ReViews: Temple Mount, the “Sacred Esplanade”

Where Heaven and Earth Meet: Jerusalem’s Sacred Esplanade

Edited by Oleg Grabar and Benjamin Z. Kedar (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2009) 412 pp., $75.00 (hardcover)

Jerusalem’s Temple Mount: From Solomon to the Golden Dome

By Hershel Shanks (New York: Continuum, 2007) 206 pp. $39.95 (hardcover)

As oversized productions featuring critical texts, beautiful and informative photographs, and in the case of Shanks’s book, drawings, reconstructions, tables and charts, these two books address the same audiences, namely, those who want scholarly detail but also sumptuous photographs on almost every page. Shanks readily calls this area “the Temple Mount,” but Grabar and Kedar coin a new expression, “sacred esplanade,” presumably for political reasons.