Step down into the pale stone-paved plaza on the eastern edge of the Jewish Quarter in the Old City of Jerusalem, and an ancient limestone wall rises nineteen meters before you, its massive drafted blocks stacked without a drop of mortar. Between weathered stone crevices tufted with caper bushes (Capparis spinosa), tens of thousands of folded paper prayer notes are wedged tight in white bands, while worshippers wearing kippah skullcaps or wrapped in tallit prayer shawls press their foreheads against the stone and murmur the Psalms. This is the Western Wall, known in Hebrew as HaKotel HaMa'aravi (הכותל המערבי) or simply the Kotel.
The Wall is not a wall of the inner sanctuary building of the ancient Jerusalem Temple itself, but part of the monumental outer retaining wall system commissioned by King Herod the Great around 19 BCE to support the expanded platform of the Second Temple atop Mount Moriah. After the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE, because the Western Wall remained the closest surviving ancient structure to the former site of the Holy of Holies (Kodesh HaKodashim), it became the focal point toward which Jewish prayers around the world have turned for nearly two thousand years.
ITheology of the Divine Presence (Shekhinah) and the Holy of Holies
In Jewish tradition (Judaism), the Temple Mount (Har HaBayit, biblical Mount Moriah) is the holiest site on earth, associated with the Foundation Stone (Even HaShtiyah), the Binding of Isaac by Abraham, and the First Temple built by King Solomon in the tenth century BCE. Under strict rabbinic laws of ritual purity (Halakha), because the exact footprint of the Holy of Holies on the upper platform could no longer be pinpointed after the Temple's destruction, most Orthodox rabbinic authorities advise against walking on the upper mount lest one inadvertently tread upon the innermost sanctuary. Consequently, the Western Wall directly at the foot of the mount became the closest accessible place of prayer to the Holy of Holies.
The theological foundation of the Western Wall's sanctity rests upon the concept of the Shekhinah (שְׁכִינָה), the indwelling Divine Presence of God. In the classical rabbinic commentary Midrash Exodus Rabbah (2:2) and Shir HaShirim Rabbah (2:9), expounding the verse in the Song of Songs, Behold, He stands behind our wall, Talmudic sages such as Rabbi Acha taught the sacred promise that the Divine Presence (Shekhinah) has never departed from the Western Wall of the Temple.
According to Pirkei de-Rabbi Eliezer and the Talmud, whenever a Jew anywhere in the world stands to recite the Amidah prayer three times a day, they face the Land of Israel, toward Jerusalem, and toward the Temple sanctuary. The Western Wall is thus revered as the Gate of Heaven (Sha'ar HaShamayim), through which prayers from the four corners of the earth ascend to heaven.
From this belief in the Gate of Heaven and the indwelling Shekhinah arose the custom of placing written prayer notes (kvitel or petek) into the crevices of the Wall. Historical sources document this practice clearly from the early eighteenth century through the account of the Moroccan sage Rabbi Chaim ibn Attar (1696 to 1743), who entrusted a written supplication to a disciple to insert between the stones of the Western Wall. Because Jewish law forbids discarding or burning any document bearing the Name of God, twice each year (before Passover and before Rosh Hashanah), the Rabbi of the Western Wall and his attendants use wooden implements to gather millions of notes from the crevices and bury them respectfully in a sacred repository (genizah) on the Mount of Olives.
Nineteenth-century Western travelogues frequently referred to the site as the Wailing Wall, a phrase coined by European observers watching Jewish worshippers mourn the destruction of the ancient Temple. Within Hebrew literature from the Mishnah and Talmud to the present day, however, the authentic title has always been HaKotel HaMa'aravi (the Western Wall) or the Kotel, emphasizing its sacred geographical bond with the Holy of Holies.
IIFrom King Herod's Second Temple expansion to UNESCO World Heritage
The construction of the Western Wall belongs to one of the greatest civil and structural engineering projects of the ancient Mediterranean world under the Herodian dynasty of Judea.
The First Temple, the Second Temple, and King Herod's expansion. According to the Hebrew Bible, the First Temple was erected by King Solomon atop Mount Moriah in the tenth century BCE and stood until its destruction by King Nebuchadnezzar II of Neo-Babylonia in 586 BCE. In 516 BCE, Judean returnees led by Zerubbabel completed the Second Temple. Because the natural summit of Mount Moriah was narrow and steep, around 19 BCE (as recorded by the first-century historian Flavius Josephus in Jewish Antiquities), King Herod the Great launched a monumental expansion that doubled the Temple Mount platform into a trapezoidal esplanade covering roughly 144,000 square meters. To retain the earthen fill and vaults across the steep slopes, Herod's engineers constructed four massive stone retaining walls around the mountain, including the 488-meter Western Wall along the Tyropoeon Valley.
