's curriculum. This product is not affiliated with, authorised by, endorsed by or sponsored by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints or Intellectual Reserve, Inc.

How to cite this model

Halverson, Taylor. Herod's Temple — Jerusalem, c. AD 30. Interactive three-dimensional reconstruction. 2026. taylorhalverson.com.

Terms of use & license

1. What you're getting. This product is a Beta: an interactive reconstruction of Herod's Temple across its building phases, with forty-three location commentaries, guided tours, a certainty overlay and a printed study guide, published by Taylor Halverson, Ph.D. (“Publisher”). It is a teaching aid and reconstruction, not a survey document — see “The reconstruction” tab for what that means.

2. License to use. Publisher grants the purchaser or recipient a personal, non-exclusive, non-transferable license to view and use this product for personal study, teaching and classroom use. Redistribution of the product file itself, or extraction of its model, commentaries or illustrations for republication, requires Publisher's prior written permission.

3. Scripture text. Scripture passages in this product are paraphrased in the author's own words and cited by book, chapter and verse. No modern translation is quoted verbatim, so no scripture-translation licence or permission is required anywhere the product is distributed.

4. Third-party software and fonts. three.js is used under the MIT License; EB Garamond and Cormorant Garamond are used under the SIL Open Font License 1.1. The full text of both licences is bundled with this product in its notices file, not merely linked, so it travels with the file offline. This application loads three.js from unpkg.com and typefaces from Google Fonts; those providers receive standard web-request information (e.g. IP address, requested resource, time of request). This product itself uses no analytics, accounts, advertising trackers, or form submissions.

5. Refunds. If this product was purchased through a store or platform (e.g. an app marketplace), that platform's refund policy governs and is displayed at checkout. Where Publisher sells directly, a full refund is available on request within 14 days of purchase, provided the product has not been redistributed; request a refund via the contact below.

6. No warranty of scholarly conclusion. Because this is a Beta reconstruction of a site with real scholarly disagreement, Publisher makes no warranty that any specific dating, identification or interpretation shown will not be revised in a later edition. The product is provided “as is” for its stated teaching purpose.

7. Limitation of liability. To the extent permitted by law, Publisher's liability for any claim arising from this product is limited to the amount paid for it.

8. Contact. For licensing, refunds or rights questions, use the Email Taylor link in the footer at insights.taylorhalverson.com.

Herod's TempleBetaJerusalem · c. AD 30

Herod's Temple Beta