Western Wall

Interesting facts

From its foundations to its top the wall rises about 32 metres, in 45 courses of stone, 17 of which lie below today's plaza.

Roman coins found in 2011 beneath its foundation stones show the wall was still unfinished when Herod died in 4 BCE, as the historian Josephus had written.

In Herod's time the upper 10 metres of the wall formed the outer side of a double colonnade and were decorated with pilasters, destroyed in 628.

At its southern end, Robinson's Arch once carried a monumental staircase as wide as a modern four-lane road up onto the Temple Mount.

Wilson's Arch, which springs from the wall beside the prayer plaza, supported a bridge that carried both a street and an aqueduct to the Temple Mount.

Radiocarbon dating of mortar shows the first bridge over Wilson's Arch was built between 20 BCE and 20 CE and doubled in width a few decades later.

The vaulted hall beneath Wilson's Arch now serves as a synagogue, with a Torah ark able to hold more than 100 scrolls.

The traveller Benjamin of Tudela described Jews praying at the Western Wall as early as 1170.

In the Muslim world it is known as the Buraq Wall, after the tradition that the Prophet Muhammad tethered his winged steed Buraq here.

According to legend, Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent had the area swept and the Western Wall washed with rosewater after the site was found.

Why it is worth it

What stands in the plaza today isn't a wall of the Temple itself — it's the western retaining wall of the platform the Temple sat on, part of a vast expansion Herod the Great ordered around 19 BCE to turn the Temple Mount into the largest religious platform anywhere in the ancient world. That distinction is exactly why it survived: when Roman legions destroyed the Second Temple in 70 CE, they were burning a building on top of the platform, not tearing down the retaining wall that held the platform up. The wall stayed standing almost by accident of engineering.

The stones themselves are the real record of that history, once you know how to read them. Herod's original masons cut and stacked enormous ashlars without mortar — the largest known block runs more than 40 feet long and is estimated to weigh several hundred tons, and nobody has fully explained how it was moved into place. Look at the courses rising up the wall and you're looking at a timeline: the bottom seven layers, with their distinctive carved borders, are Herod's 1st-century BCE work; four plainer layers above date to the Byzantine period; another band was added after the 7th-century Muslim conquest; and the uppermost course was funded in the 19th century by the British philanthropist Sir Moses Montefiore. Two thousand years of Jerusalem's history, stacked in visible layers.

The custom of tucking written prayers into the cracks between the stones is centuries old, and it has its own quiet bureaucracy: twice a year, attendants clear the notes out by hand and bury them, following Jewish law on the respectful disposal of sacred writings, in a cemetery on the Mount of Olives. The exposed wall in the plaza is also far less than the whole thing — the wall originally ran roughly half a kilometer, and only about 57 meters are visible above ground today; much more continues underground and behind later buildings, reachable through the separate Western Wall Tunnels.

Getting there

Located in Old City. Ben Gurion International Airport (TLV) is about 42 km away.

From the encyclopaedia

The Western Wall is an ancient retaining wall of the built-up hill known to Jews and Christians as the Temple Mount of Jerusalem. Its most famous section, known by the same name, often shortened by Jews to the Kotel or Kosel, is known in the West as the Wailing Wall, and in the Arab world and Islamic world as the Buraq Wall. In a Jewish religious context, the term Western Wall and its variations is used in the narrow sense, for the section used for Jewish prayer; in its broader sense it refers to the entire 488-metre-long (1,601 ft) retaining wall on the western side of the Temple Mount.

Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0

Western Wall

Interesting facts

Why it is worth it

Getting there

Plan your visit

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From the encyclopaedia