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Beit HaMikdash

A visitor from another nation

You are not Jewish. You have come a long way to pray.Reconstruction educational simulation: A choice this site made to draw or model something the sources do not fully specify. About 7 minutes
Reconstruction: view from among olive trees on the Mount of Olives across the misty Kidron valley to the Temple platform, smoke rising straight up from the altar before the square-fronted Sanctuary.

  1. Scene 1 of 6

    Why you came

    Solomon's dedication prayer foresees you: 'the stranger that is not of Thy people Israel, when he shall come out of a far country for Thy name's sake … when he shall come and pray toward this house; hear Thou in heaven.'

  2. Scene 2 of 6 · The Temple Mount

    The Mount

    You enter the Temple Mount with Jewish pilgrims. In the Second Temple, a lattice marked the point beyond which non-Jews did not go; how a future Temple will arrange access is not stated in the sources this site relies on.

  3. Scene 3 of 6

    An offering

    In Second Temple practice, a non-Jew could send a burnt offering; the court even decreed that if its libations were not sent, public funds would supply them.

  4. Scene 4 of 6

    The prophet's words

    You find the verse carved in your memory rather than on any wall: 'For My house shall be called a house of prayer for all peoples.'

  5. Scene 5 of 6

    Sukkot, in the future

    Zechariah imagines the nations going up 'from year to year' to keep Sukkot in Jerusalem. The rabbis connected the festival's seventy bulls to the seventy nations.

  6. Scene 6 of 6

    Going home

    You leave as you came: not converted, not asked to be. Isaiah's peoples keep their names and learn God's ways.