The events of 70 CE and centuries of pilgrimage. In 70 CE, Roman legions commanded by Titus destroyed the sanctuary buildings atop the Temple Mount, but Herod's gigantic lower retaining walls survived intact. Accounts by the anonymous Pilgrim of Bordeaux (333 CE), Rabbi Benjamin of Tudela (12th century), and Rabbi Obadiah of Bertinoro (15th century) attest to continuous Jewish prayer at the Wall across the Roman, Byzantine, early Islamic, and Ottoman eras. In the sixteenth century, the Ottoman Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent issued an imperial decree recognizing the right of Jewish prayer at the Wall and instructed his court architect Mimar Sinan to prepare a prayer alley along its base.
Archaeological exploration and UNESCO inscription. In the nineteenth century, British pioneers Charles Wilson (1864) and Charles Warren (1867 to 1870) sank subterranean shafts along the Wall, revealing 17 intact Herodian stone courses beneath the street level together with Wilson's Arch and Robinson's Arch. In 1981, the Old City of Jerusalem and its Walls were inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
- 10th century BCEKing Solomon builds the First Temple on Mount MoriahKing Solomon erected the First Temple in Jerusalem to house the Ark of the Covenant in the Holy of Holies before its destruction in 586 BCE.
- 516 BCEReconstruction and dedication of the Second TempleJewish returnees from Babylon under Zerubbabel completed the rebuilding of the Second Temple atop Mount Moriah.
- Around 19 BCEKing Herod the Great constructs the Western WallKing Herod doubled the area of the Temple Mount esplanade and built the 488-meter western retaining wall out of dry-laid meleke limestone blocks without mortar.
- 70 CEDestruction of the Second Temple while the Western Wall survivesRoman legions under Titus destroyed the upper Temple buildings on the 9th of Av, while the massive retaining walls at the base of the mount remained standing.
- 4th to 15th centuryContinuous tradition of prayer beside the WallMidrashic texts and travel accounts by the Pilgrim of Bordeaux (333 CE) and Benjamin of Tudela (12th century) record Jewish prayer gatherings along the western retaining wall.
- 16th centuryImperial decree of protection under Sultan Suleiman the MagnificentOttoman Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent issued an edict safeguarding prayer rights at the Western Wall and tasked architect Mimar Sinan with arranging the prayer area.
- 1864 to 1870Charles Wilson and Charles Warren survey the subterranean coursesThe British archaeologists discovered the ancient bridge arches (Wilson's Arch and Robinson's Arch) and 17 Herodian stone courses buried deep underground.
- 1981UNESCO World Heritage inscriptionThe Old City of Jerusalem and its Walls, encompassing the Western Wall, were inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List.
IIIHerodian dry-stone ashlar engineering and the colossal Western Stone
In structural terms, the Western Wall stretches approximately 488 meters along the entire western flank of the Temple Mount. The open-air section at the main Prayer Plaza measures about 57 meters long, while the remaining length is concealed behind historic buildings to the north and can be viewed inside the Western Wall Tunnels.
At the Prayer Plaza, the Wall rises roughly 32 meters from the underlying bedrock to its crest, comprising 45 courses of stone: 17 subterranean courses below street level and 28 exposed courses above the plaza floor (standing about 19 meters high). The exposed face displays three distinct historical strata: the seven massive bottom courses belong to the original construction of King Herod the Great (1st century BCE), the next four medium-sized courses were added during the Umayyad period (7th to 8th century CE), and the upper courses of smaller stones were added during the Mamluk, Ottoman, and nineteenth-century periods.
Cream-colored meleke limestone blocks quarried in Jerusalem, weighing 2 to 8 tonnes each, dressed with precision and framed on all four edges by a recessed drafted margin 5 to 20 cm wide.
All Herodian courses are held in place solely by their immense dead weight without mortar, each course set back 2 to 3 cm from the course beneath it to counter lateral earth pressure.
The largest monolith in the Western Wall Tunnels: 13.6 meters long, 3.3 meters high, and 3.5 to 4.5 meters deep, traditional estimates place its weight at 570 tonnes, while recent engineering analyses estimate 250 to 300 tonnes.
