“Solomon’s Temple: Myth and History”, by William J. Hamblin and David Seely

224 pages, Thames & Hudson, ISBN-13: 978-0500251331

The Temple of Solomon, believed by many to be a place of communion between God and humanity, has been a continuing focus of profound reverence for more than three thousand years. Although its last successor was destroyed very nearly two millennia ago, it lives on still, as shown in Solomon’s Temple: Myth and History by William J. Hamblin and David Seely, a beautifully illustrated book that not only covers the Bronze Age background and historical reality of the ancient Israelite Temples, but also the afterlife of those temples (and particularly that of Solomon) in subsequent Jewish tradition, Christian thought, Islamic lore, and even through the Reformation and Freemasonry, from Renaissance painting to the politics of the Temple Mount in Jerusalem today. Damn, that’s a lot of ground to cover. Its traditional three sections were said to coincide with the tripartite structure of Moses’ wilderness tabernacle: the Writings were the outer court, the Prophets were the holy place, and the Law was the holy of holies. The Mishnah and the Talmud contain entire treatises on the measurements of the temple and its rituals, and about their meaning and function even in post-temple Judaism, and these texts are at the core of rabbinic studies still today. Moreover, many of the biblical psalms are temple hymns.

But in many ways, it is the Temple’s afterlife that is the most interesting part of the book, as, after the final destruction of the temple by the Romans in AD 70, it prompted Jews to turn away from the physical building that had been the focal point of their faith for so long and instead institute a kind of metaphorical “Temple of the Lord”. Its inspiration, however, never ceased to drive others to surpass the structure, however. Justinian’s great 6^th Century church of Hagia Sophia Constantinople was conceived as, in some sense, a recreation of the ancient Israelite shrine; when it was finished, according to the historian Procopius, Justinian is said to have exclaimed, “Solomon, I have outdone thee!” Likewise, Jerusalem’s 7^th Century Islamic Dome of the Rock were regarded by their builders as restorations of King Solomon’s great structure. Indeed, so great was Solomon’s Temple that many later legends ascribed that achievement to supernatural help, and many magicians sought to harness that power for their own ends (the six-pointed shield or Star of David seems to have originated in a magician’s hexagram called the Shield of Solomon). And this temple has persisted in the visions of Jewish, Christian and Muslim mystics, who have seen a celestial temple that mirrors the temple on earth, a place where divine secrets are revealed to humankind.

Solomon’s Temple: Myth and History tells a story that is every bit as fascinating, every bit as exotic and far ranging, as the tales spun by Brown’s The Da Vinci Code and Spielberg’s Raiders of the Lost Ark, with one great advantage: the story that Hamblin and Seely tell is true.