Endnote 30 – Locating the Original Temple Mount

Additional support for this location can be derived from the position of the underground cisterns, as surveyed by Warren. All of the cisterns, apart from cistern 12, fall outside the sanctuary, as I have located the Temple. (One would hardly expect to find people drawing water within the sanctuary itself.) As I have located the Temple, the large cistern 5 would be situated next to the Water Gate, which was near the altar, thus providing a convenient source of water for the service of the Temple.

With this location of the Temple, one can go on to identify a few more elements of the original Temple. Middot 1:3 describes the Tadi Gate as being “on the north, serving no purpose at all.” It also mentions that if “one of [the priests] should have a nocturnal emission of semen, he goes out, proceeding along the passage that leads below the building—and lamps flicker on this side and that—until he reaches the immersion room. Rabbi Eliezer ben Jacob says, ‘He goes out by the passage which leads below the rampart (chel), and so he came to the Tadi Gate.’”

Both Warren and Conder concluded that if cisterns 1 and 3 were extended farther to the north, they would meet exactly at a point in the rock scarp where they placed the Tadi Gate (Survey of Western Palestine, Jerusalem, p. 218). Cistern 1 was probably the passageway reached by descending from the Chamber of the Hearth, which was one of the three gates on the north of the inner court of the Temple, while cistern 3 was the immersion room itself. Middot continues, that there were “four offices in the Chamber of the Hearth; … [T]hrough that on the northwestern side do they go down to the room for immersion” (Middot 1:5). Despite the fact that the Tadi Gate was put out of use by Herod’s northern extension, the underground passage was still used by the priests to visit the immersion room (see endnote 24).

It is also interesting to note that this passageway (cistern 1) is exactly in line with the rock under the Dome of the Rock, and also with the passageways of the Double Gate. Using either the northern Tadi Gate or the southern Huldah Gates, the pilgrim of the past would always see first whatever was built over that rock, whether altar, Porch, the Holy or most probably the Holy of Holies of the Temple. The importance of this architectural alignment shows that these gates were built according to a uniform plan.

This southern route passes in between cisterns 6 and 36, which according to Ronnie Reich might have been mikva’ot (“Two Possible Miqva’ot on the Temple Mount,” Israel Exploration Journal 39 [1989], pp. 63–65). Reich suggests, however, that these mikva’ot were located outside the early Temple Mount.