“The untold story of “Solomon’s Temple” at Tel Moza”
An episode from Tel-Aviv University’s podcast: Tel-Aviv 360: The Podcast After the Untold Story of the Kingdom of Judah. Episode 29: The untold story of “Solomon’s Temple” at Tel Moza. By professor Oded Lipschits. (In Hebrew)
The accidental and exciting discovery of a temple that existed through the First Temple period, only 7 km. away from Jerusalem, creates a unique and rare window to the way first-millennium temples worked and developed. It existed parallel to the temple, that according to the biblical description, existed, worked, and developed, at the capital of the Judean Kingdom. Following the processes of change and development of in the Moza temple during the hundreds of years it was used, allows a possible archaeological comparison point for the processes of development of the temple in Jerusalem, which is known only from the biblical description. More than that, the archaeological research of the temple at Moza allows the investigation of the relationship between the two communities living around the two temples: the community living in the Moza Valley, the temple at Moza being its central religious centre, and the nearby community which lived in and near Jerusalem, which Solomon’s temple, built at the height of Temple Mount, was its central religious centre.