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"Moreover all the chief of the priests, and the people, transgressed very much after all
the abominations of the heathen; and polluted the house of the Lord which He had
hallowed in Jerusalem. And the Lord God of their fathers sent to them by His
messengers. Rising up betimes, and sending; because He had compassion on His people,
and on His dwelling place: but they mocked the messengers of God, and despised His
words, and misused His prophets, until the wrath of the Lord arose against His people, till
there was no remedy. Therefore He brought upon them the King of the Chaldees . . . . .
He have them all into his hand. And all the vessels of the house of God, great and small,
and the treasures of the house of the Lord . . . . . all these he brought to Babylon. And
they burnt the house of God, and brake down the wall of Jerusalem . . . . . to fulfil the
word of the Lord."
Under Ezra and Nehemiah the Temple and walls were rebuilt at the decree of Cyrus
King of Persia (Ezra 1: 1-4). This second Temple, like the first, also had its trials,
suffering especially at the hands of Antiochus Epiphanes who set up "an abomination of
desolation" upon the altar (I Macc. 1:54). Later the Maccabees cleansed the Temple from
this pollution, and turned the enclosure into a fortress. By the time of Herod the Great
(appointed Procurator of Judaea by Julius Caesar in B.C.47) it had fallen into decay.
Herod, in accordance with his policy of conciliating the people, and possibly also in
expiation of the atrocity he committed by exterminating the Sanhedrin, put the work in
order to reconstruct the Temple. But this work was done in such a way that it did not
appear to be the building of a third edifice. The Imperial Bible Dictionary has the
following comment:
"Although it was an entirely new building which Herod projected and actually
accomplished, yet his very object required that he should avoid conveying the idea of its
being wholly new, and that he should rather appear aiming at the proper restoration and
embellishment of the existing one. On this account he seems to have taken down the
latter piecemeal, and put up the other in its place, so as to preserve the continuity of the
edifice, and admit of its being still called, as it certainly was, the second temple."
Herod's temple was begun (according to The Companion Bible) in B.C.20, and was
still in the process of being built when the Lord walked this earth.
"Jesus answered and said unto them, Destroy this temple (naos), and in three days I
will raise it up. Then said the Jews, Forty and six years was this temple (naos) in
building, and wilt thou rear it up in three days" (John 2: 19, 20).
The Greek naos refers to the actual Temple building consisting of the Holy Place and
the Holy of Holies, and should be distinguished from hieron which refers to the whole of
the Temple courts. The other word translated "temple", oikos (Luke 11: 51), is really
"house", and is so translated in most of its occurrences. This distinction between the
Greek words for `temple' must be taken as qualifying the statement concerning the
unfinished work. In fact, according to Dean Farrar,
"The assertion of the Jews was not strictly accurate, for ho naos autos (as
distinguished from to hieron), with all its porticoes, had been finished in eight or nine
years" (The Life of Christ).