O’Connelly’s research revealed that in the ancient Hebrew’s religion water played a primordial role for purification in the Temple, the focal point of their religion. De Lussac had theorised that the underground water system arranged in a cascade structure – an extremely difficult engineering task in ancient times – had in reality been designed to obey biblical laws related to the purifying power of living, or running water, water which if held stagnant would have lost its power of purification. The purifying power of the stored water was maintained by the constant addition of fresh running spring water, carried to the Temple Mount by an aqueduct. The purified water flowed downwards in a continuous stream, cascading through the heart of bedrock, to the Temple, thus supplying the necessary washing water in total compliance with the Talmudic instructions for purification.
It is quite probable that when Herod rebuilt the Temple the older cisterns were modified in a more rational system. The works of Herod, in general but more specifically those designated for the Temple, not only bore the mark of Roman influence, but also that of a close collaboration between the Jewish and Roman engineers.
This cooperation was no doubt due to the admiration that Herod held for Roman civilisation and the friendship that bound him to Agrippa, who was responsible for the monumental water works built in the Roman Empire under the Emperor Augustus.
Flavius Josephus wrote in his work the Antiquities of the Jews:
When Herod had dispatched these affairs, and he understood that Marcus Agrippa had sailed again out of Italy into Asia, he made haste to him, and besought him to come into his kingdom, and to partake of what he might justly expect from one that had been his guest, and was his friend. This request he greatly pressed, and to it Agrippa agreed, and came into Judea: whereupon Herod omitted nothing that might please him. He entertained him in his new-built cities, and showed him the edifices he had built, and provided all sorts of the best and most costly dainties for him and his friends and that at Sebaste and Caesarea, about the port he had built…. He also conducted him to the city of Jerusalem, where all the people met him in their festive garments, and received him with acclamations. Agrippa offered a hecatomb of sacrifices to God; and feasted the people, without omitting any of the greatest dainties that could be gotten. He took so much pleasure there, that he dwelt there many days with them, and would willingly have stayed longer, but that the season of the year made him haste away; for as the winter was coming on, he thought it not safe to go to sea later, and yet he was of necessity to return again to Ionia.
Herod’s admiration or dependence on Rome was such that he named many towns and fortresses he built after the emperor and the members of his family.
Concerning the construction of the Temple, Herod imposed his own architectural and decorative notions on the priests, which were radically different from those that had governed the construction of the old Temple. He constructed a special platform above the Sanctuary with stairwells that allowed him to descend into the Holy of Holies hidden from the view of the priests.
Herod also provoked a revolt of pious Jews and Pharisees by profaning the Temple adding a golden imperial Roman eagle, which was brutally put down in blood in the usual Roman fashion. But he was not satisfied with erecting the Roman eagle symbolising the power of Augustus, the Divine Emperor, the King of the Jews also engraved the door of the Temple with Agrippa’s name.
The eagle that had been a festering sore was finally removed towards the end of Herod’s reign. Many scholars tried though with little success to locate the eagle more specifically within the Temple. Some placed it on the main façade of the Temple. Others placed it over the main gate, as a sculpture of the pediment, corresponding with other temples of the period. The image of the eagle was often placed on the façades of temples in Rome and Syria and was the symbol for the god Baal Shamin, as can be seen on lintels of the Temple of Baal Shamin in Palmyra. The eagle can also be seen killing a snake appears on the coins and in the monumental sculpture of the Nabatean kingdom.
In any case the fact that King Herod had added the imperial eagle constituted in itself a grave violation of the rules, according to which only the priests had the right to supervise construction work in the new Temple.
It was impossible that the door of the Temple could have a pagan name even if it was the name of the Vice-Emperor of Rome, Agrippa. According to Flavius Josephus, no one would have dared publicly protest and Josephus himself does not seem to have been really shocked by the idea.
De Lussac hypothesised that the animals to be sacrificed in the Temple were stabled in an area that is today called Solomon’s Stables, which dates from the time of Herod and was believed by de Lussac to have been a vast holding area where the animals were watered and fed as they waited their turn to be led to the place of sacrifice, in the Court of the Priests, since it was improbable that a large number of animals would have been allowed to wander or gather in the other courts or steps of the Sanctuary.
Flavius Josephus noted that several thousands of animals were sacrificed on one single day. It was therefore logical to think these animals were gathered together in stables close by the Temple, as many had certainly arrived from distant towns and villages, equipped with watering troughs and a continuous supply of fresh water and where the animals would have been washed after their journey to Jerusalem.
The owners of animals, who led them to the Court of the Sanctuary to present them to the priests, would have also been purified before penetrating with their animals into the Sanctuary. Thus it is probable that alongside the watering troughs for the animals, washing rooms with mikvehs, or lavers, were built for those who led the animals to sacrifice.
On this point it is useful to note that the technique used by the Agrippa’s hydraulic engineers, was first employed in Imperial Rome for the Cloaca Maxima as a powerful flushing systems to evacuate the detritus that filled the sewers and cesspools that Agrippa had methodically renovated throughout the city.
This same principal was applied for the city of Caesarea, built by Herod in honour of Augustus, where the engineers probably advised by Agrippa, had designed an almost horizontal flushing system to clean the sewers of the city by propelling flood tide waters through a network of specially designed channels, as recorded by Nicolas of Damascus and Flavius Josephus.
The retention, storage, filtration and ritual circulation of purification waters supplied from Solomon’s Pool plus the rainwater stored in the underground cisterns of the Haram, posed enormous maintenance and flow problems, during the greatly varying seasons in Israel: the dry season, the wet seasons and the season of melting snows.
Wilson of the Palestinian Survey Fund reported that all of the cisterns were interconnected by a network of canals cut into the rock in such a fashion so that when one of the cisterns was full, the overflow could flow to the following cistern and so on, with the final overflow carried by canal to the Kedron Valley.
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Purification in the Temple