1 And there was given me a reed like unto a rod: and it
was said unto me: Arise, and measure the temple of God,
and the altar, and them that adore therein.
At this point in Revelation, John has been asked to measure the Temple and see who worships there. Judea has just suffered a terrible tribulation through the four winds and two of the three woes. I have shown that the four winds compare very well with historical events between the crucifixion of Christ and late A.D. 66, when Vespacian conquered all Judea except Jerusalem.
The Judeans trapped in Jerusalem suffered even more acutely during the first woe when their three-year civil war destroyed all the stored food in Jerusalem, stripping them of their sustenance, just like a plague of locusts would. Disaster came during the second woe when Titus reinforced the Roman army with local allies. In A.D. 70, he brutally conquered the starving people. His soldiers destroyed the Temple and most of Jerusalem.
There is still another woe coming, the third woe, which will extinguish Judea as an independent nation when Bar Kochba leads the Judeans to total defeat and exile. In the following chapters, I will provide more information about Bar Kochba and the war of A.D. 131-5 than any other book interpreting Revelation. All of this is so harsh on Judea that I want to move some distance away and view Jerusalem through the eyes of history. Then you and I both can place these sad events into a wider perspective, a perspective that offers more hope to Judea than the four winds and three woes did.
Imagine that you are hovering above Jerusalem, high enough that you can see the whole city. Imagine your head pointed north, your feet south, and you are looking straight down on the city. Today is the morning after the birth of Jesus. The sun's first rays slowly creep from your right but have not yet swept across Jerusalem. The rays will, in a few moments, illuminate the Temple's front wall. Covered with gold leaf, this wall will shine almost as bright as the sun. Right now, nothing is illuminated. The Temple, the homes, the streets are all clothed in darkness, too dark to see any details. But in your imagination you can clearly see anything you want to look at.
You can see that there are several sets of walls enclosing the city. There is an outermost wall enclosing the whole city. Within it are more walls that divide the city into sections. On your upper right, in the extreme northeast corner of the city, stands one section. This is the Temple site. In the center of this section stands the Temple. In front of the Temple, facing away from you toward your right is the sacrificial altar and a large basin filled with water. The Temple, the altar, and the basin are surrounded by buildings and open spaces that divide this section into several sets of concentric, rectangular courts.
The Temple complex is large. It spans a quarter mile from north to south and one-seventh of a mile from east to west. It covers thirty-four acres, an area the size of eighteen football fields. The Temple itself is ninety feet long, thirty feet wide, and forty-five feet high. Attached to the eastern end is a larger front. The front is 115 feet wide by 165 feet high. The Temple stands almost in the center of the Temple complex between north and south, but much closer to the western edge than to the eastern edge.
The rest of the city is west and south of the Temple section. East of the city is the steep valley of Kidron; south is the Hinnom valley. If you look down toward your feet, you will see the Hinnom valley running east and west at the southern edge of the city. If you look to your right, you will see the Kidron valley running along the eastern edge. The valley looks like it continues northwards past the Temple site, but the Judeans gave this northern part a different name. It is not as steep as the Kidron. They call it the valley of Jehoshaphat. On the opposite side of this valley, directly on your right, is the Mount of Olives.
Jerusalem itself consists of two main parts, each part resting on a hill with another valley running north and south between them. One part rests on a hill almost directly south of the Temple. This is the Lower City. King David made it his capital after he conquered the city from the Canaanites. Left of the Lower City, on a higher hill, is the Upper City. The buildings are not as old as those in the lower city.
There is still another walled section north of the Upper City. Its wall starts at the northwest corner of the city wall, and it travels northeast toward your upper right on a diagonal until it meets the north west corner of the Temple area wall. This encloses the city's newer section. There will be another wall built later (after Christ's death) that will enclose a future section of the city. The future wall will run across the entire northern edge of the city on a diagonal line roughly parallel to the northeast wall we just looked at but several hundred yards north of it. You can see that the city has already grown north of the present walls. The future wall will enclose all these structures north of the present wall. This future wall will be built in about fifty years. It will be the first wall that stops Titus and his army when he besieges Jerusalem in A.D. 70.