Have you ever wondered just big those stones in the Jerusalem temple were? I know from visit to the stone quarry where my step grandfather was the foreman years ago that such blocks can get pretty big.
The big blocks of stone my step grandfather's crew cut out were used in the granite city hall here in Vancouver BC and know it was not a simple matter to cut the huge blocks out using drills and dynamite and then loading them onto huge barges to be towed to the finishing plan in Vancouver was no easy task.
And the quarring of the huge stones used by Jewish builders must have been a mammoth task judging by a picture I have seen of them. They must have been pretty impressive for Mark 13:1 Jesus' disciples exclaimed: "Teacher, see what sort of stones, and what sort of buildings!"
The temple area itself was one of the wonders of the ancient world. King Solomon's original temple was awesome enough and King Herod in Jesus time made a huge expansion of the Temple platform to 480 metres by 280 meters making it the largest man-made platform in the world up to that time/
One of these temple stones examined by archaeologists was a whopping 400 tons. The majority of these buildings were smaller than that but were still extremely with a a few weighing in at more than 50 tons each.
Naturally depending on their location in the temple these stones could be smaller or larger but some of them were reportedly 11 meters long, 5 meters wide and 3 meters high.
You can imagine the difficulty in moving such huge building stones from the quarry to the building site and them lifting them into place.
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