An ancient 13-meter stone arch at the northern edge of the Prayer Plaza that once carried a bridge from the Upper City to the Temple Mount and now shelters a covered men's prayer hall.
The springing of a monumental stone arch near the southwestern corner of the Temple Mount, the remnant of an ancient Second Temple stepped overpass identified by Edward Robinson in 1838.
The open-air Jerusalem-stone plaza in front of the 57-meter wall section, divided in accordance with Orthodox Jewish practice by a partition (mechitzah) into a northern men's section and a southern women's section.
Regarding the Western Stone (Even HaMa'aravit) in the Great Course (Nidbach Raba) inside the northern tunnel, the Hall of Myriad Paths library notes both weight figures found in archaeological literature: measuring 13.6 meters long and 3.3 meters high, because its full depth embedded into the mount cannot be cored without damaging the monument, the Western Wall Heritage Foundation cites an estimated depth of up to 4.5 meters and a weight of about 570 tonnes, whereas recent structural surveys estimate an embedded depth of 2.5 to 3.5 meters corresponding to 250 to 300 tonnes.
IVThe lie of the land and the facing
This section is the Hall of Myriad Paths library's reading through the lens of traditional Eastern landform feng shui compared against the Jewish prayer orientation rule (Mizrach), and is not taken from the Talmud or archaeological reports. In Jewish liturgy, prayer orientation is centered upon the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, at the Western Wall, because the Holy of Holies lies directly behind the Wall to the East, worshippers standing at the stones face due East.
Examining the macro-topography of the Judean hills at coordinates 31.7767° N and 35.2345° E, the Old City of Jerusalem sits on a limestone plateau 740 to 780 meters above sea level. The summit of Mount Moriah (the Temple Mount) rises as a central node (huyệt) naturally embraced by three deep valleys: to the east lies the Kidron Valley separating the Temple Mount from the higher ridge of the Mount of Olives (over 800 meters), to the south runs the Hinnom Valley, and along the western flank of the Temple Mount runs the ancient Tyropoeon Valley, separating it from the higher western hill of Mount Zion and the Jewish Quarter.
Read through landform feng shui, the Western Wall stands at the junction between the western foot of Mount Moriah and the floor of the ancient Tyropoeon Valley. The broad Prayer Plaza to the west of the Wall rests upon the filled valley bed, forming a level, sunken bright hall (minh đường) sheltered on the west by the rising slope of the Jewish Quarter, which wraps around the plaza to block wind and prevent qi from scattering. The 19-meter limestone face of the Western Wall rises on the east side of the plaza as a monumental qi-gathering wall that receives the stream of worshippers descending from the western steps.
In terms of facing and light, the stone face of the Western Wall looks West slightly west-southwest, while worshippers standing in the plaza face East slightly east-northeast toward the stones and the Holy of Holies. At late afternoon, as the sun sinks toward Mount Zion in the west, warm sunlight strikes the Jerusalem limestone directly, bathing the Herodian blocks in a golden glow.
VBar Mitzvah rites, the Three Pilgrimage Festivals, and Tisha B'Av
The Western Wall functions as an open-air synagogue where prayer never ceases day or night. Religious life here revolves around Jewish life-cycle rites and the major holy days of the Hebrew lunisolar calendar.
| Date (Hebrew calendar) | Rite or festival | Religious observances at the Western Wall |
|---|---|---|
| Every Monday and Thursday | Coming-of-age ceremonies (Bar Mitzvah and Bat Mitzvah) | On the two midweek Torah-reading days, Jewish families bring 13-year-old boys to the Wall to don tefillin phylacteries and read from the Torah scroll for the first time. |
| Every Friday at sunset | Welcoming the Sabbath (Kabbalat Shabbat) | As the sun sets on Friday evening, tens of thousands of worshippers dressed in white gather in the plaza to sing the hymn Lekha Dodi welcoming the Sabbath. |
| Months of Nisan, Sivan, and Tishrei | Three Pilgrimage Festivals (Shalosh Regalim: Pesach, Shavuot, Sukkot) and Priestly Blessing (Birkat Kohanim) | During Passover, Shavuot, and Sukkot, hundreds of descendants of the Aaronide priesthood (Kohanim) draped in white prayer shawls raise their hands to bless the multitude. |
| 1st to 10th of Tishrei | Ten Days of Repentance (Rosh Hashanah to Yom Kippur) and Selichot prayers | On the nights leading up to Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, the plaza fills with worshippers reciting penitential prayers (Selichot) amid the sound of the ram's horn (shofar). |
| 9th of Av (Tisha B'Av) | Fast day mourning the destruction of the Temples (Tisha B'Av) | Worshippers sit on the stone pavement by candlelight, fasting and chanting the Book of Lamentations (Eicha) in memory of the destruction of the First and Second Temples. |
In addition to these holy days, during the eight-day Festival of Lights (Hanukkah) in the month of Kislev (late November or December), a giant bronze nine-branched candelabrum (Hanukkiah) is kindled each evening in the Western Wall Plaza to commemorate the miracle of the sacred oil in the ancient Jerusalem Temple.
