Incense; and the other at the close of the service. In pronouncing benedictions upon the congregation, the Priests stood on the steps of the Holy House, with their hands uplifted, and their faces Eastward, "towards the people." 1

(3) Further the solemn and glorious Service at the Dedication of Solomon's Temple was evidently Responsive, Congregational, and Reverent. The usual responses chanted by the people, and the usual acts of adoration, during the Temple Services, were certainly not omitted on this great occasion. But the sacred narratives do not refer to these ordinary details. There was, however, one great act of reverence by the people, and there was one great response, which were unusual and unexpected, and which are, therefore, recorded. When the Fire was seen descending from heaven upon the sacrifices, the whole multitude reverently prostrated themselves, and with one voice repeated again the burden of the Psalm which, earlier in the day, they had chanted as a response: "For He is good, for His mercy endureth for ever."

(4) The Sacred narratives and the traditional account preserved by Josephus expressly state that the Dedication Service was Musical on a most magnificent scale. The whole musical resources of the nation were engaged in it.

(5) Further, we must note that this great national act of worship was splendidly Beautiful. Probably never before, and never since, were its accumulated glories equalled in any worship on earth. There were, as we have seen, thousands of white-robed Priests and choristers, and hundreds of thousands of white-robed worshippers; wondrous white-robed Processions moving 1 Lev. 9. 22; Num. 6. 22. Edersheim, The Temple and its Services,

p. 141.

in sacred dances; "Solomon in all his glory," and all the glories of Solomon's jewelled Sanctuary of "gold and snow;" countless sacrifices, clouds of sweet incense, stately motions of the sacrificers at the great Altar, and beautiful acts of reverence by them, and by the great multitude of worshippers; the melodies of the choral music, and the multitudinous thunders of the responses: and above all these the blue diamond brightness of the Eastern heavens; the sense of the Divine blessing; and the manifested Divine Presence, in the Cloud of Glory and the sacred Fire.

CHAPTER XXIX.

THE SECOND TEMPLE AS IT WAS IN THE TIME OF OUR LORD JESUS CHRIST.

1. The Platforms and Principal Gates.-2 The Court of the Gentiles.— 3. The Sanctuary.-4. The Holy House.

1.-The Platforms and Principal Gates of the Second Temple in the time of our Saviour, sometimes called the Temple of Herod or the Third Temple.

WITH the exception of Solomon's great Portico or Cloister at the East side of the Outer Court, the Second Temple, as built by Zerubbabel and the returned exiles after the Babylonish Captivity, and rebuilt, enlarged, and beautified by King Herod the Great, was, in the time of our Lord, an entirely different structure from the Temple of Solomon. Although built, like the Temple of Solomon, on the sacred summit of Mount Moriah, and resembling that Temple in many respects, the Temple of Herod far surpassed its glorious predecessor in dimensions, and differed from it considerably in the number, names, and arrangements of its Courts, and in other important particulars.

1

In a former Chapter, I endeavoured to describe in general terms the Exterior of Herod's Temple as seen from the Mount of Olives on the day of Christ's

1 See above, Chapter XXV. § 3.

Triumphal Entry into Jerusalem. I must now try to give the reader some account of the Interior of this wondrous building, as a place of worship.

A knowledge of its Great Eastern Gates, and successive Platforms, will be the best clue to its complex internal arrangements. Like the Mosaic Tabernacle, and the Temple of Solomon, and like almost all the great Temples of antiquity, the Temple of Herod was constructed for Westward worship. Its principal Gates were, therefore, at the East of its successive Courts and Shrine; and the Shrine was situated in the Western portion of the Temple area, apparently on the very spot previously occupied by the Holy House of Solomon's Temple.

The great Eastern Portico of Solomon, the only remaining relic of his Temple, stood in its original position, immediately within the Eastern wall of the great Outer Court: but as the Temple area was greatly enlarged towards the South, Herod seems to have continued Solomon's Portico Southward to meet the great Southern Portico at the South-East angle of the Court. The principal Eastern Gateway, in which had been the Brazen Doors, called, in the time of the First Temple, the "King's Gate,"1 still occupied its original position, leading into the Portico of Solomon and the Outer Court, at a point due East of the doors of the Holy House. But although this Gate maintained its old position, it was known in the second Temple by a new name, as the Shushan Gate," so called from the sculptured representation of Shushan, the Persian royal city, which was portrayed upon it. According to Jewish tradition, a double-arched causeway, called the Heifer-Bridge," by which the Priests brought out the

1 1 Chron. 9. 18. See the Ground Plan of Herod's Temple on Page 420.

"red heifer" and "the scapegoat," spanned the valley from the slopes of Olivet to the Shushan Gate.1

The name of the greatly enlarged Outer Court, into which this Gate led, was also new. In the second Temple, the Outer Court was called "the Court of the Gentiles," because Gentiles were permitted to enter it.

Worshippers coming up to the Temple by the "HeiferBridge," saw through a magnificent series of Eastern Gateways and Courts, rising beyond and above one another in perspective, and leading to the Shrine or Holy House at the West end of the temple area: viz., (1) The Shushan Gate, leading into the Court of the Gentiles; (2) the "Beautiful Gate," leading up from the Court of the Gentiles to the Court of the Women; (3) Nicanor's Great Gate, the most magnificent gate in the Temple, which led up from the Court of the Women to the Court of Israel and the Priest's Court; and (4) beyond the Court of the Priests and the Great Altar, the Great Archway and Golden Gate of the Holy House, surmounted by the Golden Porch. These were preeminently "the gates of the Temple" (although not its only gates); and the line of these gates, although considerably to the North of the central line of the enlarged Outer Court, was still, so to speak, both from an architectural and from a devotional point of view, the axis of the Temple and of its glories and worship.

2.-The Great Outer Court, called the Court of the
Gentiles.

The Great Outer Court, including the porticoes around it, and perhaps also including the thickness of the outer walls, appears to have been, after its enlargement by

1 Edersheim, The Temple and its Services, pp. 14, 15 n. John Light. foot, The Temple as it stood in the Days of our Saviour, Chap. iii.