Randall Price

This book took me so long to finally sit down and read through! But I’m glad I got the chance to do that in the end. It’s packed with information—from timelines, to charts, to illustrations, and much more. It feels like a very thorough overview of the temple in all its many changes throughout Jewish history. As someone who has had the blessing of growing up in a Christian home where the Bible was read and expounded on daily, I felt like I was fairly familiar with what went on in the temple—but I learned a lot from this book that I hadn’t picked up from the Bible (and this does go a lot further than the Bible—it talks about the location of the temple right up through the modern Dome of the Rock as it is now). I found the illustrations of how the temple was laid out, built, and decorated interesting; I’d always had trouble imagining all of that. This has illustrations of the many different rooms and their uses, so now I can envision where the worshipers would have been when it talks about the “court of the Gentiles” or the “court of the women” now. Then, there are descriptions of the different sacrifices, and their meaning to the people—and it’s easy to see how those were foreshadowing Jesus’ coming.

It’s hard to know how to put my impressions of this book into words because there is so much information that could be gleaned from it, but I’ll say this: If you’re interested in expanding your knowledge of the Bible, and how all the different pieces of history fit together, I’d highly recommend you check this out. It’s a great book.… (more)