The Western Wall

The Temple Mount is not a hill in its natural shape. It is a platform, extended outwards over the slopes on all four sides and held in place by retaining walls, and the Western Wall is the western one. Nothing of the Temple itself survives above ground. What survives is the engineering that carried it, which is why the masonry a worshipper touches is structural rather than sacred in origin, and why its lower courses are so much larger than anything a wall of that height would otherwise need.

The exposed stretch at the plaza is a short segment of a much longer run. North of the plaza the wall continues behind and beneath the houses of the Muslim Quarter, followed underground by the Western Wall Tunnels. South of the plaza it continues into the excavated ground around Robinson's Arch, where the Second Temple period street and the collapsed stonework from 70 CE lie where they fell. The Foundation counts 45 courses of stone at the plaza, 28 of them above ground and 17 still buried.

At the northern end of the plaza the wall runs into a roofed space. That is the hall under Wilson's Arch, the first arch of a bridge that once carried a road from the Upper City across to the Temple Mount. Only about six metres of the arch is visible now, and the space beneath it was fitted out as a prayer hall after 1967. In practical terms it is the shaded, sheltered and considerably quieter part of the site, and it is the part most first-time visitors walk past.

The expansion that produced this wall was Herod the Great's, begun around 19 BCE, and for a long time the whole structure was credited to him without qualification. Excavation at the southern end complicated that. Ronny Reich of the University of Haifa and Eli Shukron of the Israel Antiquities Authority reported coins recovered from beneath the wall's foundation stones near Robinson's Arch that were minted decades after Herod's death in 4 BCE, the latest of them struck under the prefect Valerius Gratus in 17 or 18 CE. A wall cannot be older than the objects sealed underneath it.

The reading the excavators drew from that is that the retaining walls were a multi-generation programme rather than one reign's work, and that the southern stretch was completed long after Herod, which matches Josephus's account of the Temple Mount works still being finished under Agrippa II. It remains a contested reading, because a small number of coins from one sounding is a narrow base for a conclusion about a 488-metre wall.

The strongest dating now comes from the other end of the plaza. Johanna Regev, Joe Uziel, Elisabetta Boaretto and colleagues published radiocarbon results in PLOS ONE on 3 June 2020 from mortar sampled during excavations of 2015 to 2019 under Wilson's Arch. The first bridge, about seven and a half metres wide, dates to between 20 BCE and 20 CE. It was then doubled in width between 30 and 60 CE, which places the enlargement in the years of the Roman prefects rather than of Herod.

The wall reads from the bottom up as a chronology, and it is legible from the plaza without a guide. The lowest visible courses are the Herodian ones: very large limestone blocks, laid dry without mortar, each with a shallow flat border chiselled around a slightly raised centre. That drafted margin is the signature. Above them the stones get abruptly smaller and the joints get untidier, and everything from that line upwards is later repair and heightening, including work added in the early twentieth century.

So the honest description of what a visitor is looking at is a Second Temple period base carrying roughly a millennium and a half of patching. The upper sections, as Britannica puts it, were added at a later date. Nothing here was reconstructed in the modern sense: unlike the Hurva Synagogue a few streets west, the wall was never taken down and rebuilt. It was maintained, raised and repaired, and the repairs were never disguised.

The masonry is also under active watch. On 23 July 2018, hours after the Tisha B'Av fast ended, a stone weighing about 400 pounds worked loose from the wall above the southern prayer platform at Robinson's Arch and fell onto it. One woman was praying there at the time and was not hurt, and the smaller of the two platforms was closed while the Israel Antiquities Authority surveyed the surrounding stones. The plaza itself was unaffected, but it was a reminder that this is a two-thousand-year-old structure that people stand directly beneath.

• Ancient: the large drafted-margin blocks in the lower courses, laid without mortar in the Second Temple period
• Later: the smaller, rougher stones above them, added over centuries of repair and heightening, the topmost courses within the past hundred years or so
• Buried: 17 further courses below the paving, which the Western Wall Tunnels route reaches from the north
• Modern: the plaza, the paving, the barrier dividing the prayer area from the concourse, the lighting and the prayer hall fittings under Wilson's Arch

Until June 1967 there was no plaza. Worshippers used an alley, which the Foundation describes as roughly 28 metres long and 3.6 metres wide, hemmed in by the houses of the Mughrabi or Moroccan Quarter. That quarter was not an accident of settlement: Jerusalem Story records it as an endowment established in 1193 by al-Afdal, a son of Salah al-Din, for pilgrims and residents from the Maghreb, and it had stood at the foot of the wall for close to eight centuries.

It was cleared in three days. On the same account the quarter held 135 buildings, 108 families and about 650 residents when Israel took the Old City; residents were given some three hours to leave, bulldozers began work at about eleven at night on 10 June 1967 and finished on the twelfth, at least one resident was killed in her home, and two mosques went with the houses. The French historian Vincent Lemire, publishing in 2022, cited minutes of a meeting held some 36 hours before the demolition at which the destruction was already on the agenda, which he reads as evidence of planning rather than of a decision taken in the moment.

What replaced it is the open ground visitors now cross. The published figures for it do not agree, and it is worth saying so: Jerusalem Story gives the resulting Western Wall Plaza as 20,000 square metres, while the English Wikipedia entry on the plaza gives 10,000 square metres with a stated capacity of up to 400,000 people a day. The length of wall made accessible for prayer roughly doubled, from about 28 metres to the 57-metre frontage the Foundation describes today.

The area immediately in front of the wall is run as a synagogue rather than as a monument, and it is divided by a mechitza into a men's section and a smaller women's section. Behind a low stone barrier the rest of the plaza is a public concourse where nobody is separated and nobody is expected to pray. The Foundation's published rules are short and apply across the whole plaza: dress appropriately, do not eat, do not smoke, do not light candles, and do not bring Torah scrolls in. On Shabbat and Jewish festivals it adds no photography, no writing, no electronic devices and no amplification.

Who may pray in what manner, and where, has been argued over for a century, and it is not settled. Under the British Mandate the question went as far as an international commission after the riots of August 1929, and its findings became law in the Palestine (Western or Wailing Wall) Order in Council of 1931, which confirmed Jewish access for devotions while leaving ownership with the Muslim waqf and prohibiting the blowing of the shofar. Between 1948 and 1967 the wall was under Jordanian control and Jews did not reach it at all.

The modern version of the argument concerns a separate platform. A 450-square-metre space known as Ezrat Yisrael was built in August 2013 at the southern end, by Robinson's Arch, for mixed and non-Orthodox prayer. A government decision of January 2016 would have enlarged it, given it a shared entrance and put representatives of the Reform and Conservative movements on a body governing it; that decision was frozen on 25 June 2017 and the enlargement has not been built. The platform is still there, still in use, and still physically separated from the main plaza by the archaeology between them.

• Men's section: the larger part of the wall frontage inside the prayer area, entered from the left as you face the wall
• Women's section: the smaller part, to the right of the mechitza
• Wilson's Arch hall: roofed prayer space at the northern end of the plaza, fitted out after 1967
• Ezrat Yisrael: the 450 sq m platform for mixed prayer at Robinson's Arch, south of the plaza and reached separately