VILocation And How To Get There
- Address
- Western Wall Plaza, Khu phố Do Thái (Jewish Quarter), Thành cổ Jerusalem (Old City of Jerusalem)
- Getting there
- The Western Wall lies on the eastern edge of the Jewish Quarter in the Old City of Jerusalem. From Jaffa Gate on the west or Dung Gate on the south of the Old City, visitors can walk through the security checkpoints directly into the Western Wall Plaza.
- Coordinates
- 31.7767, 35.2345
The Western Wall welcomes visitors of all faiths who observe respectful etiquette: both men and women must dress modestly with shoulders and knees covered, and men must wear a hat or kippah skullcap when approaching the prayer area (available free of charge at the entrance). The prayer area beside the Wall is divided by a partition for men (on the left) and women (on the right). On the Sabbath (Shabbat) and Jewish holy days, photography, filming, mobile phones, and writing are strictly prohibited in the plaza.
Nearby places in the library
VIIContribute To This Page
Contribute photos, information or video for Western Wall
Góp ảnh, thông tin hoặc video cho Bức tường Phía Tây tại JerusalemEveryone is welcome to enrich this page: a photo you took, a detail the page misses, a short video. Every contribution is read and answered.
Thầy Ưng Khiêm mời cộng đồng cùng làm giàu trang này. Ảnh chụp tận nơi, một chi tiết lịch sử chưa được nhắc, một đoạn video ngắn: mọi đóng góp đều được đọc và trả lời.
No community contribution yet. You could be the first. Chưa có đóng góp nào từ cộng đồng. Bạn có thể là người đầu tiên.
?Quick Questions
Is the Western Wall a wall of the ancient Temple sanctuary building itself?
It is not a wall of the inner sanctuary building, but the outer western retaining wall of the Temple Mount platform. Around 19 BCE, King Herod the Great erected four massive retaining walls around the slopes of Mount Moriah to double the area of the Second Temple esplanade. The Western Wall is the intact retaining section closest to the former site of the Holy of Holies.
How have the massive stones of the Western Wall stood for two thousand years without mortar?
King Herod's engineers employed masterly stepped dry-stone ashlar masonry: each meleke limestone block weighing from several tonnes to hundreds of tonnes was dressed completely flat along its contact surfaces and held in place by its own immense weight. Each course was also set back 2 to 3 cm relative to the course below it to counteract the lateral thrust of the earth fill inside the mount.
How much does the largest stone in the Western Wall weigh?
The largest monolith discovered is the Western Stone (Even HaMa'aravit) located in the Western Wall Tunnels north of the main plaza, measuring 13.6 meters long and 3.3 meters high. Because its full depth embedded into the hillside cannot be drilled, traditional sources and the Western Wall Heritage Foundation cite an estimated depth of 4.5 meters and a weight of about 570 tonnes, while recent engineering analyses estimate 2.5 to 3.5 meters in depth and 250 to 300 tonnes.
What is the meaning of placing prayer notes into the Western Wall and what happens to them?
The custom of inserting written prayer notes (kvitel or petek) stems from the Midrashic teaching that the Divine Presence (Shekhinah) never departs from the Western Wall and that all prayers ascend to Heaven through this site. Because Jewish law prohibits destroying papers bearing the Name of God, twice a year the notes are gently collected with wooden tools and buried in a sacred repository (genizah) on the Mount of Olives.
Why is the site called the Kotel in Judaism rather than the Wailing Wall?
The term Wailing Wall was coined by nineteenth-century European travelers who observed Jews mourning the destruction of the Temple at the stones. Throughout two millennia of Hebrew literature from the Talmudic era onward, the site has always been called HaKotel HaMa'aravi (the Western Wall) or simply the Kotel, affirming its status as the sacred wall directly connected to the Temple Mount and the Holy of Holies.