questions

in response to a couple a questions my dad asked, i thought i'd put the answers up here on the blog in case other people were wondering about the same things.

huldah gates

these are entry ways onto the temple mount during the time of jesus. they would have been facing south and had major stairways beneath them. you would have entered the gates and gone through a tunnel/staircase and popped up right onto the temple platform. there were two sets of huldah gates on the south side, a double gate and a triple gate. here is a artists rendition that was at the site.

notice the double gate on the left and the triple gate on the right. these are the huldah gates.

here is a picture of the left gate today.

the wall on the left is a wall built later, intersecting with the temple mt. right where the left huldah gate was. you can still see the top of the original archway in this picture above the little iron-barred window.

here is a close up of where the triple gates stood. the gates that are blocked shut are later than jesus time, but the location is the same.

the image below is of standing right in front of the left gate looking down the southern temple mt. wall past the right gate onto the mt. of olives.

these gates were major entry ways onto the temple platform. when large groups came to jerusalem, think passover, pentecost and sukkot (the three festivals when every jew was supposed to come to jerusalem, it didn't happen much in OT times, more in NT times), pilgrims would be streaming in through these gates. sometimes the sanhedrin may have met outside these gates. teachers would teach on the steps below these gates or people would make pronouncements here. perhaps jesus did just that at this location.

here is an image of the steps leading up to the gates.

ritual cleanliness was important to the jewish people of jesus' day. many things could make a person unclean, touching a dead body for example. being unclean was not a sin, not doing anything about it was. to be ritual clean these jews would immerse themselves completely in living water. living water is rain or spring water as opposed to cistern water or well water.

one needed to be ritually clean to go onto the temple mount and offer sacrifices. so outside these huldah gates archaeologists have found numerous miqveh dating to the second temple period. a miqveh is a little pool that fill with living water. the jew would strip down, immerse fully in the living water, and come up ritually cleansed. they would then do straight to the temple to offer sacrifices being careful not to do anything that would render them ritually unclean on their way there. even the miqveh itself had a divided entry and exit way so the unclean and clean people wouldn't touch. (notice the diving line down the middle of the miqveh steps below.) below is a miqveh just outside the huldah gates.

they had to have a lot of miqveh baths outside these gates especially for these festivals when numerous people would flock to the temple and all needed to be ritually cleansed in order to offer their sacrifices.

anyways, that answers some questions for now. if anyone else has any questions, please shoot them over. :)